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I am an HFT Programmer
- MarkPNeyer 15y agothey get paid well, but they're also doing work of dubious value. i left trading because i wanted to do something that i knew would make a positive impact on the world.
- flatline 15y agoBack in the 90s I worked for two different commodity traders as it seemed like a good way to make a lot of money fast, which was very appealing to my 20-some-year-old self. I rapidly grew disenchanted by the entire thing. While I respected the men I worked for, everyone who's successful ends up driven by the two ghosts of the trade: greed and fear. That's not how I wanted my life to be.
- samlevine 15y ago>they get paid well, but they're also doing work of dubious value. Unless they're getting paid at a rate determined by regulations, by definition the value of their work is what their employer is willing to pay.
- drp 15y agoI believe the "value" being referred to here is social rather than financial.
- sixtofour 15y agoMoney can serve as a rough indicator of social value. For example, based on pay, society does not value teachers very much.
- Nrsolis 15y agoYa know, most people would agree for you until you ask them to pay for the stuff they call a "social good." I went with my fiance last Christmas to donate food and money to a local food bank. She got teary when she saw were so many people waiting to get a basket of food. I saw a bunch of people playing games on smartphones.
- gjm11 15y agoValue to whom? Suppose you work for me. I pay you because your work has value to me. Congratulations: you aren't doing something no one cares about. But your work for me could be (1) finding a cure for cancer (hugely valuable to everyone if it works out), or (2) making my brand of smartphone 0.1% better than its rivals (hugely valuable to me, positive value to others but maybe not much), or (3) writing effective advertisements that persuade people to by my product rather than a rival's which is actually slightly better for their needs (hugely valuable to me, negative net value to the world), or (4) assassinating people whose politics I don't like (valuable to me, presumably, but probably not so good overall). If doing something that someone values is enough for you, then indeed getting paid is (more or less) a guarantee of that, and getting paid a lot indicates that you're doing something someone values a lot. But they might value it merely because you're sending money to them that would otherwise have gone to someone else. They might value it merely because you're creating value for them by destroying 10x as much value for others. If you care about doing something that's valuable overall then being well paid is no guarantee whatsoever of that. (You might hope that if your employer is making money then someone values what they do, and so on recursively, with the process necessarily bottoming out at people doing things that are actually useful overall. Alas, that isn't guaranteed either; or, more precisely, there is no guarantee of any connection between what anyone is doing and its overall value.)
- samlevine 15y ago>Value to whom? In the case of the labor of an employee or a contractor, the person you're working for. Value is what someone is willing to pay, or trade, or work, for something. For example, diamonds aren't valuable because they are rare or hard to make (anymore), they're valuable because people are willing to pay large amounts of money to signal to loved ones how loved they are, to signal how rich someone is because they can spend a large amount of money on a rock, etc. This doesn't mean that price is equal to value. How about the value of the diary of your hypothetical dead grandmother? It may be "priceless" to you while it's in your possession, but there is some absurd amount of money that someone could offer that would make you part with it ($10,000, $100,000, $1,000,000,000, etc.). This isn't its market value, however, because the price some person (a historian perhaps) would be willing to pay for it is likely quite a bit less. And there is certainly a price you'd be willing to recover it. Take for example family photographs, I recently had a coworker bring in a computer with a dead hard drive. This hard drive had thousands of family photographs that weren't backed up. I made sure that the hard drive was really dead and not just mostly dead and let them know that taking it to a lab was their last option. The cost would likely be between $1000-$4000 and they wouldn't get a guarantee that they'd get anything. They thanked me for my time and decided not to attempt to recover the images. To make the problem even more interesting let's look at a commons. How valuable is Wikipedia to you? Assuming that you haven't donated to it, nothing. This doesn't mean that it isn't useful to you, or that it doesn't benefit humanity as a whole, or that it is necessarily a waste of everyone's time. It's valuable to the people that run it, it's valuable to the people that donate to it, but everyone else lacks skin in the game. You might try to calculate its value by summing the labor of all the contributors of the site (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value), but this would make it more valuable if people made it less efficient to add content to the site (perhaps requiring that people mail their edits in triplicate in approved forms obtained from the local post office on a tuesday morning). The reason why the tragedy of the commons is a problem is because commons are frequently more valuable to everyone than they are to someone. You can't hope to solve these problems without understanding what value is. >(3) writing effective advertisements that persuade people to by my product rather than a rival's which is actually slightly better for their needs (hugely valuable to me, negative net value to the world) To defend people in marketing, somebody has to let people know about products and services. > If you care about doing something that's valuable overall then being well paid is no guarantee whatsoever of that. Right. Many people value work that benefits society as a whole, or work that satisfies their own curiosity, or work that helps their religion or political beliefs, or work that has high status in the society they live in. Due to this millions of people forego higher wages. None of this makes people getting paid lots of money better people than people getting paid less money.
- prodigal_erik 15y agoActual value is what people are knowingly and voluntarily paying for your work. Front-running trades that were about to happen in milliseconds only produces "value" by exploiting flaws in the way the market clears. Muggers don't get to claim their income represents a contribution to society either.
- mdda 15y agoFront-running is a loaded term (I'm sure you know that), and isn't what is going on in HFT - since front-running is illegal, and these programmers are paid to be on exactly the right side of the law.
- william42 15y agoExternalities.
- Tharkun 15y agoThe "dubious value" argument is a bit crap. I work in porn for one of my clients. That's of pretty dubious value as well. Is it of less dubious value to work in a hospital? What about a car manufacterer? Or the tobacco industry? The only relevant values are 1) what the industry is willing to pay you and 2) whether you enjoy it. Anything else is just bullshit. If you won't enjoy a job in HFT because you think it's of dubious value, then don't get one. There are plenty of things wrong with this HFT madness, but the programmers are not the problem, so there's really no point in questioning their value [or as the slashdot crowd is doing, blaming them for all sorts of crap].
- nanijoe 15y agoMany (including me ) would argue that the value in porn is more apparent than that in HFT.
- Tycho 15y agoWouldn't it have been better, as far as making a positive impact on the world goes, to just keep your job and redirect a large portion of your paycheque to a worthier cause? This is a sincere question. You must have considered that, right?
- wallflower 15y agoI have a friend who works in trading. He's very sharp and very smart and has friends who work for D.E. Shaw. I used to ask why he didn't go work for D.E. Shaw and he said that he would never survive the interview gauntlet there. And most importantly, he would not be smart enough. Now, I know how good at math my friend is (he used to win Games t-shirts - from the magazine and studies math at graduate level). And now when I talk to him about HFT, he's like even if I could bluff my way into an HFT job they'd fire me after three months once they found out. My math abilities will never ever approach my friend's. If he is not confident about his ability, it speaks volumes to me about the ability and sheer analytical horsepower of some of those working in HFT. Yes, they may be financial wizards who cause far reaching effects but they are doing what challenges them.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- georgieporgie 15y agoSounds like your friend might suffer from impostor syndrome.
- 46Bit 15y agoDoesn't sound to me like he's really suffering. Suffering requires someone to suffer. And no, to me this isn't really pedantry.
- Cushman 15y agoIndeed. Underestimating your abilities is no fun, but if your estimation of your math skills is all that's keeping you from life as a quant let me be the first to tell you you suck at math.
- cema 15y agoEven so, had he joined DEShaw he would still have the syndrome which could easily affect his work there (as a self-fulfilled prophecy). Happens all the time.
- gte910h 15y agoThat hourly rate is pretty crappy for that level and amount of work. (<$100)
- Bungholio 15y agoCompared to what the top traders make, 0.5Mil / year is pretty embarrassing.
- justincormack 15y agoIT is generally considered a cost centre in banking, in essence, and so not rewarded like real traders, or sales people.
- tdfx 15y agoI was pretty shocked with I saw that guy said he hoped to make $500k for the year. Sounds like the profits aren't making their way down to the developers.
- veyron 15y agoThe reason why profits don't flow down is because the buck doesn't stop with them. There are plenty of developers making much more, but in those cases they take the fall if a trading strategy loses money. Those developers that do take the risks make more if the firm makes more money, but also lose their jobs if they make a really bad trade. Same is true in other software development outfits as well. Lower-level programmers have much more job security but don't have as great a payout
- ntkachov 15y agoThey are specialists. They specialize in optimizing the crap out of very specific algorithms. I would much rather take a pay cut than work all day on optimizing stuff. For the money that they pay the work sounds extreamly boring (imho)
- Kallikrates 15y agoSpecialization is for insects -Heinlein
- dadads 15y agoI like how the slashdot discussion rapidly turns into a moral debate.
- redthrowaway 15y agoCheck out this thread; we're hardly immune.
- hugh3 15y agoHow to get a really good salary: 1. Be really smart 2. Be willing to do something that's deadly boring to most smart people Me? I'm a scientist. I'm not gonna write your goddamn binary tree pricing algorithm or remove your varicose veins or argue about some dull point of legal text in court. But I'm sure I'd be a lot richer if I did. (In other news, man, those grapes sure look sour, I'm glad I can't reach 'em.)
- Astrohacker 15y ago3. Be willing to work for a corrupt industry.
- hugh3 15y agoOh, I'm perfectly willing to work in a corrupt industry, just not to do boring work. If anyone wants to hire me to build a planet-destroying supervillain weapon, email in profile.
- Maro 15y ago> I'm not gonna write your goddamn binary tree pricing algorithm I'm not in the banking industry, but writing a very efficient binary tree pricing algorithm sounds like super-interesting work.
- blix 15y agoReplace one of your examples of 'boring work' with "writing grant proposals" or "performing the same experiment over and over again" and you have the perspective of the non-scientists. I think you're confusing "deadly boring to most smart people" with "deadly boring to me".
- sixtofour 15y ago"2. Be willing to do something that's deadly boring to most smart people", ... ... and super lucrative to their employers. Otherwise shelf stocking might be a good route to riches.
- Goladus 15y ago> 2. Be willing to do something that's deadly boring to most smart people ... And work really hard at it.
- Astrohacker 15y agoSo he does what any good programmer does, but he earns 5x as much. One reason they earn so much is that the companies they work for have corrupt ties to the Federal Reserve and the US government, and when the money supply is inflated, they get all the new money, and can thus pay their programmers (and all employees/partners/shareholders/owners) with the new money. Their salaries come at the expense of people who don't get the new money, like pensioners.
- hugh3 15y agoFun fact: the people on the internet who talk about economics the most appear to be the people who understand it the least. This is unusual. I mean, the people on the internet who talk about Batman the most generally turn out to know a lot more about Batman than I do. And the people on the internet who talk about tae kwan do the most turn out to know more about tae kwan do than I do. But for economics it is, for some reason, the other way around.
- Astrohacker 15y agoI understand economics just fine, I just come from the Austrian School, which makes a lot of people angry (even though it is right).
- Astrohacker 15y agoFun fact: Everyone knows the finance industry is highly corrupt, but point out the mechanism of the corruption and you will be downvoted.
- Jd 15y agoYour analysis is a bit superficial. The government connections keep them from being regulated but don't adequately explain how they can skim so much off the top. For instance, how do the big firms (e.g. Goldman) manage to get into oil futures, create new fangled products that others will buy, get everyone to follow them into the same market sector, raise the price of oil, pocket billions of dollars, and leave the market before it goes south. It's actually hundreds of years of accumulated know-how in a somewhat needed but mostly bogus market sector -- of which the first priority is how to convince very intelligent and hard working people that they are doing some admirable or at least neutral when they are in fact destroying the economic base of the country they are in, siphoning all of the talent into meaningless and counterproductive tasks, and pouring their money into the political machine in order to increase corruption so they will never be held accountable for their actions. The short answer is an excellent understanding of human psychology leading to good marketing. Most criminals think they aren't doing something wrong. Most people can be trained to do very damaging (even evil) actions by acculturation and habituation. Americans have been re-educated in the past fifty years to think that all sorts of things are okay that they never would have thought when we were the industrial superpower that invented and produced everything imaginable (e.g. car, plane, tv, space shuttles, etc.). Of course, most of these changes in American thinking aren't politically correct to mention. Nowadays people either go into finance or work on some little web startup in the hopes they will make a billion dollars -- but at least that is better than being a patent troll. The AirBnB scandal is in fact a great example of the present dynamic. It is a great service on top of existing infrastructure. That's basically all Americans do these days -- a service economy on top of actual products that are increasingly being produced elsewhere. Sometimes those services are good, sometimes not so good, but barely anyone actually builds anything that is made to last -- nor do they seem to care. Wake up America!
- scythe 15y agoThat comes to about $74/hour; he's rich for working 100-hour weeks. I don't know what good the money is if you don't ever take the time to spend it, though.
- zedshaw 15y agoThis is a huge load of bullshit. 99% of the "banking programmers" are some of the worst coders in the world. A vast majority of them just babysit a Bloomberg terminal, barely understanding the supposed math they use all day. Others just babysit an Excel spreadsheet, or worse, develop whole applications in Excel then try to get a real programmer to "build it". The lower echelons are even worse and just make shitty C# and Java web apps that are huge wastes of money. The supposed "C++ optimizer" guys are some of the worst. They're the guys who go off and make algorithms they think are blazing fast, and sure for one tiny little use maybe, but then when you actually see the code it's a huge convolute mess for nothing. It's usually riddled with bugs, not in source control (Clearcase), only if it is only because the Compliance Dept. told them to, and they refuse to share because they're too damn competitive. I've even seen projects by some of the top guys that were built by hand. No make file because the dude didn't trust make. Don't even get me started about these jackasses that think their huge monolithic shitpiles of Java code are somehow superior, yet the only reason their code can actually run is because some bank sunk millions (and maybe billions) into infrastructure just to run that crap even moderately fast. I had one project where the damn process used so much ram per request they had to go buy an Azul box just to make it run even at 2 req/sec. That was their "cream of the crop" coders. Finally, they constantly do this thing where they say, "Oh man my code is so awesome it's written in C++ and is so fast. No you can't see it. Oh but I make $500k a year!" They equate how awesome their code is by how much they make, but rarely have any idea of what other people's code is like. Honey, if all you can make from your corrupt financial masters is $500k while they make billions and trillions then you're not a very good coder. And if I can't see your damn code, then you're a damn liar. Take it from a guy who thought he'd run into some quality in the finance world. There is none, they just have so much money they can't help but make tons of it.
- orijing 15y agoIt's true, and it's somewhat discouraging. When I was in my last year in college, I applied to various types of companies, in different stages of life, plus a quant fund. In the end, while the salary/potential bonus for the fund was very enticing (despite not having graduated yet), I stuck with the middle-of-the-road tech company. (I also looked at Google and Dropbox but decided to go to FB). Google was desperate for people, and threw money at everyone who had a Facebook offer. I like that they offered $$$, but I knew that most people there aren't compensated as well, which suggested that future compensation might not be as enticing. Dropbox was actually really cool (the people I met there), and I was thinking about it a lot, but in the end, I just wanted to stay where I've been, and work in Palo Alto. (I know, it's weird: All my friends want to work in SF). But it sucks, because while everyone thinks I took FB for the money ("It's pre IPO!"), that's the farthest from the truth. In fact, they're so surprised that I decided not to work in New York. "Are you stupid? That's more money than any of your peers make out of college!" Not to mention, the people there I met through two straight days of technical questions (compared to Google's easy-peasy 4, 45 minute sessions) were some of the smartest I've met. And I like working with smart people. I was afraid that if I'd gone on that route, it would affect me as a person. Don't get me wrong: I've studied financial institutions and believe that they produce value, but in the end, it's more awesome to tell friends and family that I ship products rather than arb derivative contracts. I figured, the money will come. What the hell are you gonna do with 500k a year, anyway?
- jamesteow 15y ago"What the hell are you gonna do with 500k a year, anyway?" Buy a house? A car? Invest in your own future business? I agree with the sentiment of your post. I prefer earning less but working with intelligent, sensible people while also believing in my work because my mental health supersedes material needs.
- TheEzEzz 15y agoSquirrel it away for 5 years then retire on 5% returns on a million bucks ($50,000) a year?
- orijing 15y ago
- jasonkester 15y agoQuick quiz: Given the ability to charge $100/hr for your time (which is what this guy's rate works out to), would you prefer to make: a.) $500,000 by working 100hr weeks b.) $250k by working 50hr weeks Me? I tend to lean toward secret option c: make $100k by working 25 40hr weeks, then spend the rest of the year squandering it on a beach with tall cold beers, good surfing/climbing and good wifi. Gotta keep them priorities straight.
- DasIch 15y agoIndeed. What is the point of making so much money if you don't have time to spend it or have anything that resembles a life for that matter.
- veyron 15y agoBecause you can make enough money to retire before you are 30, which means you can spend much more time with your wife and kids when that time comes. I wouldnt want to be the type of dad who has to stress out about money issues.
- bmj 15y agoExcept I bet people that actually want to work 100 hour weeks don't retire when they are 30. And if they do, they probably go crazy (and drive their families crazy) because they don't have anything to do. I wonder how many rich, overworked people really do walk away long before retirement age?
- juiceandjuice 15y agoRight. The motivated can't ever stop. It sort of runs in my family. My grandpa retired because he had a heart attack, then started his own company and had to stop that because he had a stroke. He sits in his house and watches fox news and I've never seen him unhappier (fox news doesn't help) The only time my dad has worked less than 50 hours a week was when he was diagnosed as terminal and on medical leave for a cavernous malformation on his brainstem. He had brain surgery and now he's mostly better, and he's been back to 60 hours a week for a few years since then... except now he comes home exhausted, take some pain killers and lies in bed. I make the same salary as he does, and I'm 25 working a bit more than 40 hours a week.
- bfung 15y agoProgramming skill is only a small part of why Wall Street Programmers earn top salary. The major factor is that their industry is very close to the money, and their jobs are close to the money. As a result, it's easy to measure someone's worth in terms of currency. In trading, if your group is making money, and you can convince everyone else (or just the boss) that you are worth x% of the profits, then there you go. As your industry and job function moves further and further away from the money, it gets harder to measure your performance in terms of raw "dollars", but the game to convince everyone else your currency worth still applies.
- cletus 15y agoI worked for a time in finance and investment banking. Problem-wise it can be pretty interesting but it's important to distinguish between two classes of developers. 1. Traders; and 2. Non-traders. Engineers who are traders are typically called "quants" (quantitative traders) as they write software that employs trading strategies to make money, as one or more of spread trading (trading between the bid-ask spread), prop trading (taking a position in the market) and arbitrage (of which HFT is merely the latest incarnation; some may dispute this definition). Traders of all kinds have their bonus defined as a percentage of the profit they make. That percentage can be as high at 10%. In 2007 there were some Wall Street traders who walked home with $50m+ for the year. I remember seeing an AmA on reddit from a quant who took home $20m. While maths is obviously important, it is not (IMHO) as important as psychology. It takes a special kind of individual who can hold a position worth billions of dollars and make rational decisions. Human psychology is typically completely wrong for trading: people hold on to losers too long ("I'll sell when I get my money back") and sell winners too soon. I know enough about myself to know I could never do that. Some can and they get rewarded for it. The second class of engineer, the non-trader, earns a respectable salary with benefits as compared to other software engineers. They are however the second worst paid employees at an investment bank (the worst are support people). All those business types who join IB, assuming they survive, will typically have a salary and career trajectory that will dwarf that of any engineer within a few years. The only way for an engineer to make real money is to be a quant, found a startup or join an early stage startup. In the last few years the competition for engineers has heated up to the point where engineers are (or can be) more adequately compensated for their contribution. The other thing that happened is the cost of seeding a startup went from $5m to $50,000 in the last decade, almost all of which is engineer time. This makes engineers just that much more valuable. As far as not having some kind of positive impact, working in investment banking can be exactly that. People like to demonize the finance industry with some justification but it does a lot of good too. You want to buy a house? Well the only reason you can get a loan is that investor (and/or depositor) funds are matched to you. In the last few decades securitization (MBS ie mortgage-backed securities) have revolutionized this market. On the other hand, the subprime collapse should, in my mind, lead to criminal prosecutions across the entire finance and insurance sectors. Spread trading (or "market making") is also misunderstood. People see market makers as scalpers when in fact they're providing a valuable service: they're creating liquidity. The reason you can buy or sell shares at any time (rather than waiting for a seller or buyer to show up) is because of market makers. IPOs are a complicated business. They're possible because of the finance industry as well. Although, curiosity, VC as it exists in the Internet startup world is almost completely unrelated to the finance sector. It's basically a byproduct of university endowments. Still, I think I'm done with that industry (I now work for Google) typically because IB types aren't, in my experience, very nice people to work with plus you're near the bottom of the totem pole.
- thinkbohemian 15y agoTIL slashdot commenters are fairly mean and biter. Good post, and thanks for the intelligent and well reasoned comments HN.
- paganel 15y ago> Another HFT programmer here. I once had to make a run-time modification to an algorithm to keep about $100 million from going at a lower price than what the traders wanted. Sometimes market conditions change so fast that the traders demand the ability to make rapid adjustments to the algorithm. They're willing to take the risk. They can't wait for the safe development cycle. Someone should post this next time the issue of "TDD and sudoku-solvers" comes up on HN.
- tmsh 15y agoI used to work in HFT. From about 1999 (right out of high school) until 2008. In response to the OP, zedshaw and a couple of others (who make good points), I'd say: * obviously if you're good at your job in HFT after a while you don't have to work 100 hour weeks. People wait for you. There are levels of support. You still get woken up once in a while, but not if the firm is well structured and the support training / delegation is good. * people are right in that the closer you are to the money, the more financial upside (and downside) you usually have. * there are some very mediocre programmers, like in any sector -- however, they tend to not last as long because the trading side is very demanding (in terms of quality) and that filters down pretty quickly. * do the people who really know what they're doing in the trading and HFT space have an OCD level of awareness of all levels of their code? sometimes. and it's easy to then conclude that this must not be found in other fields/areas. i can't speak for the rest of the world, but there are exceptions everywhere i've been. in fact, i wouldn't even say it's the norm that in HFT people are more capable of deep diving into assembly or whatever. however, basically there are a handful of people in HFT who have been fortunate enough to grow up in that industry and have made mistakes without being fired -- and those people are very bright and careful about their code, and the large purchasing price for quality/reliability and quickness delivered does affect things on a macro scale probably. there's also basically a lot of hard-core russian programmers (from the many different technical universities in russia) who are quite rigorous with their code and trust the idea of finance more than the idea of startups or silicon valley even -- but this is probably a generalization (just my experience perhaps). most software rewriting is trivial once you know what you have to do. and most software projects don't 'know what they have to do' until half way through. i used to work with a guy who made a point of rewriting ALL trading-related code every two years. another guy didn't trust OSS because he thought it was mostly hobbyist. they're both sort of wrong -- but it's a different culture/mindset. and these guys weren't idiots. respectively, they were some of the lead developers / architects for some of the largest algorithmic shops in chicago. but my point is that programming for HFT or real-time trading requires that you really know what you're doing down to each line of code, so that you can react when things do break (and they will break). if you can't react quickly, you will eventually not find yourself on interesting projects and you might even get fired. so ironically you have to slow down and really get to know how to do programming very carefully, and then scale that up so that you can react really quickly later (with something like binary search). this is a useful thing to practice in some ways. other people probably learn variants of it in other fields. * the recession hit large parts of the financial sector pretty hard. i went back and visited chicago somewhat recently (now work in SV). i can't speak to everyone, but if i were an undergraduate or someone trying to figure out career trajectories for the first time, i would feel much more secure in even the startup space than in financial services at this point. because you know most of that is going to be replaced (with automated, distributed technology) in our lifetime.
- benthumb 15y agoThis fellow's braggadocio is off-putting. Especially the dig he makes at the expense of Google. I mean, I wish he'd clarify what he's talking about when he says that the "engineering talent is just not there"... just not where?
- gaius 15y agoErmm, at Google? Seems a simple enough sentence construction to me.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- bignoggins 15y agoThis is slightly OT, but can anyone recommend a good book for understanding the modern finance industry (IB, quant, trading) and its impact on the economy? Finance in general is just a giant black box to me.
- mikecsh 15y agoInside the Black Box: http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Black-Box-Quantitative-Trading/dp/0470432063 http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Black-Box-Quantitative-Trading/...
- Nrsolis 15y agoSeconded.
- bwanaaaa 15y agoHere is where the coders of Wall street can help us understand--making their efforts more transparent. They dont have to reveal details of their code--but a few blogs about what they are doing, what they are achieving, and they aim for would be nice
- thisuser 15y agoCapital Vol. 1 by Marx is classic and still more applicable than anyone wants to admit. Ease into the terminology over the first few chapters, things are defined carefully.
- ebaysucks 15y ago1. Works 12 hours a day on average 2. Works 100 hour weeks Stopped reading there.
- hugh3 15y agoYeah, I hate to work an 8.3 day week.
- TracyWilker 15y agoI just paid $22.87 for an iPad2-64GB and my girlfriend loves her Panasonic Lumix GF 1 Camera that we got for $38.76 there arriving tomorrow by UPS. I will never pay such expensive retail prices in stores again. Especially when I also sold a 40 inch LED TV to my boss for $675 which only cost me $62.81 to buy. Here is the website we use to get it all from, GrabCent. çom
- sliverstorm 15y agoWould it be foolish to try to play with HFT (or perhaps "medium" frequency or something) as a private entity? Or is this something essentially only available to Wall Street? Not looking for money, it just seems like it'd be interesting to explore.
- dereg 15y agoYou'd need access to a) tremendous leverage and b) proximity to the exchange that you'd want to trade on (the profit opportunities disappear when faced with greater latency).
- eurohacker 15y agoits when simple quants make bonuses 20M per year - causing worldwide economic crisis - and the country is defaulting then you think that something must be wrong with the American economic policy and tax system
- nazgulnarsil 15y ago"the way I make money is opaque to people with no economics background" "rabble rabble moralizing rabble rabble!" you people do realize that normal people think the same thing about software developers right?
- bwanaaaa 15y agoSo many intelligent replies here. And to think some of the best coders do not live in the US - think of Skype (Estonia), Tim-Berners Lee, Linus Torvalds, etc... Their contributions tower above anything done by any one person on Wall Street. Yet Wall Street has only contributed to the common good by paying taxes. Even then they seek to game the system and have also managed to get the government to give them more than they ever paid (think bailout). Their scrooge-like aversion to philanthropy, charity, education, or any research to help the human condition is what annoys. Certainly those of you who code for the street have food in your belly, but when will you decide to fix your monstrous employer? They don't even have to know.
- smcl 15y agoLinus lives in the US
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- pdovy 15y agoArgh, guys like this give the rest of us a bad name. It's ridiculous to claim that we're somehow universally better than developers at Google or anywhere else. One of the big arguments in that Slashdot thread seems to be backlash over developers bragging about how they change software that handles millions of dollars in the middle of the day without any testing. Let me tell you, any HFT firm worth it's salt is very conscious about risk controls. I mean honestly, what kind of business are you running if you're routinely exposing yourself to potentially massive losses because of one developers error? Not one that would be around very long. I can only speak to where I work, but we are not coding by the seat of our pants. Yes, traders do make intraday changes to their strategies, but they can do that because their software is backstopped by a tiered risk infrastructure that limits the damage their software can do.