Banking != HFT. I've worked at both a bank and an HFT firm, so I think I have some perspective you might find interesting. To make a broad generalization from

Banking != HFT. I've worked at both a bank and an HFT firm, so I think I have some perspective you might find interesting. To make a broad generalization from my experience, "Traders" at a bank are mostly non-technical Excel junkies. It seems like in your experience they also went by the title "Programmer", which I agree is a gross misnomer. Besides that, I think the most important thing to realize is that at banks, non-technical people run the show. The technical people are at the disposal of their non-technical overlords, and thus they spend their every waking hour implementing terrible specs like "do {some incredibly specific task}, and make it fast." Even worse, they are far down on the ladder of responsibility; a "banking programmer" has no feel for the big picture. This all culminates in what you describe: highly specialized/one-off/non-generic piece-of-shit code. But whatever, their MBA overlords don't care about the means, just the ends. To make another broad generalization, "Traders" at an HFT firm are predominantly go-getter CS majors from top schools. Thus, if they have an idea, they implement it themselves. Any delegation of duty is done with strict specs, and bugs or terrible design in the finished product will get noticed. Incentives abound for writing good code: scalability/genericness is rewarded (have something that averages $1k trading symbol XYZ every day? You're a millionaire if it generalizes to many symbols), speed is rewarded (just the nature of the game), and bugs should lose you money (otherwise they are just unknowingly optimized around). tldr: banking is like you describe, but there is plenty of quality in the HFT world.