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Can I ask how you got into such a role? Is it at a major bank or some kind of consultancy?
by anonymousDan 5y ago
Can I ask how you got into such a role? Is it at a major bank or some kind of consultancy?
- bitcharmer 5y agoI started as a java developer around 20 years ago; in those times it was called enterprise java and at some point I joined a consultancy that had many clients in telco industry. That meant there was a lot of opportunities to get exposure to performance troubleshooting. At first it was only on the JVM level but you quickly realize the virtual machine doesn't run in vacuum an the OS as well as HW are equally important layers of software execution stack. I devoted a lot of time to learning about systems engineering and modern hardware. When switching jobs it was always with the purpose of getting more and more exposure to performance-focused software engineering. In my case the last 12 years was was exclusively big banks and one exchange (LMAX, UBS, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, HSBC). From what I can tell there's more opportunities to get your hands dirty with perf on the buy side (hedge funds, prop trading shops) but I always got lucky with the big market makers and got involved in amazingly interesting things anyway. I absolutely love this line of work and wouldn't trade it for anything else but it sometimes costs you some grey hair especially if you're dealing with the very bleeding edge of hardware and kernel/OS level bits (think spending weeks chasing misbehaving icache on a heavily overclocked cpu). This job is very rewarding but requires real passion and constant learning.