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I am curious, what was your previous career and your new career? and what was wrong with the previous one?
by victorhn 15y ago
I am curious, what was your previous career and your new career? and what was wrong with the previous one?
- joncooper 15y agoI'm actually on my second career since then. At the time of 9/11 I was an enterprise Java programmer. We built software for MBS desks: trade capture, portfolio management and risk analytics. Finance is hugely interesting, but I was not learning any of it. I was building CRUD operations hooked up to Swing UI and a black-box (to me) analytics backend. There wasn't (and isn't) anything "wrong" with that, objectively. But I possess two things: one, a strong need for self-determination--I need to eat what I kill; and two, a love for learning that can manifest as antipathy toward using things that I don't understand. I ended up getting into finance proper and spending six years as a multi-asset prop trader at a gigantic hedge fund and then a gigantic bank, living in NYC and London. I've ultimately realized that I want to help build stuff that people use, so my lovely wife and I moved to SF and are building a life here.