8 ms·

I guarantee that higher quality pay will give you access to a higher quality talent pool.

eschneider 4y ago
This.
joezydeco 4y ago
These are financial firms griping about the lack of developers. They're some of the highest paid developers in the world. But working for these companies is also insanely stressful. Long hours, high pressure. Maybe that reputation has caught up to them.
- coliveira 4y ago
  Exactly. They pay well, but the job is absolutely stressful. If you survive long enough to enjoy some of this money, good luck for you, you deserve.
  - JKCalhoun 4y ago
    Which industry are we talking about — gamedev? ;-)
    - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
      No, the parent poster said they pay well!
    - speedgoose 4y ago
      Obviously not.
    - dehrmann 4y ago
      That's a funny industry because good enough code is perfectly fine, and people will line up to work on games, so you can pay them less.
  - bdw5204 4y ago
    The best thing they could do to attract talent would be to offer a choice of 3, 4 or 5 days for 60%, 80% or 100% salary. Many people would probably choose 3 days at a high paying finance job over 5 days somewhere else and 60% of the money they tend to offer at those companies would still be really good money.
- galangalalgol 4y ago
  Do people actually use c++ for HFT? I thought it was all verilog and cuda.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    The glue code is C++ still. It's also a much less glamorous job than when the C++ programmers were the "hot shit" instead of the people who specialized in accelerators.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      So they are complaining that they can't find people who want to be second class citizens while still dealing with the pressure and hours using language skills they acknowledge are in high demand...
  - macjohnmcc 4y ago
    The jobs that I have been approached for in HFT have been for C not C++.
  - dragontamer 4y ago
    CUDA is C++ I imagine some work is also useful on CPUs, and C++ is one of the most efficient languages.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      Yeah, kinda, CUDA is c++ that I can't run cppcheck or clang tidy on, and the important bits are either calls into the cu* libraries which are c style, or kernels, which are really their own thing.
      - dragontamer 4y ago
        Yes, kernel code is GPU style rather than CPU style. But the CPU-drivers of CUDA are all C++. Albeit a C-like API (cudaMalloc, lol), but its a clang compiler for the CPU code nonetheless. If you have complex GPU + CPU interactions, you'll need to be a C++ expert. Even if you aren't doing GPU work and sticking "only" with CPU-side CUDA, its all C++.
- jchw 4y ago
  Last time I looked at the finance industry, which was admittedly a while ago, I saw a C++ job that listed the salary as being around $100k. Sounds reasonable. In New York City. Oh. Compare to Google salaries, on levels.fyi for example. I know they're not theoretical or inaccurate because I worked at Google for a while. If you really want to do C++ professionally, that and maybe other FAANG companies seem like they'd give you much higher quality of life. But the truth is, if you're a C++ developer, you may as well just take up another programming language and get paid more. The data doesn't lie: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-... C++ was basically the first programming language I really learned, but I seldom use it in the industry, because I don't know why I would intentionally pick a pay cut to do harder work. (I consider C++ to be "harder" than many of the languages above it in pay grade even when doing the same work, for most tasks.)
  - emidln 4y ago
    Salary at an HFT doesnt tell an accurate story. I'd be shocked to learn any quality c++ dev at an HFT pulled down less than 500k last year, and I'd expect most to be well above that.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      Maybe they’d have more luck hiring if they told a more accurate story.
      - emidln 4y ago
        Hiring C++ isnt especially hard because our pay is opaque. Recruiters will tell you immediately what total comp you can expect and they'll let you know what you can contractually guarantee year 1. Hiring for C++ is hard because C++ is hard and most people are quite bad at writing even somewhat reasonable code.
        cjbgkagh 4y ago
        I was told $300K about a decade ago and I told them no. I was already making more than that at a big tech company with a much easier pace of work. $500K would have peaked my interest, why didn’t they tell me $500K if that was an option? A quick google search is suggesting that $200K for the top end of experience, when I was told $300K they said it was as high as they go. Where is the rest of this compensation coming from? Maybe they could give stats for bonuses but when enquired it seemed that the bonus pool was being eaten up elsewhere and the C++ devs were in the back of the line for that.
- spamizbad 4y ago
  Having worked with several "veterans" of this industry, I'm inclined to agree. Also weirdly C++ devs aren't making that much more than the fullstack devs who build FOH tooling for traders.
  - eru 4y ago
    What's FOH?
    - stevesimmons 4y ago
      Front office = trading desk
    - sharemywin 4y ago
      Font of the house
    - 95014_refugee 4y ago
      FoH = Front of House, i.e. directly supporting customer activity.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
        just a side note: long before a small part of the programming world took over this acronym, it used to mean the sound engineer (and sometimes other staff) that were in the venue, embedded in the crowd, working on live sound while the talent was up on stage. "back of house" was behind the stage, "front of house" was the room/venue itself, and the people working in it.
        conductr 4y ago
        It's also from the restaurant industry. Dining room vs kitchen staff. I think "the house" part comes from hospitality in general.
        pgwhalen 4y ago
        I’m not sure the programming world took over the acronym, I think OP just confused them. In finance at least, the terms Front Office and Back Office are used. I’ve never heard anyone use the restaurant/entertainment variants used.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- magic_man 4y ago
  Also crazy non competes. Like 2 years.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    If paid by a "high quality" salary, why not?
    - ohyoutravel 4y ago
      It’s anticompetitive, stifles innovation, and boxes people out of career growth in their niche industry.
      - mixmastamyk 4y ago
        That's why they better pay $$$ for it.
  - ska 4y ago
    At a certain level, this tends to be balanced with severance. "Garden leave" is different from "I can't get a job".
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    If they pay double, then you just need to suffer for at least 2 years to break-even and get 2 years of vacation.
    - smabie 4y ago
      You get paid during your NC
- dcchambers 4y ago
  Yup. What's the point of all that money if you have no time to spend it and the stress will send you to an early grave?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  > Maybe that reputation has caught up to them. It did. Comp is nowhere near FAANG and the work culture is still stuck in the 90's. Go to any college and talk to students looking for internships. Finance firms are nowhere near the top of their list.
  - joezydeco 4y ago
    Curious - what's at the top of their list now? Do they still want FAANG jobs after all the layoffs?
    - andsoitis 4y ago
      I don’t think layoffs change people’s desire to work at a top hi-tech company.
    - boshalfoshal 4y ago
      I'd say HFT/prop trading/market making/hedge funds, since those are the only places that are hiring right now and pay good money. The usual destinations for smart and motivated new grads are (not counting very early startups/making your own company): 1. Top tier HFT/prop firm (Jane Street, HRT, Jump, etc.) 2. Meta, larger unicorns like Stripe, Databricks, etc. 3. Google 4. Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Obviously im leaving out a lot of places but this is generally what I've seen. Id say for most people FAANG is still the top option, and for people that want to shoot beyond FAANG, trading firms are probably the next target. If you were including very early startups in this list, I've noticed that the smartest people often join promising startups as an early engineer, or make their own company. I'd put them above trading firms, but the risk is way higher.
  - noisenotsignal 4y ago
    HFT, prop trading, market makers and the like are also finance firms right? They are still pretty coveted by those who are aware of their existence. Jump Trading, Citadel, Jane Street, DE Shaw etc are considered highly prestigious and competitive. There are certainly financial firms that people are less interested in though, namely banks.
  - 4y ago
- wwweston 4y ago
  This speaks to the point in the article "The real problem is that C++ is neither easy nor loved," which they offset with "The language may be hard. But it's also worth it." The problem is that there's a law of diminishing returns to compensation. If you can work with a tool you like that helps you meet milestones and general expectations for $X00k generally leading to pleasant days, or can work with a tool that makes your life harder and leads to higher stress fewer pleasant days for $2X00k... sure there's going to be people who take the extra money. But there's also going to be people who say to themselves "yeah, it turns out I'm plenty well compensated at $X00k I'll take the extra quality of life." "Worth it" is a value judgment. How many people managing the financial firms decided it was worth it to invest in C++?
  - bfung 4y ago
    To further the idea, C++ can be loved if the firms invest dollars, invest marketing (open source, other ways) of it. They should support/invest in the community they want to hire from.
  - klyrs 4y ago
    They're focused on the language. The language isn't the problem. Of the people I've met in finance, there are some really strong and offputting trends: they're uniformly dismissive of work/life balance, they're almost uniformly the worst stereotype of tech-bro, and aside from the rampant cocaine use, they're hugely socially conservative, and every single one values profit over ethics. It's not the language, it's the extremely toxic culture. Any programmer worth their salt can march into a nasty codebase of whatever language, and make it dance. But financial folk don't want to employ humans with all their complexity, they want robots who will run themselves into the ground for cash. So they get young men who burn out quickly and retire ASAP. The problem isn't the language. The problem isn't the pay. The problem is the extractive culture. Finance folks focus on short term profits to the detriment of their future. And now they're wondering "where can we find programmers" after they've been burning them like so many trees. Go figure.
    - dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
      > Any programmer worth their salt can march into a nasty codebase of whatever language, Correct, I wonder why people both technical and non-technical focus on this aspect a lot. ( my guess is that they are incompetent themselves). Agreed, if you want someone for two or three months you probably want someone who knows the language and it's ecosystem pretty well. Any work that is more than six months should be nearly language independent.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  I wonder (with no supporting data) if they are griping because in C++ they've created horrid technical debt that they have a hard time hiring people to maintain.
- bitL 4y ago
  Financial firms in London pay peanuts to C++ devs.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  The key to being a developer in finance is to work in a software shop. Working at a bank / prop firm is going to be extremely stressful. Working at the shop that all the big banks buy their trading software from is like 80-90% of the pay but none of the stress. I love it. I get to do real, hard engineering for big pay without working on ad tech or javascript.
  - lolpython 4y ago
    Where is this?
User23 4y ago
The only comp structure that would get me doing that job would be a market rate base and points on the algo earnings.
- gumby 4y ago
  ...which is how they pay
  - User23 4y ago
    I freely confess my ignorance, so thank you for that. If they will make a remote deal it might be time to dust off the ol' angle brackets.
Invictus0 4y ago
The pay is 500k and up
- PenguinCoder 4y ago
  I wish. I've never received an offer that high for C or C++ job. Then again I haven't applied at any trading firms, and I wouldn't be considered Senior.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- intelVISA 4y ago
  Probably closer to $1M these days
PragmaticPulp 4y ago
C++ quant jobs were already some of the highest-paying jobs in the technology market. A step above FAANG in many cases. There's more to the story than just comp. Even increasing comp wouldn't immediately generate new developers, as it takes a very long time for the increased comp to incentivize new students and junior engineers to move in that direction in their career. High performance C++ takes a lot of time and effort to learn, and even longer to master. Maybe the real issue is that there has been a surplus of high-paying jobs that are much easier and require a lot less effort to master.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  "Already" doesn't mean it couldn't be raised further. Have you seen C-suite salaries? Also you don't have to only incentivize grads. Getting experienced devs to jump ship is the primary goal. Which a $100k+ raise would certainly incentivize.
acdha 4y ago
The company they based the story on appears to be a cryptocurrency firm, too. That'll exclude a lot of otherwise qualified candidates due to ethical or business model concerns — especially since C++ developers tend to be older, they're more likely to understand the risks of jumping into a bubble and have higher expectations for things like work/life balance.
com2kid 4y ago
You can't pay me enough to go back to writing c++ code. I despise the language, 80% of my time is spent figuring out how to beat it into submission to get it to do what I want, which leaves very little brain power left over for designing well architected software. Modern languages get easy access to a large number of powerful design tools, C++ I have the same tools but it's stuck behind an interface (headers, the build system) originally made in the 70s.
kazinator 4y ago
To a point, but it's still just an example of throwing money at a problem, which has limitations.

This.

These are financial firms griping about the lack of developers. They're some of the highest paid developers in the world. But working for these companies is also insanely stressful. Long hours, high pressure. Maybe that reputation has caught up to them.

coliveira 4y ago
Exactly. They pay well, but the job is absolutely stressful. If you survive long enough to enjoy some of this money, good luck for you, you deserve.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Which industry are we talking about — gamedev? ;-)
  - AlchemistCamp 4y ago
    No, the parent poster said they pay well!
  - speedgoose 4y ago
    Obviously not.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    That's a funny industry because good enough code is perfectly fine, and people will line up to work on games, so you can pay them less.
- bdw5204 4y ago
  The best thing they could do to attract talent would be to offer a choice of 3, 4 or 5 days for 60%, 80% or 100% salary. Many people would probably choose 3 days at a high paying finance job over 5 days somewhere else and 60% of the money they tend to offer at those companies would still be really good money.
galangalalgol 4y ago
Do people actually use c++ for HFT? I thought it was all verilog and cuda.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The glue code is C++ still. It's also a much less glamorous job than when the C++ programmers were the "hot shit" instead of the people who specialized in accelerators.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    So they are complaining that they can't find people who want to be second class citizens while still dealing with the pressure and hours using language skills they acknowledge are in high demand...
- macjohnmcc 4y ago
  The jobs that I have been approached for in HFT have been for C not C++.
- dragontamer 4y ago
  CUDA is C++ I imagine some work is also useful on CPUs, and C++ is one of the most efficient languages.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    Yeah, kinda, CUDA is c++ that I can't run cppcheck or clang tidy on, and the important bits are either calls into the cu* libraries which are c style, or kernels, which are really their own thing.
    - dragontamer 4y ago
      Yes, kernel code is GPU style rather than CPU style. But the CPU-drivers of CUDA are all C++. Albeit a C-like API (cudaMalloc, lol), but its a clang compiler for the CPU code nonetheless. If you have complex GPU + CPU interactions, you'll need to be a C++ expert. Even if you aren't doing GPU work and sticking "only" with CPU-side CUDA, its all C++.
jchw 4y ago
Last time I looked at the finance industry, which was admittedly a while ago, I saw a C++ job that listed the salary as being around $100k. Sounds reasonable. In New York City. Oh. Compare to Google salaries, on levels.fyi for example. I know they're not theoretical or inaccurate because I worked at Google for a while. If you really want to do C++ professionally, that and maybe other FAANG companies seem like they'd give you much higher quality of life. But the truth is, if you're a C++ developer, you may as well just take up another programming language and get paid more. The data doesn't lie: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-technologies https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/#technology-top-paying-... C++ was basically the first programming language I really learned, but I seldom use it in the industry, because I don't know why I would intentionally pick a pay cut to do harder work. (I consider C++ to be "harder" than many of the languages above it in pay grade even when doing the same work, for most tasks.)
- emidln 4y ago
  Salary at an HFT doesnt tell an accurate story. I'd be shocked to learn any quality c++ dev at an HFT pulled down less than 500k last year, and I'd expect most to be well above that.
  - cjbgkagh 4y ago
    Maybe they’d have more luck hiring if they told a more accurate story.
    - emidln 4y ago
      Hiring C++ isnt especially hard because our pay is opaque. Recruiters will tell you immediately what total comp you can expect and they'll let you know what you can contractually guarantee year 1. Hiring for C++ is hard because C++ is hard and most people are quite bad at writing even somewhat reasonable code.
      - cjbgkagh 4y ago
        I was told $300K about a decade ago and I told them no. I was already making more than that at a big tech company with a much easier pace of work. $500K would have peaked my interest, why didn’t they tell me $500K if that was an option? A quick google search is suggesting that $200K for the top end of experience, when I was told $300K they said it was as high as they go. Where is the rest of this compensation coming from? Maybe they could give stats for bonuses but when enquired it seemed that the bonus pool was being eaten up elsewhere and the C++ devs were in the back of the line for that.
spamizbad 4y ago
Having worked with several "veterans" of this industry, I'm inclined to agree. Also weirdly C++ devs aren't making that much more than the fullstack devs who build FOH tooling for traders.
- eru 4y ago
  What's FOH?
  - stevesimmons 4y ago
    Front office = trading desk
  - sharemywin 4y ago
    Font of the house
  - 95014_refugee 4y ago
    FoH = Front of House, i.e. directly supporting customer activity.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      just a side note: long before a small part of the programming world took over this acronym, it used to mean the sound engineer (and sometimes other staff) that were in the venue, embedded in the crowd, working on live sound while the talent was up on stage. "back of house" was behind the stage, "front of house" was the room/venue itself, and the people working in it.
      - conductr 4y ago
        It's also from the restaurant industry. Dining room vs kitchen staff. I think "the house" part comes from hospitality in general.
      - pgwhalen 4y ago
        I’m not sure the programming world took over the acronym, I think OP just confused them. In finance at least, the terms Front Office and Back Office are used. I’ve never heard anyone use the restaurant/entertainment variants used.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
magic_man 4y ago
Also crazy non competes. Like 2 years.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  If paid by a "high quality" salary, why not?
  - ohyoutravel 4y ago
    It’s anticompetitive, stifles innovation, and boxes people out of career growth in their niche industry.
    - mixmastamyk 4y ago
      That's why they better pay $$$ for it.
- ska 4y ago
  At a certain level, this tends to be balanced with severance. "Garden leave" is different from "I can't get a job".
- aidenn0 4y ago
  If they pay double, then you just need to suffer for at least 2 years to break-even and get 2 years of vacation.
  - smabie 4y ago
    You get paid during your NC
dcchambers 4y ago
Yup. What's the point of all that money if you have no time to spend it and the stress will send you to an early grave?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
908B64B197 4y ago
> Maybe that reputation has caught up to them. It did. Comp is nowhere near FAANG and the work culture is still stuck in the 90's. Go to any college and talk to students looking for internships. Finance firms are nowhere near the top of their list.
- joezydeco 4y ago
  Curious - what's at the top of their list now? Do they still want FAANG jobs after all the layoffs?
  - andsoitis 4y ago
    I don’t think layoffs change people’s desire to work at a top hi-tech company.
  - boshalfoshal 4y ago
    I'd say HFT/prop trading/market making/hedge funds, since those are the only places that are hiring right now and pay good money. The usual destinations for smart and motivated new grads are (not counting very early startups/making your own company): 1. Top tier HFT/prop firm (Jane Street, HRT, Jump, etc.) 2. Meta, larger unicorns like Stripe, Databricks, etc. 3. Google 4. Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Obviously im leaving out a lot of places but this is generally what I've seen. Id say for most people FAANG is still the top option, and for people that want to shoot beyond FAANG, trading firms are probably the next target. If you were including very early startups in this list, I've noticed that the smartest people often join promising startups as an early engineer, or make their own company. I'd put them above trading firms, but the risk is way higher.
- noisenotsignal 4y ago
  HFT, prop trading, market makers and the like are also finance firms right? They are still pretty coveted by those who are aware of their existence. Jump Trading, Citadel, Jane Street, DE Shaw etc are considered highly prestigious and competitive. There are certainly financial firms that people are less interested in though, namely banks.
- 4y ago
wwweston 4y ago
This speaks to the point in the article "The real problem is that C++ is neither easy nor loved," which they offset with "The language may be hard. But it's also worth it." The problem is that there's a law of diminishing returns to compensation. If you can work with a tool you like that helps you meet milestones and general expectations for $X00k generally leading to pleasant days, or can work with a tool that makes your life harder and leads to higher stress fewer pleasant days for $2X00k... sure there's going to be people who take the extra money. But there's also going to be people who say to themselves "yeah, it turns out I'm plenty well compensated at $X00k I'll take the extra quality of life." "Worth it" is a value judgment. How many people managing the financial firms decided it was worth it to invest in C++?
- bfung 4y ago
  To further the idea, C++ can be loved if the firms invest dollars, invest marketing (open source, other ways) of it. They should support/invest in the community they want to hire from.
- klyrs 4y ago
  They're focused on the language. The language isn't the problem. Of the people I've met in finance, there are some really strong and offputting trends: they're uniformly dismissive of work/life balance, they're almost uniformly the worst stereotype of tech-bro, and aside from the rampant cocaine use, they're hugely socially conservative, and every single one values profit over ethics. It's not the language, it's the extremely toxic culture. Any programmer worth their salt can march into a nasty codebase of whatever language, and make it dance. But financial folk don't want to employ humans with all their complexity, they want robots who will run themselves into the ground for cash. So they get young men who burn out quickly and retire ASAP. The problem isn't the language. The problem isn't the pay. The problem is the extractive culture. Finance folks focus on short term profits to the detriment of their future. And now they're wondering "where can we find programmers" after they've been burning them like so many trees. Go figure.
  - dennis_jeeves1 4y ago
    > Any programmer worth their salt can march into a nasty codebase of whatever language, Correct, I wonder why people both technical and non-technical focus on this aspect a lot. ( my guess is that they are incompetent themselves). Agreed, if you want someone for two or three months you probably want someone who knows the language and it's ecosystem pretty well. Any work that is more than six months should be nearly language independent.
jjtheblunt 4y ago
I wonder (with no supporting data) if they are griping because in C++ they've created horrid technical debt that they have a hard time hiring people to maintain.
bitL 4y ago
Financial firms in London pay peanuts to C++ devs.
dahfizz 4y ago
The key to being a developer in finance is to work in a software shop. Working at a bank / prop firm is going to be extremely stressful. Working at the shop that all the big banks buy their trading software from is like 80-90% of the pay but none of the stress. I love it. I get to do real, hard engineering for big pay without working on ad tech or javascript.
- lolpython 4y ago
  Where is this?

User23 4y ago

The only comp structure that would get me doing that job would be a market rate base and points on the algo earnings.

gumby 4y ago
...which is how they pay
- User23 4y ago
  I freely confess my ignorance, so thank you for that. If they will make a remote deal it might be time to dust off the ol' angle brackets.

Invictus0 4y ago

The pay is 500k and up

PenguinCoder 4y ago
I wish. I've never received an offer that high for C or C++ job. Then again I haven't applied at any trading firms, and I wouldn't be considered Senior.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
intelVISA 4y ago
Probably closer to $1M these days

PragmaticPulp 4y ago

C++ quant jobs were already some of the highest-paying jobs in the technology market. A step above FAANG in many cases. There's more to the story than just comp. Even increasing comp wouldn't immediately generate new developers, as it takes a very long time for the increased comp to incentivize new students and junior engineers to move in that direction in their career. High performance C++ takes a lot of time and effort to learn, and even longer to master. Maybe the real issue is that there has been a surplus of high-paying jobs that are much easier and require a lot less effort to master.

mixmastamyk 4y ago
"Already" doesn't mean it couldn't be raised further. Have you seen C-suite salaries? Also you don't have to only incentivize grads. Getting experienced devs to jump ship is the primary goal. Which a $100k+ raise would certainly incentivize.

acdha 4y ago

The company they based the story on appears to be a cryptocurrency firm, too. That'll exclude a lot of otherwise qualified candidates due to ethical or business model concerns — especially since C++ developers tend to be older, they're more likely to understand the risks of jumping into a bubble and have higher expectations for things like work/life balance.

com2kid 4y ago

You can't pay me enough to go back to writing c++ code. I despise the language, 80% of my time is spent figuring out how to beat it into submission to get it to do what I want, which leaves very little brain power left over for designing well architected software. Modern languages get easy access to a large number of powerful design tools, C++ I have the same tools but it's stuck behind an interface (headers, the build system) originally made in the 70s.

kazinator 4y ago

To a point, but it's still just an example of throwing money at a problem, which has limitations.