5 ms·
The conclusion makes perfect sense; software engineers should be paid much less than quants. After all, we know that software is really easy to build, that's wh
by mapleoin 12y ago
The conclusion makes perfect sense; software engineers should be paid much less than quants. After all, we know that software is really easy to build, that's why there are so many cheap programmers out there. Once it's built, there will be no maintenance problems, we won't need to add new features, port it to use some other backends, nothing which requires a really thought-out and flexible design and of course, who cares about security? When it gets big, we'll just rewrite it, hire ten more people to do it in three years and realize that we're so buried in technical debt that we'd be better of selling this to a big company and just doing another startup.
- doormatt 12y agoWere you reading the same article as me?
- ckdarby 12y agoI don't think they were ._.
- Rong1961 12y agoI think they were. They're being sarcastic, and commenting on how the end of the article puts the coder into a junior position and puts the math expert into a senior position.
- lbarrett 12y agoI dunno, a programmer who can't think about algorithmic complexity isn't actually going to be all that useful.
- waterlesscloud 12y agoHow useful is the guy who thinks about algorithmic complexity but doesn't code? At the end of the day, someone's got to write the code that runs on your servers. It doesn't magically transfer from that paper covered in pencil markings. The actual conclusion of the piece made sense to me- all 3 were worthy of offers, for different reasons. Not hiring all three has less to do with how good the economy is (that was a non-sequitor) and more to do with the needs of the particular company at this particular moment. Right now they need people to design algorithms and to code. They need both, and their company doesn't advance if they only have one and not the other.
- Shivetya 12y agodepends on what they work on, business applications in large organizations we tend to direct programmers through reams of project documentation, from top level to familiarize them with what the overall direction is to technical documents which specify exactly the formulas to be used at all levels of calculation. These formula and related specification does include the number of decimals to use within calculation, rounding, and resulting decimal precision. yeah its nice if they understand it all but programming isn't all shoot from the hip, many work in very structured environments which is more true when projects can have more than a dozen programmers on just one machine. Throw in three or more touch points and I am more concerned you follow the technical than branch out with your own ideas
- ilikevideos 12y agoThat's the same interpretation I had. Because the guy didn't know quant he would therefore be in a junior role for something unrelated to quant.
- doctorstupid 12y agoBut Tom was, by his own admission, merely a programmer and not a software engineer.
- Bahamut 12y agoBut quants create a lot about how the business is driven. Flawed software is less likely to sink a business as a flawed algorithm (at least for businesses driven by algorithms). Of course, good software engineers are also important, but depending on the business, a good data scientist might be more critical.
- dxbydt 12y ago>software engineers should be paid much less than quants This is a complete misread. afaik I have used the word "quant" in the article exactly zero times.
- sleazebreeze 12y agoThe title of the blog is "just another scala quant", so that might be where he got the term from the article.