I work in finance (for an investment management firm that's a household name in the CNBC world) and can confirm that the synopsis re: working for finance, "Lots of money but crappy environment, dull projects etc." is correct.
Here's a summary of the work environment:
- no office (hah!) or cubicle, just a space on a long desk, hardly conducive for concentrating on programming
- dress code is shirt and tie, but on Fridays you can drop the tie, and every quarter or so you can wear "jeans for charity" if you pay $10 (yes, I'm serious)
- C++ is the standard language, but it's C++ as written by physics PhD quants who have obviously never taken any classes in software engineering, and have no interest in doing so
- hours are long, 10 - 12 hours a day
- as much as possible technology is done by contractors or is outsourced
Generally speaking the attitude is nobody got fired for buying Oracle, so "awesome and seriously hard core projects" are few and far between if non-existent.
On the upside, the pay is good, so if you're disciplined and don't get stuck in the trap of living the Wall St. lifestyle you can save a lot and at some point take the money and run far, far away from the financial industry.
FWIW, my experience has been different (I work at a proprietary HFT firm in Chicago).
-Open office space (no one short of C-level gets an office). We all work together in a large open space to collaborate better. We have reasonable sized desks though, with 4-8 monitors each
-No dress code (I'm wearing jeans and t-shirt, and shorts/sandals/t-shirt isn't uncommon).
-A lot of C++ and Java. But more Python, Haskell, and Erlang every day. If you can prove your solution is better (mostly faster), we'll use it. It is true that some of the people writing code are physicists/mathematicians, and don't get some SE best-practices. But they're pretty damn smart and will learn if you teach them.
-Best hours I've ever worked (<50 hrs/week). Home by 5PM most days.
-You have access to any tech you need. If there's an expensive piece of hardware or library that will help, it's no problem.
After watching the original Wall Street again last night, and looking forward to the new one I'm thinking these days its guys like you who are at the cutting edge, not the actual people on the floor. Your job sounds great!
What are the projects that you are working on? HFT strategies? Statistical Arb trading strategies? Those kinds of projects seem extremely math and CS hardcore to me.
I worked on Wall St (for a large Commodity-trading company).
Only a small percentage of the IT people worked on those. Mostly we built and maintained systems to track and report on trades, keep track of credit, figure out profit/loss on books, make sure traders didn't bet the company on risky trades, scrape numbers off of websites and put them in a db. We also pulled a lot of numbers into spreadsheets so analysts could make charts to email out to the traders.
It was much as the GP says... long desks, lots of noise and distractions, poor technology base (they upgraded to WinXP with IE6 in 2009). On the plus side, the pay was good (high 5, low 6 figures), multiple monitors, lots of snacks and drinks in the kitchen, catered lunch, good healthcare...
Roughly 30 - 40% more than you could expect to get working as a programmer outside of finance. But considering that the hours are longer, it's not much more on an hourly basis on a straight salary basis. However, if you're an employee, you can also get substantial annual bonuses.
Bank in the 90s I worked for a small derivative shop in NYC. The lowest bonus we ever got was 100% of annual salary. This was not a boring project either - we had a network of Suns and all code was written in Eiffel and C.
Here's a summary of the work environment:
- no office (hah!) or cubicle, just a space on a long desk, hardly conducive for concentrating on programming
- dress code is shirt and tie, but on Fridays you can drop the tie, and every quarter or so you can wear "jeans for charity" if you pay $10 (yes, I'm serious)
- C++ is the standard language, but it's C++ as written by physics PhD quants who have obviously never taken any classes in software engineering, and have no interest in doing so
- hours are long, 10 - 12 hours a day
- as much as possible technology is done by contractors or is outsourced
Generally speaking the attitude is nobody got fired for buying Oracle, so "awesome and seriously hard core projects" are few and far between if non-existent.
On the upside, the pay is good, so if you're disciplined and don't get stuck in the trap of living the Wall St. lifestyle you can save a lot and at some point take the money and run far, far away from the financial industry.