Q&A: CS/Finance Major -> Software Engineer

Mod Note (Andy) - this Q&A originally went up last July but Ace wrote and said he could still answer questions. Hey all, Recent graduate here trying to kill time before work starts. I've seen a number of recent posts about people in finance getting burnt out and considering picking up the skillset to become software engineers. I'd be happy to answer any questions about this trade-off, or about software engineering in general. A bit of background about myself: I studied computer science and finance at a target university, and I graduated summa cum laude. I spent one summer in finance (hedge fund analyst) and two in software engineering (household name tech companies), and I will be starting a full-time software engineering job in a couple of months (another household name company). I thought pretty hard about a couple of other popular paths, including investment banking and product management, but I ultimately decided that I would be happiest in software engineering.

 
Best Response
7xEBITDA:

What led you to choose software engineering over product management? I always felt that people with a business mindset would find a PM role to be more fulfilling, as it tends to combine the best of both worlds. Would love to hear your thoughts.

Great question. I initially had the same concerns, but it turns out that capable software engineers are quite involved in the strategic process (at least at the companies I have worked at). This is a big difference between an investment banking analyst and an entry-level software engineer: the latter's insight into high-level decision-making is valued much more than the former's.

The point of a product manager is not necessarily to tell software engineers what to do, but rather to coordinate different parties across the organization. Very few, if any, tech companies use cross-functional organization, but most new initiatives will require a cross-functional approach. For example, releasing a new feature to a website can require people from engineering, operations, design, marketing, data science, and finance. This is one place where the PM can add value, by tracking project tasks and goals across these teams. Without this cross-functional aspect, there's very little a PM can do that an engineering manager can't.

I would summarize by saying that the PM's role is to make the software engineer's job easier where possible. That isn't something that appeals to me; I enjoy getting my hands dirty with the coding process. I'm able to do this without sacrificing my soft skillset, so this is a win-win for me.

I should note that I also went out of my way to find teams that had opportunities for me to play a strategic role. At one company, I met several times with the CTO to discuss a new product initiative. At another, I commonly hopped on sales / due diligence calls with our team lead, and I was actually allowed to drive significant parts of our pitches to potential customers. Not every engineer is interested in these things, but in my experience, those that are capable of seeing both the trees and the forest are encouraged to wear both hats.

 

I'm currently in the tech industry as well. This may come off as blunt but what's your salary? What's your goal within the tech industry? Startup? Google? Interesting problems? Has the concept of the salary ceiling as an engineer worried you?

 
mike97345:

I'm currently in the tech industry as well. This may come off as blunt but what's your salary? What's your goal within the tech industry? Startup? Google? Interesting problems? Has the concept of the salary ceiling as an engineer worried you?

Base is in the low 100s, along with about ~200k in equity, obviously not accounting for fluctuations in stock price. There's also a signing bonus (low five figures), end-of-year bonus, etc. I will be joining what I suppose would be the equivalent of a bulge-bracket firm (i.e. Google / Microsoft / Amazon / Facebook level in terms of brand equity and company size).

I don't currently have a specific end-goal. While I recognize that my preferences are subject to change, right now I value the responsibilities I have at work. I'm very much a generalist in terms of engineering skillset, and I've been pretty happy regardless of company size. However, I enjoy being able to take ownership of my work and do more than just code in a box, and that was what was important to me in terms of choosing a full-time offer. I hope to move into engineering management after a few years. Long-term, three different paths I'd like to have available would be joining an investment bank's TMT division at VP level or higher, becoming VP of engineering or CTO of a tech company, or founding and being CEO of my own company. Obviously there are a lot of factors that will go into this decision, so I'm not beholden to any one possibility.

As it might follow, I'm not overly concerned about the salary ceiling. This is because I don't think the ceiling is in effect at the company I'm at, because I don't plan on being a lifetime software engineer (as implied above), and because I will be making enough money to live quite comfortably based on my personal consumption.

 

For someone who has an investment banking background, but no CS background, and wants to break into the tech industry, what resources do you suggest learning from? Should I target only PM jobs, or look into learning to code myself and then trying to get a software developer gig?

 
Entrepreneur321:

For someone who has an investment banking background, but no CS background, and wants to break into the tech industry, what resources do you suggest learning from? Should I target only PM jobs, or look into learning to code myself and then trying to get a software developer gig?

If your only two desired positions in tech are PM and software engineering, then you should learn how to program regardless. However, if your goal is simply to break into the industry, don't forget that the big tech companies have corporate strategy, corporate development, and finance / accounting teams. They may be a better fit for any individual person.

Why do you need to know how to code to be a product manager? The more you can code, the more effective you will be as a PM in terms of helping add value for engineers. Remember, without your entry-level engineers, you don't have a product, so you as a PM need to be able to speak the engineering language. This should be self-evident; I've heard lots of people frustrated with their banking associate because they didn't know enough about the job of a banking analyst to be able to actually help them out.

This is so important for a PM because understanding software engineering is significantly harder than simply reading a Vault guide (not that any such analogue exists). It really takes a couple of years of exposure to both computer science theory and the practice of programming to be super comfortable with it. This is why you hear the stereotype of the English or history major reading the Vault guide and becoming a banking analyst, but there is no corresponding stereotype for software engineering. The barriers to entry are too high.

Every single PM I've known—although my sample size is small—knew how to code. They weren't necessarily all CS majors, but they all had substantial coding experience. I don't think it's impossible to be a PM without coding experience, but it absolutely works in your favor.

Will you actually like coding enough to do it for a job? I think three big factors here are detail-orientation, a love for solving puzzles, and patience. One, you need to build software the right way the first time. This includes thinking through design choices fully, properly documenting your efforts in a helpful way, and being in a habit of writing high-quality code. This is hopefully a skill that will transfer from banking. This is important because code sticks around for the long run and is read by many other people. Nothing is shittier than having to spend hours digging through someone's shit-quality code. Two, you need to have the kind of inquisitive mind that makes you enjoy solving puzzles, since that's what building software is like. Finally, patience is a big virtue, whether you need to spend hours trying to understand code written ten years ago by a former employee of your company that probably wasn't competent, or it takes you two days to track down and fix some crazy bug. This is a different sort of patience than what is required in banking: banking patience involves sitting around waiting for someone to assign you work, while software engineering patience involves being okay with spinning your wheels for as long as is necessary.

In terms of resources, people usually recommend something like Codecademy, but I always tell people to go to a university's intro comp sci website, follow the textbook and lectures, and complete the homeworks. University classes are designed to give you the proper balance of theory and practice, whereas Codecademy is designed to give you all practice but no understanding. Also, I strongly recommend Java over Python as a first language. Python is a particularly bad language for building large systems in because of its lack of a static type system (don't worry about what that means). Java is the way to go here.

tl;dr learn to code, see how much you like it, and use that to determine which tech job you'd be a good fit for

 
OkOwl:

Soon to be sophomore here. I am currently a Finance major, but I have always been interested in CS. I regret not taking freshman year CS. But, my university does have a BA CS degree that can been completed in 3 years. I am working a great internship this summer that is very applicable to investment banking. But I want to start doing CS and get a sophomore year internship with a good tech firm, because I eventually see myself as a founder/VC/TMT banker.

Basically, my question is: is starting a year late too big of a disadvantage to land Google or Facebook or something of the sort?

I know you can say "it's never too late." But honestly, sometimes things like can screw you. Just looking for general advice on this, and if it is not too late, a game plan. Thanks

I know a number of people that were in a similar position to yours, and they're fine now. They generally started college with another engineering major—lots of bioengineers and mechanical engineers realize that they don't actually like that subject—but I've heard of switches from all over, including urban studies. If you're bright and motivated, you shouldn't be at a marked disadvantage. Once you take a course on data structures and algorithms, you should be able to land just about any tech internship you want. As a TA for my university's data structures and algorithms course, I've seen literally dozens of freshmen and sophomores get internships at companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Palantir, including those that didn't start in computer science.

There are internship opportunities explicitly meant for younger college students. For example, Google's Engineering Practicum program is designed exclusively for sophomores. It's still a legitimate Google internship, but it's a means of applying that marks you as someone still relatively new to computer science, and Google uses this information to properly hone the interview process and team placement process.

Finally, remember that software engineering is quite meritocratic, and therefore company prestige doesn't matter as much as it does for banking analysts. Apply all over the place. You can connect with many start-ups through programs like KPCB Fellows and hackNY Fellows, companies that you might not heard of but that legitimately might be better learning experiences than the established companies.

 

For software engineering roles, is it harder to get into the type of company you work for (FB, Google, Microsoft) or a hot late-stage startup (Slack, HotelTonight, Instacart)? Obviously there are more spots at Google - but are the most competitive positions at large tech companies, late-stage startups, or seed / series A startups with name-brand funding?

 
jss09:

For software engineering roles, is it harder to get into the type of company you work for (FB, Google, Microsoft) or a hot late-stage startup (Slack, HotelTonight, Instacart)? Obviously there are more spots at Google - but are the most competitive positions at large tech companies, late-stage startups, or seed / series A startups with name-brand funding?

Difficulty is a function of brand equity, influence per engineer, and company size.

  1. Brand equity. The more prestigious the company is, the harder it will be to get a job there. This is because of basic supply and demand forces. More people apply to Dropbox than they do to CloudLock, so Dropbox can afford to be pickier.

  2. Influence per engineer. How important are your individual contributions going to be? This should be obvious. This correlates with company size and team size, but it is not a perfect correlation.

  3. Company size. Technical competence and cultural fit are the two biggest influencers of a software engineering interview, as they are for most jobs out there. The trade-off is how much to weigh each factor. Generally, the weight afforded to cultural fit decreases as company size increases. This is not a perfect model, as there is absolutely a baseline of technical knowledge that one must have to get the job in the first place, but it's good enough for our purposes. This should also be obvious; you need to be a perfect cultural fit at a ten-person company, whereas IBM probably doesn't care about your cultural fit too much.

To go on a tangent, I personally believe that cultural fit and social skills matter a lot more than most people in this field do. Even if companies explicitly say that they aren't evaluating fit, every interviewer internally conducts the "would I grab a beer with this person?" test. Sometimes, they may even be explicit about this. A fraternity brother and I both interned at the same tech company. One of our pledges this year interviewed at that company, and when his interviewer saw that on his resume, she name-dropped both the brother and me.

 
african13:

How difficult were the interviews to land a software engineering job? How about for PM jobs?

I'd say software engineering interviews are quite difficult. They're almost all extremely technical, with one fit interview at some companies. The reason that they're difficult is because you need to be able to think and problem solve. You will be given data structures and algorithms questions that you have never seen before, and knowing your material cold is a pre-requisite for having a chance at solving these questions. A couple of the trickier questions I've had include programming a file system in an hour (the interviewer literally said, "Holy shit, I can't believe you just did that"; failure is an expectation, and these companies strongly, strongly prefer false negatives over false positives), and whiteboarding a Bloom filter from first principles in ten minutes. Generally, these questions take building blocks that you should know and ask you to build things several steps of complexity greater. These interviews are a crapshoot by definition—if you get a question that you just can't solve for whatever reason, say goodnight—but you can tremendously improve your odds with constant practice.

A significant contrast with business interviews is that getting the interview is never the concern. I haven't been rejected from a tech interview in years. From what I understand, it is more difficult to get a banking or consulting interview. Given that you're in the interview room, your odds are better in banking and consulting than they are in tech.

One interesting parallel is that, much like the consulting case interview, the software engineering interview cares about thought process. Think out loud. Show the interviewer that you are making reasonable assumptions and logical steps. With that being said, the software engineering interview cares more about the correct answer than the consulting interview does, partially because there usually is a correct answer in the former.

I can't directly speak to PM interviews, but from what I understand, they are like tech-heavy case interviews. An example Google APM interview question is, "We are colonizing space and want to extend Gmail to reach Mars. Talk us through this scenario." There are literally dozens of different directions you can take this question: cost, market size, latency, bandwidth, etc. Here, the interviewers would obviously care tremendously about thought process and reasoning.

 

Thanks a lot, this is a great post.

As someone who realized too late that they were really into computers and wishes they had a degree in CS/math and not bus. management concentrated in finance...I really wish I could go back and do it over. I'd love to get a master's degree, but I feel like there's no way I could even begin to apply unless I had years of experience in at least one language, and a heavy math background. Is this accurate? I'm aware of all the self-study resources there are out there right now, I'm actually trying to teach myself C++ right now along with more math. Is there some sort of viable path into tech that I can take, given my utterly useless undergrad degree?

Thanks again.

"When you stop striving for perfection, you might as well be dead."
 
PeteMullersKeyboard:

Thanks a lot, this is a great post.

As someone who realized too late that they were really into computers and wishes they had a degree in CS/math and not bus. management concentrated in finance...I really wish I could go back and do it over. I'd love to get a master's degree, but I feel like there's no way I could even begin to apply unless I had years of experience in at least one language, and a heavy math background. Is this accurate? I'm aware of all the self-study resources there are out there right now, I'm actually trying to teach myself C++ right now along with more math. Is there some sort of viable path into tech that I can take, given my utterly useless undergrad degree?

Thanks again.

Don't worry too much about the degree, tech companies care about what you can do, not what your major is. I have several friends that dropped out of college not to make their own company, but simply to work at another company. A friend of mine is working on the Windows kernel team at Microsoft, and he graduated with a business major (but is an exceptional programmer nonetheless).

Side projects are going to get your foot in the door, especially without the CS degree. C++ is a good starting language, and lots of companies use it for their infrastructure, but it's not the best for small-scale side projects. Good starting side projects are some kind of mobile or web app. I'd recommend looking into JavaScript once you are quite comfortable coding in C++.

You'll be lacking in the data structures and algorithms knowledge, although that can be learned, so you might want to try applying to smaller companies. Smaller companies tend to value what you've built over what you know, if that makes sense. Pure web dev or app dev skills are critical at a start-up, where you can do other jobs at an established company.

Networking does help, so see if you have any friends that currently work at companies you'd like to be at. Resume referrals are super helpful for getting interviews.

 

What's the best and worst thing about your job?

My buddy is a CS major and claims that a lot of the people in his major are lacking social skills, big time. Do you find this to be true within the tech/startup scene?

Finally, piggybacking off an earlier question, for someone interested in getting into tech (non-CS major) which language do you suggest learning first?

 
da chief:

What's the best and worst thing about your job?

My buddy is a CS major and claims that a lot of the people in his major are lacking social skills, big time. Do you find this to be true within the tech/startup scene?

Finally, piggybacking off an earlier question, for someone interested in getting into tech (non-CS major) which language do you suggest learning first?

The best thing is knowing that my work can directly affect millions to billions of people. At some point after my last internship, a popular news outlet did a piece on my summer project, and I felt extremely humbled to be involved.

The worst part is when you need to spin your wheels for days at a time because there's some subtle bug that you can't crack. It can make you doubt your abilities and wonder why you have a job in the first place. Also, it's quite frustrating when you're in a nice groove, building some bomb-ass software, and you get an Outlook reminder that you have a meeting in 15 minutes. Totally kills your workflow in a terrible way. Refer to this Paul Graham essay for a good explanation.

The social part was pretty terrible in college, which is one reason why I pledged a fraternity. It actually gets much better in the workforce. A bit of that is the whole "would I have a beer with this person?" serving as a filter, but it's mostly just the fact that it's work, not school. Different environments entirely. I'll geek out about functional programming and machine learning and compiler implementations with whoever wants to do that, even if we wouldn't be the best of friends outside of work.

Moreover, as CS gets more popular, you'll see better-adjusted people studying it.

I always suggest Java first. It's not as easy as Python, but you're doing yourself a favor in the long run.

 
mrharveyspecter:

+1 For a good article with tons of relevant info about tech. I'm a PM now at a big tech company and all of this stuff is spot on.

Only thing I minorly disagree with is learning Java first just because it's a pain to learn, but thats probably not too relevant here.

Thanks man! Yeah, I even pointed out that I was for sure in the minority opinion on this one. I'm quite bearish on Python because you can view a static type system as training wheels; it eliminates a whole class of bugs that beginners might run into. In my ideal world, we'd teach the first CS class in OCaml, but obviously most WSO users are looking for something more practical.

 
Ace Rothstein:
mrharveyspecter:
+1 For a good article with tons of relevant info about tech. I'm a PM now at a big tech company and all of this stuff is spot on.
Only thing I minorly disagree with is learning Java first just because it's a pain to learn, but thats probably not too relevant here.

Thanks man! Yeah, I even pointed out that I was for sure in the minority opinion on this one. I'm quite bearish on Python because you can view a static type system as training wheels; it eliminates a whole class of bugs that beginners might run into. In my ideal world, we'd teach the first CS class in OCaml, but obviously most WSO users are looking for something more practical.

Funnily enough, since this is WSO, OCaml might actually have some takers...Jane Street practically runs on it alone. Functional programming seems to be at the center of a few small but successful prop shops.

On that note, do you have any advice on picking between algorithmic trading and traditional software development roles? Is it even possible to break into algo trading as an undergrad? As a CS major at a target, I'm somewhat torn between the two industries--the former has some tempting stories of successful traders making well over 200k/year out of college but the latter offers the promise of a more stable career path and probably a better lifestyle.

 

Ex IB/ER guy here now a Financial Data Engineer at a fin-tech start up. I wont hijack with my story or anything (if OP wants me to add something I will)...but on the PM front, our guy knows pretty much just HTML bare min. CSS. Makes wire frames all day. Came from similar positions at MUCH larger firms (CAP IQ, Factset etc...)

WSO Vice President, Data @JustinDDuBois
 

What is your day to day work like? How much of it is spent tackling challenging intellectually demanding problems (eg. involving algorithms or data structures) vs. mundane grunt tasks? What are the best and worst parts about your job?

 
JDawg:

What is your day to day work like? How much of it is spent tackling challenging intellectually demanding problems (eg. involving algorithms or data structures) vs. mundane grunt tasks? What are the best and worst parts about your job?

Daily schedule last summer looked something like this:

7:30am: wake up and go for a run 8:45am: in at work for a quick breakfast, shoot the shit with some friends 9am: read a few articles on WSJ, Hacker News, etc.; catch up on my sports teams 9:30am: knock a few small items off the backlog for the day, such as anything email related, documentation, commenting on our internal Wiki or issue / feature tracker, make small changes to the code base, etc. It's not worth doing anything big because... 10am: stand-up meeting with the people working on my summer project. This is a five to ten minute meeting in which each person gives a sixty second rundown on what they worked on yesterday, what they're working on today, and if there is anything blocking them from making progress. 10:15am: get cracking on the day. I'll have about an hour and a half to two hours of uninterrupted time, during which I'll continue to think about the best way to engineer a certain solution, write the code for it, write documentation, etc. 12pm: lunch 12:45pm: back to work! The afternoon is prime time to go on a roll. 3pm: play a quick game of table shuffleboard with a teammate in order to stretch the legs. 6pm: dinner 7pm: grab a beer if I'm feeling ritzy. Either way, I begin to wrap up work for the evening. I don't like going home on an unfinished note, so I get to a point where I can mentally let things rest. 8pm: head home. If it's a Friday, head to a different building and play beer pong until like 1am.

There are a few weekly meetings that will come up. 10:30am on one day each week was a half-hour meeting with one of our clients. 10:30am another day was a half-hour internal meeting across the division, in which we focus on big-picture issues. 2:30pm one day each week was a divisional engineering meeting, in which we focus on smaller issues and share some neat tech tidbits. I also had a weekly afternoon half-hour walking meeting with my company mentor, and a weekly afternoon half-hour walking meeting with my manager. So you can see that the afternoon and early evening, at least at that company, was the prime time for getting work done. Morning was made for meetings, and the afternoon naturally split into large chunks of time split up by an occasional meeting. This is in line with the Paul Graham essay I linked to above, which was nice.

I'd say that my position was probably close to an even split on thinking and coding. I don't personally find coding to be grunt work or boring, at least not yet. I take pride in building a stable, easy-to-understand system. Most software engineers place great emphasis on not reinventing the wheel, so it shouldn't ever feel like you're doing the same thing twice.

 

Legit, legit post. My background since it's relevant to my endorsement of the OP:

Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from 2nd tier public school (UT system but not UT, and that's Texas for you Tennessee punks). 3 years in Engineering Leadership Program at 2nd tier tech company in Austin (not google/FB/etc but solid place, I have 7 colleagues who went to HBS in the last 3 years). Now 4 years in technical sales (the leadership program was grooming people for PM/Sales/Engineering Management).

My wife is a PM (now director of Product Marketing) at a small company, ME degree from top20 public engineering school in Texas, went through same leadership program I did in Austin.

Although I am EE/Sales, my former company makes a product for testing that helps EE/ME/etc program easily called LabVIEW (ni.com/labview), a graphically programming language, so a big part of what I did and now do as a contractor is coding.

Ace is dead on about how CS/SE interviews work (that's engineering in general but even more so CS/SE). He/she is also absolutely correct that any programmer who is good at and shows interest in leading, directing strategy, or talking with customers, will be given that chance and likely promoted for it. My wife as a PM was promoted to Director because she is constantly visiting customers for demos/training/etc and helping to close deals. In technical sales I worked closely with our marketing teams and the ones who engaged sales/customers came out with better products and were more highly regarded in the company, hands down.

I also agree that C or C++ is a good place to start for programming, our EE program was Java and it sucked to go from 1 C class in high school to an intense object oriented language right off the bat.

Also of note: there is no salary ceiling for excellent engineers with the skill set Ace seems to exhibit (

). I mean, it's not like finance where at certain levels you hit 7 figures but great engineers will do extremely well and never be without work for long.

tl:dr Ace is 100% dead on, awesome post.

 

I'm in the same boat, double majored in CS and finance and just started at a financial software company. Cool to see more software people here. I'd like to recommend joining the competitive programming team (ICPC) for students who are serious about becoming a software engineer or a quantitative analyst/developer. I actually took a class in ICPC style competitive programming and learned a lot of cool algorithms. Fun stuff. And software interviews are basically easy programming competition problems.

 
lullinatalk:

I'm in the same boat, double majored in CS and finance and just started at a financial software company. Cool to see more software people here. I'd like to recommend joining the competitive programming team (ICPC) for students who are serious about becoming a software engineer or a quantitative analyst/developer. I actually took a class in ICPC style competitive programming and learned a lot of cool algorithms. Fun stuff. And software interviews are basically easy programming competition problems.

Definitely an interesting idea. I'm not familiar with the ICPC syllabus, but I'm decently familiar with IOI questions, and for the most part you can get the same thing by working through every single proof of CLRS. I think this depends on what kind of a learner an individual is. Also, all of the computational geometry stuff is useless for standard SE interviews, but it's certainly interesting.

 

The algorithms book you linked to is 800 pages. And I've found the online courses (say Princeton, MIT, Cambridge) are difficult and demand a serious time commitment. How long should it take to grasp elementary algorithms for interviews?

 
aurelius:

The algorithms book you linked to is 800 pages. And I've found the online courses (say Princeton, MIT, Cambridge) are difficult and demand a serious time commitment. How long should it take to grasp elementary algorithms for interviews?

Definitely a decent bit of time. There's quite a bit of nuance to the material. You not only need to know runtime complexity, space complexity, and how the data structures and algorithms actually work, but you need to be able to explain them from first principles, apply them where appropriate, and understand their advantages and drawbacks. And that's at a minimum. For the top companies, I actually recommend knowing the canonical proofs of runtime and correctness. I also strongly recommend that you implement every data structure and algorithm in an actual programming language, especially a hash table. I would say that a majority of my friends who interviewed at top companies were told to implement a hash table from scratch. And even if not, the most effective way to make sure you know the material is to code it.

To give some perspective, I've taken three algorithms courses, and I've lectured our data structures and algorithms course for four semesters, and I'm just now getting to a point where I have absolutely 100% of the material internalized.

I'd be happy to make a list of the standard data structures and algorithms needed for interviews if there's sufficient demand.

Sorry for the delayed response.

 
shortmyshit:

Interested in hearing more about your summer experience as a hedge fund analyst vs software engineering. Was the hedge fund analyst position at a fundamental fund? Why didn't you choose that route? Also, with your background, why didn't you want to move into a quant fund?

The hedge fund position was at a fundamental fund that did some activist investing in biotech companies. Frankly, I don't have the stomach to take an investment thesis and commit money to it. I also just don't have the patience to sit around and listen to people pitch all day. You might notice that I never mentioned wanting to become a VC, and that's for very similar reasons.

Re: quant fund, didn't want to live in a cold-weather environment, and since I don't have a mathematics Ph.D, I probably don't have the skills needed to really add value at a legit quant fund, a la Renaissance.

 

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success
From 10 rejections to 1 dream investment banking internship

“... I believe it was the single biggest reason why I ended up with an offer...”