Lot of people have historically recommended learning how to code as a finance professional. Now I acknowledge there's lots of stuff we do manually via excel / ppt that could probably be done more efficiently via code. This would be the obvious 'pro' but here are some important nuances:
- Proliferation of low-code / no-code tools. Will non-coders / those with minimal knowledge be able to leverage most of the important tools for their space without knowing how to fully code?
- From an terminal skill level perspective, those of us in roles like IB / AM / PE / etc will NEVER be as good at coding as those who do this full-time. Is the juice even worth the squeeze to write mediocre code?
- How many tasks / what kind of tasks can even be automated via code? If you don't use the code for a while you're bound to really lose most of your skills...are you then just getting good at something only to lose the skill a year or two later from disuse?
- Finally, ChatGPT and similar such tools...how much can they enable getting the same output from learning how to code but in a way that's accessible to folks who don't know how to code?
All said, for those in non-quant finance who do not know how to code today it feels like the ROI is getting lower and lower by the day / month / year to dive in moving forward. What are your thoughts synthesizing the above / anything additional you feel (or perhaps you disagree with the above which is cool as well)? Would love to hear all of your thoughts
Hi Sequoia, check out these threads:
More suggestions...
Hope that helps.
Yes, it would be tremendously helpful for any finance professional to learn to code. Coding is not only a skill but also a mindset. Coding helps to train a person's brain to organize data in a linear algebraic way. Many mathematical logics become more clear once you start to code, such as if-then condition, for/while loop, dichotomization, and dot product in linear algebra. In addition, coding probably provokes a person to naturally pursue more knowledge in statistical inference and modeling. In terms of productivity improvement, Python beats Excel by flying colors. Once you set up a Python notebook, you can reuse the same routine by only replacing a few parameters. There are many good resources out there to learn to code for finance professional. I recently came across the new CFA program about data science and coding, and it looks pretty good.
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