As a non-quant finance professional, is it worth it to learn how to code in 2023?

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

 
Most Helpful

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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