Is there a trend of respecting IT personel abit more?
Now I don't mean the poor outsourced folks who you dial *9 on your cisco phones to complain when you spilt some coffee on the keyboard. I mean the guys who wrote your desk's pricing engine, your trading UI, your back office stuff and implement the Quant's strats/algos, altogether with the reminder that some of your friends are rocking it up to the office in shorts and sandals in silicon valley.
This isn't so much the case here in London but I've noticed some of my American friends talking about it. What's your experience?
You mean programmers. I think you answered your own question by calling them IT personnel.
Well thats me personally. Then a bookrunner buddy of mine told me how much the algo desk made and seriously am thinking about job security now...apparently the IT/programmers/whatever you want to call them guys are taking a large chunk of that bonus pot too, moreso than nornal back office anyway.
Does anyone know, btw, how much silicon valley guys make?
I want to slap the shit out of whoever coded my BB's research publishing platform.
Ever since people realized that BBs and quant-focused hedge funds were willing to pay sometimes tens of millions to guys who were writing the code, I think there's been a whole new light cast on the "IT guys" and that's a good thing.
Those aren't IT guys, those are your developers. HUGE difference :(
This must be a new troll account for @"IlliniProgrammer"
That's not IT.
If we're talking IT, I think it just depends on the person. I'm an intern and some of the traders here treat them like crap whilst others are much nicer. I don't see the need to be a dick to them really, doesn't help anyone...
I'll be the first to throw MS and this douche.
not with spelling like that. grammar is excusable on a forum like this, but c'mon man, "personel?"
tons of IT people in my neck of the woods, many silicon valley companies are coming to the southeast because of tax incentives, still good education (GT, UVA, UNC, etc), and lower cost (because lower cost of living). I think people that envy stuff that reddit publishes on the offices/perks of goog, aapl, and amzn just have a "grass is greener" mentality. have a buddy whose fiance works at a silicon valley firm, and the perks are great, but while they say "you can work whenever and wherever you want!" what they mean is "get your shit done, no matter how long it takes."
it's incredibly competitive, tons of long hours/all nighters, minimal contact with the outside world, and so on. to me, it sounds like banking but you can wear a polo shirt jeans and teva sandals. most of the tech guys I've met have been pretty cool, the main thing I've noticed is that they lack in social skills, they don't know how to listen, and they have a high opinion of themselves because they're "inventing" stuff. I think what they do is very cool, but I've noted anecdotally that they brag just as much as bankers when you get them talking.
Sorry was typing on a phone.
I don't know about silicon valley man, no bank on the street has a chef prepare you 3 meals a day, have ball pens and a napping chair. Also hours are long only if a project is behind schedule it seems. The only consolation I have is that we get paid more, but I heard that the programmers are getting $100k+ base straight out of college?
Reading Flash Boys right now, certainly eye opening for me. IllinoisProgrammer - were you an analytics dev at a bank? If so, how come you didn't continue being a dev for the HF desk?
I'm kidding, no one cares about spelling on the interwebz.
we have several silicon valley companies in my part of the country, similar perks, and people rave about the benefits. I can see the allure, sure, 24/7 day care, free food (and beer in some cases), but I think I can spend money better than my office, plus I like to get out of the office every once in a while. work is a place for work, not goofing off. different strokes, I s'pose. I'd prefer higher pay, less in-office perks, etc.
now, I'd be lying if I said I haven't taken a break to play ping pong or cornhole in the vacant suite next door, but that's more of a once a quarter type thing when I'm burned out, not something I look forward to each day. my thinking is I'd rather get in the zone when I'm at work, bang out my shit, then go home and do all of that fun stuff without having to worry about what the market's doing.
moreover, the absolute best benefits program EVER is Patagonia. they will literally let you take surf breaks throughout the day, seriously. the place shuts down when it's overhead glass, I cannot think of a better working environment. come to think of it, I wonder if Brandes and Oaktree have this policy as well...I bet Howard Marks rips.
Just wait until we start rolling out the heavy hardware artillery on machine learning and optimizations. The hardware guys will have their day too. It might just take longer.
I think the bottom line is that it's good to be nice to people. You might end up working for one of them some day.
Developers need to be nice to the BAs. They sort of work for us right now, but the situation was reversed 10 years ago and could reverse again.
Researchers need to be nice to traders. Alpha is expensive and execution is cheap right now but that has been different in the past and could change again.
Everyone needs to be nice to the hardware guys. Especially the developers.
Hopefully the banks have been smart enough to roll back "Run the bank; build the bank" and go back to "YOU built it; YOU broke it; now YOU fix it" like we had 10 years ago and every other sensible business uses. It means less power for the CIO, but the business runs more smoothly and developers get to be developers rather than paperwork bureaucrats who occasionally write code. Same goes for the hardware guys.
If you want to know why IT takes forever to get the simplest stuff done, ask your CIO why the hardware and software people have to spend 80% of their time filling out paperwork. Ask if it makes more sense to decentralize and have IT MDs report more to the business heads than the CIO, as was done ten years ago.
That's my perspective. At least as an analytics developer turned HF QR guy.
There was- there is- no HFT in Corporate Bonds.
Analytics had job stability, equivalent pay risk adjusted, and, for me, more interesting intellectual problems than say equities HFT. We're not trying to figure out if a price is going to tick in less than a second- we're trying to figure out what happens to a portfolio with 500 callable bonds in it when credit spreads increase.
I was always an algorithms rather than execution guy and the problems in analytics, as well as systematic strategies were more interesting and the solutions always needed to be a little more complex. There are a lot of brilliant people in HFT, but shaving off microseconds and figuring out if a price is going to tick does not sound interesting to me. The people there are just as smart and a lot more disciplined, but it's not complicated enough for me to stay focused.
Net Trading Revenue in HFT was $1B last year. Net revenue in analytics (MSCI, Barclays Index/Analytics, Bloomberg, BARRA, Reuters) was probably several times that. And that's just the external stuff- not the stuff done in-house. The money is split by a larger group of people, but the point is that the problems in Analytics can be just as valuable as HFT. It's less sexy and less competitive, but I think it's a perfectly good place for a smart person to work and it creates a lot of economic value. 99% of the time, you make money by helping people- these are often folks at pension funds, ETFs and mutual funds managing your parents' investments.
I pity the fool that thinks they can get away with that in my office.
You've never seen a trader send out horribly misspelled two sentence emails to coworkers and even clients? I honestly think some of them do it deliberately to piss people off.
Also isn't your pronoun "they" incorrect (plural they vs singular "the fool... thinks")? I think the grammatically correct term here is "he or she". If you make a short one sentence post criticizing someone for grammar, it's often good to have your ducks in a row.
Oh well, driving my rusty honda back to my glass house from this grammatical stoning.
You (singular) need to hit the pakalolo and relax.
No Cheech and Chong? :)
Even better: Blazing Saddles and Top Gun.
Excuse my extreme utter ignorance, but what exactly it that you do in analytics? I know the word means analysing patterns of data, but do you do a similar thing as those kids in the FT article where they were taking social media feeds and crunching them to try and find some investment opportunities? I.e. where do you get the data from and what patterns in the data are you looking for? It all actually sounds quite interesting tbh. The turnover figure you just gave me, I am assuming, is for your company's HFT desk and not HFT as a whole?
Analytics means answering a question with a number. A Bond's yield- or interest rate- is one of the simpler examples of an analytic, but I think the most classic examples would be, for college students who've taken the classes, a Bond's duration and an option's delta- how much a security varies with yields or the underlying.
Analytics do a number of things. They tell you the relative valuation of security. For instance, the OAS (the credit and credit volatility spread) of a bond or the volatility measure of an option. (Sorry for repeating equity derivatives and credit examples; that's my background.) If you think the OAS of a bond is higher than where it should be, you should buy the bond. If you think the volatility of an option is lower than where it should be, you should buy the option. Analytics is a process, in some ways, of creating a projection of a very complicated multi-dimensional problem into a single understandable number or a small set of numbers.
In the financial definition of an analytic, these numbers basically tell you two things- whether you should buy or sell, and what kind of risk you're taking on by doing so.
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