Cs minor to s&t

A CS minor/major is not necessary - but it's definitely helpful.

I dunno why everyone on this site thinks S&T is a programming job. It’s not. You will not be programming buddy, your desk strat will or some fucker on your product dev team. Will having some CS background help you? Yes, depending on product VBA background is helpful but it’s not a deal breaker. Focus on GPA. CS classes are notorious for bell curving and fucking your GPA so make sure you are THOROUGHLY researching professors if you’re CS minoring 

Yeah - spend more time learning the underlying products. Learn the jargon. Much of that isn't taught in school. You're not going to analyze companies or build DCF models. but you better know your bids from your offers. 

CS and programming is over rated. there is a small niche that uses both, but most traders won't program and more likely aren't allowed to program.

It just depends what you want to do. If you want to be a credit trader on the sellside, you won’t need to program

even in rates at a bank, you don’t need to program to do the job 

If you ever want to go to a macro hedge fund, it’s practically required these days. If you know cs you will have 5x the opportunities as someone who doesn’t know at least python. Honestly there is no reason at all not to learn CS, it can only help. I’m constantly working with data, back testing my assumptions and developing new strategies. Knowing how to program is invaluable 

A CS minor is fine if you want to signal you are comfortable with programming and algorithmic thinking.  It's not going to substitute for a major, and you'll still be behind someone who knows how to code as far as "quantiness" goes.  In general the skills that matter for trading are (i) ability to learn stuff, (ii) ability to figure out when something seems wrong/off, and (iii) ability to manage emotions and risk.  Doing math/CS doesn't really help you do any of those, although people who are good at those fields tend to be good at the first two.  

I'd say its sort of similar to the tech PM role, where you don't need to be able to code stuff day-to-day, but increasingly, its important to liase with the quants and IT and figure out what sort of things are useful and can be delivered and prioritized in a reasonable time frame.  More and more projects and initiatives are going to do this, so I think it will only be more important going forward.  

Accepted a intern offer at a bb trading with just a finance background lmaoo you should ge good bro

I'd like to add one more thing that I think is important, especially for those of you in school.  Think of the Wayne Gretzsky quote about going where the puck will be, not where it is.  It's still possible to get internships and FT offers without a technical background.  That said, banks are more and more trending towards monetizing their franchise, rather than letting guys punt around risk and getting paid for it.  You can still take views, but most of it is going to be on a relative value basis rather than higher-VaR directional bets.  

If you want to be at a bank for a decent amount of time, it's really important to understand that you don't necessarily get paid on current value - you get paid on expected future value.  Think of your P&L as a sunk cost - the bank can choose to pay you zero and keep your P&L for this year.  If you're a consistent performer and have some systematic way to make money, that's valuable.  If you just punted some risk and got lucky, that's less replicable, and your comp will definitely reflect this.  

So where I'm going with all this is that you don't want to be a 30 year old 3rd year VP who's getting fucked on comp now and going forward because your future outlook isn't in line with where the bank is headed.  I strongly believe that in the next 5-10 years we're going to see a massive transition towards technical skills.  We're already seeing automation in liquid stuff (equities, FX, and now vanilla rates), and this trend is going to continue.  This isn't to say it's going to be doom and gloom like every other thread on this forum, but that the skill set that matters is going to change.  Additionally, the number of traders required is going to shrink and you know who gets cut first when that happens.  If you get your foot in the door now, that's great.  But, I think you will need to be at the very least tech-savvy if you don't want to get RIFed in like 7-8 years.  It's much easier to learn this shit now when you're in school and have the free time and a supportive network than when you're working 60+ hours a week and have things going on in your life.

Very accurate 

The types of roles where CS would be important are the types of roles where a minor isn’t enough. It will help, sure, but it isn’t crucial at all

As a trader at a bank my day was 30% coding. As a trader at a hedge fund it's more like 80%. This is derivatives so lots of analytics, data presentation is involved in figuring out trades but situation would be similar if you're doing say fixed income RV. If you do physical commodities you might be able to get away without much data analysis (not a given though) however with derivatives you'd need the data analysis and analytics skills, hence you need to be able to code. If you do equities unless you want to be fundamental (in which case you should do banking not trading), you need quant skills. If you do credit exotics or credit index trading, you'd need quant skills too. I think even mortgage guys have some funky modelling around prepayments so as a junior they'd probably like you more if you can code. I think only trading job that doesn't benefit much from coding skills and can get you paid is HY bonds. 

That said, there are a lot of "trading" jobs on the floor which don't require much data crunching or intricate modelling. Very hard to get paid in the majority of them though. On the other hand there are a lot of quantitatively difficult trading jobs that won't get you paid either so please don't take the above as advice to get into the most quanty products.