Current Events > ama: i work on trading systems that handle ~10% of all US trades

(+) Yeah! (+)

both institutional and retail, although nearly all of the retail is fwded from another broker

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Why should I?

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My uncle also does this.

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What is it like working for a financial company as a software developer? Is it a hard job? What's the salary and work life balance

Are your coworkers good people to work with?

Got any skin in the GME?

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2Pacavelli posted...

What is it like working for a financial company as a software developer? Is it a hard job? What's the salary and work life balance

Are your coworkers good people to work with?

i have a role that basically sits between software and "traders" (which really just means sales and algo tweaks here and there) - it's not my title but googling "solutions engineer" is kind of what i do here.

business as usual means 9am-6pm for me. there are certainly a lot of "hell weeks" and for the last 2 weeks i've been doing 7am-9pm without more than like a half hour break and some weekend work as well. this retail boom contributed to some but not all of it.

my job in particular is mostly soft skills. you have lots of different kinds of people who basically need a translator to communicate with each other. sales to tech. external client tech to our sales... our tech to external traders, etc. think a fratbro trying to talk to someone who grew up in the slums of mumbai. this is such a dumb thing yet probably what i'm most useful for.

you have to be able to work under pressure of course - technology outages can be absolutely disastrous. there's been occasions where we've fucked up and took on 30 million of client positions because a server went out for 10 minutes

techwise i use python and our systems run on linux. i am not at all a real developer. the devs are mostly c++, we also do hardware stuff with verilog, FPGA and whatever.

a recent college grad can make like 90-120k base. i've gotten bonuses as big as 30k. you have the opportunity to make 300k or so if you're doing really nextgen stuff but that's not at all par for the course. this is certainly worse than real tech companies, and due to being in the financial industry we're a lot stiffer culture wise. i would never recommend working in this business over like, google unless you're interested in the markets, which i am.

my coworkers are generally pretty nice people, and it's pretty diverse (as far as fintech goes). but there are some exceptionally bad personalities in powerful positions which is maybe my least favorite thing.

Jabodie posted...

Got any skin in the GME?

i have to hold anything i buy for 30 days as i can see non-public dark pool trades. memeing over a month is not something i have the risk tolerance to do.

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