How and Why Wall Street Programmers Earn Top Salaries

msmoriarty writes "Given the level of interest in the recent highest-paid programmers discussion, our reporter decided to do a follow-up looking into the languages and skills needed to work on high-frequency trading systems. There's actually a pretty wide range of languages/tools used, but Linux is the 'default' OS and, not surprisingly, the 'ability to work under pressure when the traders are screaming at you' is a must-have skill."

Comments

Re:Perversion of Capitalism

[zippthorne]

Look, superman III had a lot of lessons to teach. It's really too bad on villains watched it...

Re:Perversion of Capitalism

[russotto]

I call BS. You don't need much skill or talent in writing code that effectively does this in the end:

account.balance *= 10.0;

The challenge isn't making the code do that. The challenge is making it look like the code is intended to do something entirely different, and that part is merely an unavoidable side effect.

you know who else posted bullshit analogies

[decora]

on internet forums?

that's right. Adolph Hitler.

He wrote hundreds of pages 'exposing' the 'truth' behind 'power'.

It was called 'the protocols of the elders of zion'. of course, the whole thing was bullshit. made up by some anonymous author, possibly the Russian Tsar's secret police, to support yet another pogrom.

But Hitler took this and ran with it. Over and over this document, and many others, including his book Mein Kampf, were given out by the tens of thousands. People were happy to 'forward' these 'revelations' to others, often tweaking details here and there, or changing the attribution of the author(s).

And what happened in the end? Trillions of children were killed. I'm a student of history too. I have over 5 billion books published. On the internet. You can look it up.

Re:I am an HFT programmer

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, it must be very stressful working 12 hours a day, 8.3 days a week...