Coding/Programming skills

Just curious about how many of you know how to code or have an interest in coding. I’ve began to notice that more and more finance guys are making the shift into tech, especially after they acquire some good capital from working in finance. An example of this is the founders of Ampush Media who used to be investment bankers and eventually shifted to tech because they wanted to build a company. They had to learn everything from scratch because they were total noobs and only had experience in finance.

Obviously they hired engineers for the technical aspect and mainly focused on the business development side.

But I guess I am trying to find out if it’s worth gaining deep programming knowledge or just focus on finance/business development and hire others to handle the technical side. Would a basic understanding of coding prevent you from being overcharged by programmers/engineers for their services?

Would you recommend learning code simultaneously with finance, or would it be best to completely focus on finance now and then learn code later after I’ve acquired a good amount of capital, have more time, etc?

Basic programming knowledge is useful, but there is a big gap between casual learners and real CS people with years of experience. So, if you go out on your own, you will probably still need to hire engineers.

However, basic programming knowledge is useful in many finance positions. You will be able to automate work and maybe solve complex math problems. Depends on what you do.

I see. I figured it is best to focus on what you are good at, especially since there are people out there that have been programming since they were in diapers. The problem is that I’m really competitive and hate not knowing something lol. Everytime I look at Google’s stock price, I have a craving to learn programming.

Programming is generally about using computers to solve problems, so it’s nice to have the coding skills to solve the types of computational or informational problems you will encounter in your work, particularly if there isn’t off-the-shelf software that does the same at a reasonable price. So how much you should learn depends in part on the types of problems you are likely to be solving.

If the type of problem you solve is “How do we produce an application that others will buy,” or "How do we get the answer 21 microseconds faster, so you can place your trade before the competition, then you need much deeper knowledge.

If you just want to optimize some portfolio before the close of the month or day or plot a pretty chart, that generally requires less.

If you have to make code that is robust to user errors, and there will be large numbers of users, having experience in how users are likely to use your code is very helpful (because the way a developer uses their code may be very different from the way the end user does it, and so you need to have a good sense of what different user types want to do).

I used to know one of the Ampush Media guys…didn’t realize they were famous now.

To answer your question, it’s best to hire a developer to build things for you. Unless you’re gifted at this. Remember the Winklevii and Narendra hired Mark Zuckerberg to build their social network, they didn’t try to build it themselves. Wait…

I recommend not learning finance or ‘coding’, but rather concentrate in math/computer science.

Undergrad in finance is really uselss

^ Telling it like it is.

my recent horrors have been confirmed.

I must use MatLab and coding commands to do analysis of data sets from fMRIs … I have avoided coding all my life … until now … the commands don’t look that difficult but I dont like it … maybe I will learn to like it … or just get used to it

Learning some basic programming will actually make you a better user of off-the-shelf products too. At the end of the day, it is really about solving problems. And programming skills, thinking through the problem, will make your outputs, reports and recommendations that much more powerful and credible.

how did this happen? did AF travel back in time???

Palantir Mar 26th, 2016 10:08pm

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Yea, how is Palantir’s post time stamped several years after the replies?

^i figured it out. if you edit your post the time stamp also updates the time stamp

now the question is why did P update a post from 3 years ago?

he finally got the flux capacitor to work!!!