I have no reason to disagree with the PhD point, but I think people are too binary on this question. There are plenty of roles that exist in between using Excel and having a PhD that pay well and are in high demand. Even in fairly simple data situations, programming means you can scale your output to be multiples of a typical person and of course that is very valuable to firms who prioritize that sort of thing. The economy is huge and more and more companies are starting to accumulate large datasets without the skill set necessary to use them.
Comp Sci is right about building vs implementing models. I can use an open source machine learning algorithm and it only takes like 5 lines of code. But to build the model that 5 lines of code uses, I would need significant more education. But a lot of problems don’t need to reinvest reinvent the wheel but the output is still economically meaningful to the employer. At least that’s been my experience so far
Even some investment banks seem to be starting to try to emphasize code in their recruiting efforts. But I do wonder why you want to work in finance as opposed to tech. Tech seems to have the brighter future
I am no expert in finance and the job prospects of it,however my wild guess is people here referring to decline of finance are referring to accounting type gigs being in the decline and not jobs for SWE or other tech types in finance.If anything from my personal anecdote finance companies are hiring CS grads like crazy and people seem to be making the switch from being a swe in a bank to a non finance firm pretty easily.
As for why wanting to intern in a finance related company vs a tech company ,I didn’t have any good firm offers for tech companies despite going to final round of two major tech giants so it’s more like doing an internship over some no name tech company or doing a quasi quant/developer role at a finance company so I took the latter.
I don’t have any concerns about job availability in the technology side of financial firms for the foreseeable future. Banks and similar institutions are trying to cut costs, and this means that they are trying to automate many processes, for which they need programmers. On the downside, it might be hard to get into an interesting product line, as so many of the projects are of the boring process streamlining or compliance related variety.
Regardless of project type though, it would obviously be best to get into a company with the best platform of its type, as other companies might hire or promote you to replicate that platform at their firm. Sometimes, some of these systems even spin off into independent companies.
At least from what I’ve seen, lots of the buyside job postings are asking for programming type skills. There just are not many people who know both, and Finance is much easier to learn than computer science. You won’t get a finance job solely for that CS background, but you will stand out ahead of others who are just excel monkeys that can’t handle data larger than 1 million rows
Yes,one of my friends got hired in a bank writing code to parse resumes and basically do HR related engineering,perhaps the shittiest thing you can do as a white collar tech person.
I partially disagree with that statement regarding finance skills. Conceptually, this stuff might not be difficult. However, it is rare to find developers who understand the business work flow and can design systems that enhance the productivity of users. A majority of finance workers seem to dislike their systems - which technically work, but have many poor design decisions. Almost no developers have actually sat on a finance business desk. So developers who can engage productively with the business are very rare.