Yeh, also, im tending to get the feeling quants do just spend a lot of timing programming etc, and not being involved in the market. Plus I have no programming skills whatsoever, so probably not for me.
I’m at an early point in my career and I haven’t learned any programming in college. I’ve come to the conclusion that the two most practical languages are VBA and C++. Please correct me if I’m wrong about that since I am still learning. I’ve made a commitment to get a handle on them before I make any attempt a switch to a quant role.
While I agree that VBA and C++ are quite useful as a solid programming base, I really think strong knowledge in a statistical package such as R and engineering software like Matlab are quite necessary for quant positions. They have many of the basic functions that one would need on a day-to-day basis and have a strong quant community so you don’t have to re-invent the wheel so to speak on basic modeling. But I’m just a 1st year grad student so take that with a grain of salt 
DTD I agree. I should have included those two since I have been working on them quite a bit.