Programming for Dummies: Dissastisfied, Some Wall Street Technologists Flee for Start-Up Life

[Joy Pathak]

Programming for Dummies: Dissastisfied, Some Wall Street Technologists Flee for Start-Up Life | The New York Observer

"I mean, no one was being held with a gun to their head and forced to work at Morgan Stanley," said Andrew Montalenti. "It was a very good job by any objective measure. But a lot of people did feel like if you just kept working there and pursued the career path that was laid out for engineers, you could blink and all of a sudden 15 years would have passed and you wouldn't have anything to show for it."

 

[Stefan Zota]

Interesting article. It is subjective, of course it cannot be a precise, general analysis of technical working environment on Wall Street.

It contains good points. For instance, he is correct that most software engineering work on Wall Street involves systems integration. He is also correct that innovation is not the most important factor. The business requirements drive everything, innovation is limited to these "constraints".
However there are areas with interesting technical problems. If we are talking about execution speed or large scale optimizations, there is plenty of room to contribute. Maybe even as a quant:

"According to Matthew Rathbone, who spent two years at UBS and is currently in grad school at N.Y.U. for computer science, engineers who want to do anything that involves real thinking must become "quants"—meaning they have to get into "how everything is priced and how certain risk values are calculated." Quants are mathematicians with programming skills who have an interest in financial modeling, Mr. Rathbone explained, and they are distinct from regular developers, whose entry into computer science is motivated by a desire to build software. "If you want to be doing more than just connecting system A to system B, which is what 90 percent of developers do in finance, the way to progress technically is to become a quant and to have a higher competency in the financial markets side of it,""