Automate everything. Regardless if it saves time or not. Pickup a good scripting language. Ruby or python.

Spend time with business people on “why” they are doing something.

Learn Excel.

After awhile you will be incredibly good at highly useful business process stuff.

I wonder if this stuff pays well though. I recall someone showing me a position at Jane Street (since this thread was discussing HFTs) with at was looking for a VBA developer to develop some sort of integrations between their APIs and Excel sheets I guess someone in the company loved.

My first though was “there’s no way this is paying what you typically see for Jane Street developer salaries”.

Payed crap. It setup me up for success.

Learned more in demand stuff and my pay is top notch.