"People who can code in the world of technology companies are a dime a dozen and get no respect"
Generally in business, those people whose job title is 'programmer' or 'developer' or 'software engineer' get relatively little respect even with lots of experience. (I am 37 years old and programming since 12) Previously I thought the only way out of this is to become a 'manager', which I never really wanted to do... Recently I have discovered 'quantitative finance' which is a quite respected and interesting geek profession (with lots of math, which i like), and I am planning to transition into that in the long term. (Theoretically a relatively smooth transition is possible because there are 'quant developer' jobs out there.)
I'm also 37, and have been programming a similar amount of time (15 of those years professionally). I've worked in 2 person, 10 person, 20 person, 30 person, 50 person, 300 person, and 5000 person organizations.
What I've discovered is this: In larger organizations, you get respect by being the "answer" guy. If everyone's coming to you for advice, you become more important.
In small organizations, you get respect for being the hero, who waves his magic wand and fixes things after everything goes to shit. This is easy to do since most of the operations are pretty basic and cowboy to begin with.
The biggest key to respect (in mid-to-large organizations) is playing the political game. The more your name is on peoples' lips, the more important you'll appear to be.
But the question is: WHY do you want it? If it's for the money, you can get much more money with less effort freelancing or consulting. If it's for security, you could also get that by digging yourself so deeply into an essential project that nobody can get you out. If it's for the admiration of your peers, just remember that it also sparks envy, and separates you from them emotionally. If you wish to belong, you're far better off choosing a faction to ally yourself with, and remaining loyal. Elevation is a loner's game.
> Wish to belong
This is a fairly hard thing for me to do, because every faction i have been part of or tried to be loyal, to have limits on what beliefs can be questioned and what are not open to be experimented with. There comes a point where i disagree and have trouble stopping myself from experimenting. So loneliness is not a problem for me. But i have a very limited/narrow interest in being important. To some extent the admiration of peers feels good, but not much.
So at this point, i find myself a little lost as to what do i want to move forward towards. Made worse, by i have trouble just enjoying when am not sure what am working towards.
UPDATE: Eeks,sorry if it's turned to a ramble.
It sounds like you're comfortable as a loner then. That gives you immense possibility, but also makes it harder to choose.
My advice: Just pick something interesting and go with it. If it doesn't work out, pick something else. Fear of failure is worst in people who haven't failed yet, and that fear will impede you far more than actual failure ever could (I've had a few spectacular failures in my lifetime, to the point of being reduced to the clothes on my back, and each failure made me more fearless).
You don't need the respect of others when you're making your own path.
>"Theoretically a relatively smooth transition is possible because there are 'quant developer' jobs out there."
Quant-Developer is a weighted sum of q% quant and d% developer. Ideally you'd like q to be high and d to be small. What happens in practice is that many companies will hire a quant developer, throw 90% of d at you and keep you enticed with some 10% q. This is rather sad, but I have seen this happen to more than half of the graduating class of 2011. Perhaps 5% of my classmates are doing 100% q. Another 20%, including myself, are remarkably lucky to be doing 80%q , 20%d. But the rest of my classmates are stuck with 80%d 20%q, and even the q is watered down cookbook solutions. And this is the case with University of Chicago graduates, so you can imagine what goes on with grads of non-top-10 quant schools. There are companies in the chicago area (morningstar, for eg., and even much of cme) which advertise for quant developers but give you 99%d, 1%q ! What they really want is an sql guy who maintains the securities database and writes stored procedures, but they will go ahead and call you "quant developer" anyways. Its a rather shady practice imo. Sadly, the worst offenders are startups in finance. I spoke to one who asked me a ton of interesting quanty questions straight out of Mark Joshi...but when it came to the actual job I'd be doing, the CTO says (actual quote) "you don't need anything more than mean and variance, we are all generalists here". Then why do you want a guy with a math masters and a cs masters and a quant masters...just hire a high school student.
Your best bet is to stick with IBs & large banks. They have tons of really interesting ( and really hard ) math problems to work on, they aren't going away anytime soon,and they will pick up the tab for your math phd costs ( or lightweight garbage like series 7 and cfa, if pde ain't your thing).
I agree with you about IBs and large banks. We had some really interesting stuff going on to the extent we were leaders in our field. I wouldn't call CFA lightweight though, I found it hard. It was mainly memorisation of boring, boring, boring stuff. Little motivation == hard.
Things you should know depending on what you're doing:
Math/Finance
- statistics, know stats inside and out.
- differential calc and finite difference methods
- Black Scholes,
Programming
- the R langugage
- vba, if you don't know R really well then vba can be useful for modelling. VBA is approachable enough that every trader uses it and when they move shops they take their vba models with them.
- C++ or C, it's still used very widely and often is the language that interviews are conducted on.
- TCP/IP performance.
- linux kernel tweeks for performance.
Programming in a commercial sense really means solving other people's problems under a set of constraints over which you have little or no control. I always get a little annoyed when people say, in an interview, that they have 10 years experience, because they started at 12. That's great and I encourage it, but it's not transferable to a commercial setting any more than playing Chess for 10 years is. In fact I would take the Chess player give the choice.
In my experience it's the programmers who can ONLY program that get little respect. The ones that can also understand other problem domains (business/people/processes) tend to get respect no matter what their job title, even in technology companies. So Zed is right - programming is most powerful as a tool to be applied to more interesting problems.
a) Is "respect" really so important to you that you are willing to sacrifice a 25 year career? Surely if the pay is good and you enjoy that's all that matters.
b) By switching professions to a more "respected/cool" one do you not think you're just contributing to the problem of programmers not being taken seriously?
By using "cool", I get the impression that you're thinking more about respect from people outside work, rather than those you are working with. I think the article was talking about respect from the people you work with and work under, in the sense that if you are not respected, then you likely won't get paid what you are worth. From the point of view, point (a) is a contradiction - if you are not respected by the company you work for, the pay won't be good.
Whatever people say about "lawyers", people tend to have a lot of respect for their lawyers. It's lawyers as an aggregate that people tend to stereotype.
Part of the respect is a better pay, which is important to me as I have small children to care about. But the main reason is that so far I enjoy learning quantitative finance.
" contributing to the problem of programmers not being taken seriously"
I don't know. Maybe switching professions is an extreme thing, but gaining some knowledge in a specific domain (other than programming) is a good advice to every programmer.
Being respected in that sense is extremely important. First of all, people need to pay the bills, which you can't do if your work is viewed as a commodity and you're therefore in wage competition with 22-year-olds and outsourcing shops. Second and more importantly, for the types of people who learn programming to enjoy their jobs requires a certain amount of autonomy that isn't usually granted to non-managerial workers.
"Respect" is a social construct that relies highly on social interaction. Since programming is a lonely activity it's hard to earn respect beyond peers. Not that one should really care about that much. I have found that i earned more respect when i started introducing myself as "entrepreneur" than i got when i was "programmer", even though i actually work less in general now.
As for working in other fields, from my experience in a biology lab, yes, you may earn "God-like" status sometimes, that is, become the last resort for everyone, but truth-be-told, sometimes you find yourself doing boilerplate work by just implementing some algorithm and nothing too exciting.
That is sadly true. I've been developing software for the past 6 years and have helped organizing several developer oriented events.
Now I have worked in entrepreneurship for 8 months and am currently organizing the first entrepreneurial event(Startup Weekend).
Yesterday i received an official invitation from the city council to a banquet for entrepreneurs in our city...
In some fields, given a CIO title is akin to being demoted. Nobody wants to be the head of the IT operations because the money is somewhere else (sales and marketing).
Some people argue that IT provides efficiency and in some cases increase revenues as well. The hard cold truth is this:
1) It's hard to measure $$$ from IT projects
2) It becomes internal politics: it shifts the balance and nobody wants IT to have more power.
Am also planning to switch to quantitative finance, though am just figuring out a sense of balance between work + learn/play time. I would call myself to be in the "early adulthood" phase and am figuring out my first love is math.
