Emily Lambert of Forbes.com published an article called: High-Frequency Programmers Revolt Over Pay. The gist of the article essentially says that:
programmers toiling away at Wall Street’s secretive high-frequency trading shops–places like Goldman Sachs, Citadel and Getco. They wrote algorithms that take advantage of fleeting trading opportunities and bring in up to $100,000 a day. In return, they received a fraction of the pay doled out to their bosses.
As a developer and infrastructure engineer, I have to say that this thrills me. The IT professionals that work on Wall Street are generally the best of the best. Most of us have 15 + years experience, can code in multiple languages, understand low latency networks, systems performance tuning, capacity planning, storage networks, and market data feeds. We can build kernels and software packages, tweek I/O performance, find memory leeks in code, set CPU affinity to certain processes to sort of “fence them off”. We shave microseconds off of processes. We run thousands of systems, and keep everything running like clock work.
The simple truth is, that just like understanding global financial markets is a skill so is understanding global networks, low latency software development and networks is also a skill. We engineers rely on traders for our salaries, when they make money, we make money; but in a world where making money relies on fast systems and networks, they rely on us just as much as we rely on them. Both of these jobs require lots of skill and years of experience to be good at them.
Somebody has to understand these networks:
and Somebody has to keep hundreds (and in some cases thousands) of racks, just like these up and running around the world
