[Phil Van Sexton]

What do you do?
Software Engineer at hedge fund.

Do you like it?
yes


What makes you in particular well-suited or poorly-suited for your work?

I taught myself to program at about 11 or 12, so the coding part is very easy for me. I ended up getting an Information Systems degree from a business school where I picked up a base of business knowledge that has been very valuable.


What kind of people do best in your work?


The most successful people in my field are not the best programmers. They are the very good programmers who also have good interpersonal skills, and industry knowledge (like finance or biotech).


What qualifications are necessary for people considering work in the same field
as you?

You have to be able to code to even get in the door. Most people have a computer science degree, but that's not even necessary if you can manage to teach yourself.

If you are great at math, you can probably do it. (There's no real math involved in my job, but it's a good indicator.) The vast majority of people wouldn't be able to code with 100 years of school, so that keeps the good programmers in demand.


What is a typical day like?

The first thing I do in the morning is check to see if any of my applications are having problems. Since we are a small company, I support my own programs. We have a lot of market data that comes in overnight, so most problems happen then.

At 8:30, we have a 1/2 hour staff meeting. This is an attempt to get us to communicate. This is no small achievement with IT people. Without this, you'll have everyone duplicating work, or assuming someone else is working on a problem when they are thinking the same thing and no one does anything. Of course, this happens anyway.

At 9, I can finally start working on my stuff. I work directly with the traders and their analysts. My boss in IT basically just assigns us to a particular area or trader. After that, I meet with the analysts to do whatever the trader wants the application to do today. This is a great deal. No red tape or stupid meetings. They tell me what they want, and I do it.


What kind of problems do you encounter? What are the biggest (most common)
sources of frustration and elation?

My programs are based on services and data that were created by other programmers. If any of these get screwed up, then my application will be screwed up. Of course, the users don't care about this. They just see that my program is broken. The other programmers don't work for me, so getting them to fix things is sometimes difficult.

The satisfaction comes from writing good applications and seeing them being used. It's nice to walk through the trading desk and see people making 8 figures a year running 1 of my applications.


How much do you make? How much can one expect to make in your position?
6 figures + bonus (which is based on fund performance and could be 6 figures too)

After 12 years on the job, I'd assume most people make 80k+. It varies a lot by location (I'm in Boston). You can probably still pull down 250k if you get the right consulting gig (I was independent consultant for a couple years before taking this job).