Programming Skills for Finance Career

[schnoodleC]

I say the following as someone with 10 years of experience in "high end" software development working on "name brand" enterprise software that are often deployed as part of financial systems. Warning, this was written quickly on a break without spell or grammar checking. Still, I hope it will help.

Asking what skills you need for a programming/technical finance job is too broad. You are talking about an extrordinary array of systems and job descriptions. These include:

Working on trading systems where very top tier C++ skills and knowledge of messaging technology such as FIX or TIBCO is required.

Hedge fund/analytical programming requires good programming skills and often datamining or mathematical progrramming expertise along with some finance savey.

High end web development for large scale consumer applications. Mostly JAVA these days, still what I would call high end as these are the people who develop the very secure and high performance web applications that we all use when we bank, trade, check accounts etc online.

Then there are the jobs that I would characterize as lower lever IT development jobs that really aren't too different from the jobs outside of financial services. Here I'm talking about people supporting internal systems, databases etc.