General Discussion

A few are very successful, but it’s sort of still blue collar to be on the floor these days. The people “upstairs” are the brains of the operations. They do a lot of coding (python these days…excel has been phased out for some time by now) or manage those who do while strategizing. There is still a lot of C/C++ for those in the high frequency space where nanoseconds count - they are much more tech than quant though. The ones who can shave “mics” (microseconds) off of execution time are few and far between…the need for H1b in these cases is justified.

Anyone who can be extremely nimble with large matrices in python’s numpy will be in demand. The difference between directly writing loops and using numpy’s broadcasting (or numpy.einsum - my favorite thing!) can be a 1000x or more performance improvement. I can’t emphasize this enough…being wickedly good at numerical linear algebra goes a long way.