

Ask HN: How does one get into contracting for financial institutes? - gringofyx

I've been trying to get into some contract developer roles for financial institutes in London. I must've applied to about 10 different roles and haven't heard anything back. My CV/Resume is one of an experienced developer (12yrs) but just don't have any/much finance experience.<p>Yes - I've considered the possibility that I'm shit (I'm fairly certain I'm not). But other than that how does one get into contracting for financial institutes?
======
anothermouse
Experience of finance is required, or you had better be cheap. Experience of a
product or a platform is better, but you can't understand those with out the
financial knowledge . They will teach you both if you go permanent.

Typically, you need a specific skill, and they hire for that. The more exotic
the better. Java? no. C++ on unix? more so. Front Arena or Murex? Easy.

Back office jobs most likely won't give you the financial market/product
exposure, but closer you get to front office the less coding happens (and you
won't get close without experience.)

My "in" to the industry was having perl as well as their other requirements,
which made me unique amongst the other applicants (perm role). I gradually
transitioned to being a c++ guy as that paid more and I was optimizing for
cash.

How to get there from where you are? We'd need to know "where you are". as
cjbenedikt says, what do you do, know etc?

------
gringofyx
My experience is quite varied but I'd say mainly anything MS stack oriented,
with some Java and C++. I've also got quite a lot.of web and mobile, which I
appreciate isn't 100% applicable to the financial sector.

Perhaps more relevant is my hobbyist experience building poker bots, so I know
about some complex Maths, AI and game theory but I don't have a degree so I
know that a potential employer may not appreciate my skill set in those areas.

I would be willing to go cheap for maybe a year until I've got a better
history in the financial sector. How cheap is cheap?

~~~
cjbenedikt
where are you based?

~~~
gringofyx
But I could work from anywhere Uk or Europe based

~~~
cjbenedikt
how can I get in touch - London is pretty good - am temporarily based in
Frankfurt

~~~
gringofyx
Sure thing mate, my email address is mc underscore gringo at hotmail dot com

------
zpk
Financial industry as a whole is under a lot of stress right now. The jobs
opps out there are shrinking...Banks talk about going lean, AKA layoffs. If
you can't get into an investment bank, go for a tertiary opportunity. Try
retail or some insurance company for a year or two.

You need Java or C++. Web/SOA/ and for some reason they all want
multithreading experience, even though 80% of the work is server side.
Familiarize yourself with the Java Concurrency package.

~~~
gringofyx
Web & SOA are a given, design patterns and high performance concurrency are
all a given and there's strong signs of that all over my CV. Also, I've worked
at Insurance companies before, I thought all of that might be enough to get my
foot in the door.

------
cjbenedikt
what exactly would you like to do? work as a freelance developer? what
languages do you code in?

