Calypso developer

Question

I am looking for IT jobs these days and I see all the time, jobs asking for Calypso.

What is Calypso? Why it is so popular? Is it worth learning about Calypso development?

Answer 1

It's a trading and risk system for merchant banks. My old flatmate contracts in it.

It's not that popular, it's actually a very niche market, there's just greater demand for it than there are skills so you get a lot of adverts as they struggle to fill the roles they have.

In terms of is it worth it, financially yes, but it's the sort of thing that I think you'd struggle to learn on your own. Just getting hold of the software and getting it installed and configured would be pretty difficult (it may be on warez sites but it's not going to be common), plus you'd need the background in trading to understand what you're even trying to do, and that's before you learn the product, the API and so on. On top of that it's the sort of thing they're likely to want actual commercial experience in rather than just a bit of knowledge.

The best bet would be to get a Java job with a merchant bank and work your way into it. Because of the shortage (and expense) of skills in the area, they're often happy to train people up as it's more cost effective for them. You'll likely have to spend time doing support at first but you'd get there in the end.

Might also be worth noting that work wise you'd be limited to major financial centres (London in the UK, maybe a little in Edinburgh but unlikely) and working for merchant banks (with all that entails - long hours, politics and all) but it pays very very well.

Answer 2

"it's the sort of thing that I think you'd struggle to learn on your own. Just getting hold of the software and getting it installed and configured would be pretty difficult (it may be on warez sites but it's not going to be common), plus you'd need the background in trading to understand what you're even trying to do, and that's before you learn the product, the API and so on".

I accept that I "would struggle" to learn Calypso, in the sense that the amount of effort required to master a computer language or system can often be comparable to the effort of mastering a foreign language.

I would suggest that getting and installing the software may be easy.

"You need the background in trading to understand what you're even trying to do". A system such as Calypos presumably provides the equivalent of years of trading experience. "That's before you learn the product, the API and so on".

You could have a good knowledge as a user, and almost no knowledge as a developer.

A developer could have good knowledge as a developer, and almost no knowledege as a user.

This is discordant because user knowledge could be an overview briefing for a person learning about Calypso as a developer.

We are saying therefore that a developer has a more refined view that a user does. But we couldn't we equally say that a user has a more refined view than a developer has. This would imply that developer knowledge could be an overview briefing for a persons learning about Calypos as a user.

In my "society" it seemed obvious that a developer has a much more advanced view of the system than a user does. Today I think, this may be so, but has it been programmed this way?. If developers and users both had interfaces based on computer grams, what could be the criteria for saying that a developer had more advanced knowledge than a user. Perhaps we would say that the developer is playing a more complex game. Perhaps we can refute this by showing that somne canonical simple game can be used to model arbitrary games, and we show that the intelligence of the average person from some population will suffice for a person to be able to make their own "user changes" to the system. This requires that current user interfaces be greatly enchanced - almost certainly we will need to give the user the apacity to make VR games about the workplaces of developera and users.

THis means that we will want to user natural language as a natural way for the user to request user changes to the system.

IT will be interesting to look at Calypso and see what it does and has.