|
I have an interview coming up for a company operating in the financial markets. Other than generic skills like OOD, refactoring, testing and so on, what are the core areas that a financial software developer specifically needs? I can think of some obvious ones like rounding modes, differences between floating point data types etc. What other areas should I be brushing up on? |
|||||||||||||||||
|
|
Security. Both of the database and the communications between the client and the server. This covers encryption of the data as it flows around the system and verification & validation of the users. |
|||
|
|
|
Professional Attitude Understand how the business generates money and how you (will) contribute to that. On the scale of "1 - sticking plaster over the problems" to "10 - (re-)write it from scratch", be aware that you need to be comfortable operating at the low end. Understand that Project X needs to be delivered to paying customer Y by date Z. If you've got to work evenings/weekends, hire contractors or cut features to ensure delivery that yields payment, you'll have to do it (or at least convince them you would). Handling Financial Information As others have noted, "Security" (authorization / authentication) around what users can or can't see/gain access to, Compliance with legislation (no naked short selling, etc), Accuracy with calculations (understanding limits of numerical representation) and being able to explain your workings to anyone who asks. Working with Scale Financial institutions usually run a 24x7 operation on a global basis. There will be load-balancing, redundancy, caching, logging/monitoring, SLAs and likely an army of sysadmins and DBAs keeping things running. If you're happy to deploy fresh code worldwide in one step with no back-out plan, best to keep your resume up to date as that is a recipe for disaster. Motivated Some of the systems you'll work on will be rather dull compared to e.g. iOS apps. You need to be motivated to succeed with relatively small projects and deliver them successfully before you'll be allowed onto bigger things. The monetary rewards will surely motivate you at bonus time, but you need to keep this momentum throughout the year. |
|||
|
|
|
That depends on what you're going to be doing in finance. If you're going to be doing quant stuff, a good grounding in math and some knowledge of econometrics will be very helpful. If you're doing the routine stuff, knowing how to write correct software for fairly simple requirements, and how to do calculations exactly as the accounting conventions say, will be useful. |
|||
|
|
