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Career path: quant dev contractor or tech lead?

 
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I'm at the stage in my career where I have 2 years professional coding experience, and need to decide where I want to end up, but I can't decide and need some input from people with experience.

I absolutely love coding. I love learning about how a new language or library works, even down to the very nuances, and then designing and building something that solves a real problem well. I even enjoy debugging, even if it takes me a whole week to fix a bug.

I'm also fascinated by mathematics, algo-trading and economics.

I really like building stuff in a team, it's great to have some banter every day in the office while also building something awesome together...

So I don't think being on ordinary manager would be for me. I could never just leave this fascination with the technical side of IT projects. I would enjoy managing people but the lack of engineering challenges would kill me.

So I'm looking at being a "tech lead". Is this a halfway-house to the management role described above? I think I would be capable of doing the people management side of things, but the engineering would always be my passion...

On the other hand, I'm thinking of specialising as a C++ contractor, and being the "implementation guy" for some quant team in a bank/hedgefund/HFT firm. However this is quite a niche language, and it's scary becoming a contractor as you're self-employed and building skills that may become completely worthless.

My experience is a maths with economics bachelor's degree, a computing masters, a year in C# server-side development (at an investment bank), a year in Java/Groovy-on-Grails and countless side projects in Angular, Python/Django and C++, to name but a few.

Am I being immature, refusing to take the lead and give up coding, or should I follow my passion and jump into the Quant Dev thing with both feet? Or is there another option I could be missing?

Thanks for your answers, regardless of what they are!
 
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George,
I've been coding for 14 years. Well mostly. Part of my job is to be the ScrumMaster for our team and part is co-tech lead/mentoring. But I don't manage people. There are a few people who moderator here who have been coding for way longer than that.

Depending on where you work, a tech lead position can be good for what you described. In others it is a manager lite position. Even when a tech lead position is coding/mentoring/designing/etc, there's still less coding than when that was your only responsibility. Because you are also responsible for helping and guiding your teammates. You'll also likely attend more meetings. This can be good (see what the business really wants) or bad (you mean I have to go to yet another status meeting.)

"building skills that may become completely worthless" - This quote jumped out at me. We are all building skills that will go obsolete. Just some will take longer than others. That's ok. We still build on our experiences to learn other things. And you'd learn a ton about the quant team's domain. I agree it is scary to specialize.

With only two years of coding experience, whatever you decide in the next few years isn't a path you must tread forever. You could try out the contractor/quant thing for a year and see how you like it. At that point, you'd have a balance of positions and when applying for a job, you aren't specialized yet. And if anyone asks why you are leaving, you have a good reason. "I wanted to try it out and learned I like ... more".
 
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George Wooding wrote:Am I being immature, refusing to take the lead and give up coding, or should I follow my passion and jump into the Quant Dev thing with both feet? Or is there another option I could be missing?


I don't think "immature" is the right word. If so, I was immature for over 30 years...

Management has just never interested me, so I spent my entire career as a jobbing programmer, and was lucky enough to do some really interesting work along with the dross - which you'll never get away from completely unless you're truly blessed. And in that time I managed to pack in some data modelling, DBA and sysadmin work in addition to straight programming...as well as actually physically building systems and storage arrays.

The only thing I'd say is that once you get to 40 or so, companies may be less interested in you unless you have some management experience. I suspect that this is because they worry they can get three eager young juniors who will do what they're told for the same price as you. Mind you, my track record on doing what I'm told isn't great.

If you've got a while before you have to worry about that, my inclination would be to jump in with both feet; but understand that you may be eating tinned food for a while.

Winston
 
George Wooding
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Thanks for both your answers! Well actually I'm 32 already. I was an accountant for a few years but decided I wanted a career change.

I'm not that money orientated. Contractors in finance in London get paid plenty, Winston? I'm inclined to go for it with the C++ quant thing, try and join a team where I'm also getting some domain experience, and revisit the management route when I'm 35 if it's not working for me?

Thanks again
 
Winston Gutkowski
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George Wooding wrote:Contractors in finance in London get paid plenty, Winston?


I wouldn't know. I spent my entire contracting life in the UK (about 6 years) avoiding working in London. Still managed to make enough to buy an apartment in Edinburgh though (or at least put 25% down on one)...

I'm inclined to go for it with the C++ quant thing, try and join a team where I'm also getting some domain experience, and revisit the management route when I'm 35 if it's not working for me?


The only thing I'd add is that a job in the hand is worth two in the bush, so you might use the time while you're looking to build up a rainy day fund for yourself before you take the leap. Remember: job offers are like London buses - you stand around waiting in the rain only to have five come at once.

Time of year is also quite important. It's much more fun waiting around when you can get out on the tennis court or go out for a bike ride if you want.

Winston
 
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…and welcome to the Ranch

I know a few people who have done contracting; you can get paid well and then spend several weeks looking for he next job, so it can cut both ways.
 
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