Courtesy of Pam Martens.
There is now overwhelming evidence that Wall Street firms have entered a race to the bottom in high-tech trading wars. To grab the best programming talent, Wall Street firms are paying top dollar for the best and brightest coders and developers and potentially sapping the ability of other U.S. industries – those that make real products – to compete.
Just this month, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan, told the firm’s shareholders in his annual letter that JPMorgan employs “nearly 30,000 programmers, application developers and information technology employees who keep our 7,200 applications, 32 data centers, 58,000 servers, 300,000 desk-tops and global network operating smoothly for all our clients.”
According to Anish Bhimani, Chief Information Risk Officer at JPMorgan Chase, in an interview published at the Information Networking Institute (INI) at Carnegie Mellon, JPMorgan has “more software developers than Google, and more technologists than Microsoft…we get to build things at scale that have never been done before.”
Obviously, not all of those tech guys are engaged in creating ever more rapid trading strategies; but to stay competitive with the technology arms race on Wall Street, new algorithms, programs deploying artificial intelligence, and high-speed routing techniques are being created at break-neck speed across the industry.
Industry insiders say that Wall Street is a potent force in campus recruiting, seeking out the computer whiz kids with large pay deals months before their graduation and before non-financial firms have had a chance to even schedule an interview.
An online advertisement at efinancialcareers says that “The market for intelligent and sophisticated programmers within finance is still booming, and not just for those with existing finance experience. The world’s top financial institutions are continuing to search for the most talented technologists from an array of backgrounds…” Salaries are listed at $150,000 to $400,000 for programmers skilled in C, C++, Core Java, Low Latency, Multithreading, FX [Foreign Exchange], Equities, Futures, Perl, Python, TCP/IP, High Frequency, Bank, C#, Operations, Python, Unix, Linux.
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