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Contractors who suck
- Thread starter lolatency
- Start date
Quote from satchel:
Don't care if he wrote a boatload in a short time. Hire someone else. You hired him and do not even have 100% of what you need. If I treated a client like that I would deserve to not be called back!
Farm out the last 1/4 and move on with it.
Easier said than done. i've spoken to numerous programmers and none of them thought they could help me.
Its truly amazing the whole trader/quant/programmer dynamic.
I talked to a guy that was a head programmer at a big bank (laid off) and figured he'd be able to do this. The guy hadn't a clue what I was talking about.
He only dealt with quants and they basically kept him in the back room and he had very little trading knowledge outside of buy/sell. I was shocked!
And of course he wants to be a quant and get closer to a trade desk!
There really is something to be said for the whole cyclical nature of the trader/quant/programmer relationship.
IMO, all traders wish they were programmers, all programmers wish they were quants, and all quants wish they were traders!
Quants who can program and trade make beaucoup bucks- they rest are just part of the process.
At the consulting company, there were several reasons that we were successful. One was the high pay, we attracted some incredible talent. Another thing was that our tough boss did not let managers misuse that talent. He made the clients spend weeks in meetings until they had decided exactly what they wanted us to do. Then he got a contract with them that made it very expensive for them to make the slightest change. From that point on it was all "over the wall", our phone number was never allowed to be given to anybody in any manufacturing department anywere in any organization. We delivered five working prototypes and the specs to build the product and that was the end of it... the key thing was that the customers were smart people with a lot of money but in the aggregate they were a committee. Our boss took that committee and made them all give input as to what they wanted and when they all gave their input, it was put in a contract and the time for input was over. Usually we got paid in milestones, they would inspect the work and decide whether to continue or not and either way they paid us for work to date...
I've worked inside corporations on projects, we would get half way done and marketing would demand something new, or the money guys would stop approving our purchase req's.. it was a political nightmare that never ended. I saw two projects go for five years with continual politics and eventually they had to be cancelled. It's the new paradigm of businees, the team approach, from Harvard and other bullshit arts places that are into integrating women into the workplace... it just does not work, the model that works is one guy in charge, an he better be damned intelligent, and up to 25 people doing what he says. He has to be tough enough to get rid of people that don't do what he says and he has to have skills enough to get the customer to decide what they want and to commit to it...
As an individual I've worked for individuals that could not tell me exactly what they wanted. I used to take their ideas, build up a prototype very quickly, take it to them for clarificaton and usually when they saw it they would get more ideas and we would then finish it with all the ideas included. I never spoke with them after the clarification, I just finished the thing asap and delivered it and made modifications difficult to impossible after that, if they could not get it with all my help then f%^k 'em, some I never did any more work for at all. If it turned into a political fight I'd tell my boss that he would have to meet with them on every little project to clarify what they wanted.. that worked out well too...
I've worked inside corporations on projects, we would get half way done and marketing would demand something new, or the money guys would stop approving our purchase req's.. it was a political nightmare that never ended. I saw two projects go for five years with continual politics and eventually they had to be cancelled. It's the new paradigm of businees, the team approach, from Harvard and other bullshit arts places that are into integrating women into the workplace... it just does not work, the model that works is one guy in charge, an he better be damned intelligent, and up to 25 people doing what he says. He has to be tough enough to get rid of people that don't do what he says and he has to have skills enough to get the customer to decide what they want and to commit to it...
As an individual I've worked for individuals that could not tell me exactly what they wanted. I used to take their ideas, build up a prototype very quickly, take it to them for clarificaton and usually when they saw it they would get more ideas and we would then finish it with all the ideas included. I never spoke with them after the clarification, I just finished the thing asap and delivered it and made modifications difficult to impossible after that, if they could not get it with all my help then f%^k 'em, some I never did any more work for at all. If it turned into a political fight I'd tell my boss that he would have to meet with them on every little project to clarify what they wanted.. that worked out well too...
Quote from Trader922:
Lolatency - I agree thats frustrating but at the same time, you pretty much figured out a way to distinguish yourself from the other developers/quants/programmers whatever.
The top guys arent't going to want to deal with the 'programmer speak' of the guy that explains things in an obscure way or in C# or whatever. I previously had a developer that was handed to me that more or less spoke in SQL all the time.
All of the successful IT guys I know can do the technical aspect of the work and explain it in terms the non-technical person can explain.
Its unfortunate, but a lot of times the non-technical people run the show and have to be worked with.
Eric
If it's easy enough to explain, then you lucked out on who you are explaining it to.
Where I work, the guy wanted me to analyze some tick data. To do that analysis would have taken forever to code had I written it in C++ or something, so I opted for python. The man then asks me why I am using python, because he actually cared about the speed of the backtests. I said latency doesn't matter on the backtests, and if it takes too long, I can always just run it on multiple cores. No big deal. 10 seconds vs 2 seconds makes no difference to us. So then the guy accuses me of using a technology I like best without the interests of the business at hand.
To this moron, the language choice alone means performance. Truly incompetent. I don't know who he is talking such that he gets some of these crazy ideas -- probably some friends of his out in Chicago who drop hints here and there.
Then the guy hires this java programmer, tells him to learn C++. Now, we're a Java shop because after I reviewed the guy's code, turns out his C++ is terrible and he never wrote a line of C++ in the past 5 years. So, really, we have dead weight in terms of developers. Had this idiot consulted me for 10 minutes, I would have been able to ask the right questions on who to hire.
I'm giving this place 3-6 months. If they don't get their shit together, I'm going elsewhere. I'm going to start looking now with the hope of finding something in December/January. I have some non-sense in my contract about a three month test period, so I might just call it at 3 months head out the door. I have no patience for idiots.
Quote from lolatency:
If it's easy enough to explain, then you lucked out on who you are explaining it to.
Where I work, the guy wanted me to analyze some tick data. To do that analysis would have taken forever to code had I written it in C++ or something, so I opted for python. The man then asks me why I am using python, because he actually cared about the speed of the backtests. I said latency doesn't matter on the backtests, and if it takes too long, I can always just run it on multiple cores. No big deal. 10 seconds vs 2 seconds makes no difference to us. So then the guy accuses me of using a technology I like best without the interests of the business at hand.
To this moron, the language choice alone means performance. Truly incompetent. I don't know who he is talking such that he gets some of these crazy ideas -- probably some friends of his out in Chicago who drop hints here and there.
Then the guy hires this java programmer, tells him to learn C++. Now, we're a Java shop because after I reviewed the guy's code, turns out his C++ is terrible and he never wrote a line of C++ in the past 5 years. So, really, we have dead weight in terms of developers. Had this idiot consulted me for 10 minutes, I would have been able to ask the right questions on who to hire.
I'm giving this place 3-6 months. If they don't get their shit together, I'm going elsewhere. I'm going to start looking now with the hope of finding something in December/January. I have some non-sense in my contract about a three month test period, so I might just call it at 3 months head out the door. I have no patience for idiots.
I think you just summarized the reasons why I left my last job. haha.
In any event, I still believe the IT guys that work out the best are the ones that bridge the gap between IT & interacting with the business.
Eric
Quote from rosy2:
it really is all tech. aside from providing the capital and setting up accounts the non-tech people i have worked in HF dont do anything ... like a trader who just watches an automated strategy run or a quant handicapped due to lack of programming ability.
there are a few firms that get it like atd several years ago.
Personnally, I find the non-tech people invaluable for dealing with suppliers, regulators, exchanges, filling out paper work and all the other mundane operational stuff that I have no real interest in doing.
lolatency...
From my perspective you're the biggest dim-wit in this discussion...
I can see you're a smart kid but you are narrow minded. Seriously, let's say I hired you and I tell you that all my library is in C#. Then I ask for the same task to be done, to test tick data. If you come in with the same crap as you wrote writing the shit in Python, I'll be pissed off.
Seriously, let's say I ask you again to test the tick data on some other model... are you going to do the same ol' shit in Python? What if I wanted to run a few tests on my own, do you expect me (the boss) to learn Python and use your lib?
Gimme a fuckin' break.
Anyways, I'm critisizing you based on the information you've provided. My opinion can change if there are other details you might have missed mentioning.
From my perspective you're the biggest dim-wit in this discussion...
I can see you're a smart kid but you are narrow minded. Seriously, let's say I hired you and I tell you that all my library is in C#. Then I ask for the same task to be done, to test tick data. If you come in with the same crap as you wrote writing the shit in Python, I'll be pissed off.
Seriously, let's say I ask you again to test the tick data on some other model... are you going to do the same ol' shit in Python? What if I wanted to run a few tests on my own, do you expect me (the boss) to learn Python and use your lib?
Gimme a fuckin' break.
Anyways, I'm critisizing you based on the information you've provided. My opinion can change if there are other details you might have missed mentioning.
Quote from TSGannGalt:
lolatency...
From my perspective you're the biggest dim-wit in this discussion...
I can see you're a smart kid but you are narrow minded. Seriously, let's say I hired you and I tell you that all my library is in C#. Then I ask for the same task to be done, to test tick data. If you come in with the same crap as you wrote writing the shit in Python, I'll be pissed off.
Seriously, let's say I ask you again to test the tick data on some other model... are you going to do the same ol' shit in Python? What if I wanted to run a few tests on my own, do you expect me (the boss) to learn Python and use your lib?
Gimme a fuckin' break.
Anyways, I'm critisizing you based on the information you've provided. My opinion can change if there are other details you might have missed mentioning.
I have seen these tech people that resent even discussing what they are doing and why... he said he went ahead and used python and the discussion seemed to be after that... that's why I presented the plan that worked for the consulting company, lots of discussion before ANY work is begun, complete agreement on who-what-when-how-why-where before ANY work is done, etc...
We had one asshole that couldn't get his test code to work so he went in and changed the library code.. his stuff worked and everybody else's didn't... They wasted days debugging their stuff that worked on Friday and didn't work on Monday... he really didn't understand how that was a problem... it's about brain deficiencies and you have to learn what to look for.. a person can have huge brain deficiencies [most are tied to nutrition] and still get a degree as a tech person or probably anything else really... POTUS likely...