It’s not scary when it’s done properly. And done properly can look like an incredibly tedious job. I think it’s for a certain kind of person who loves the process and the tests and the simulators and the redundancy. Where only 1% of the engineering is the code that flies the plane.

It’s fine to have that kind of responsibility, but it has to actually be your responsibility. Which means you have to be empowered to say “no, we aren’t shipping this until XYZ is fixed” even if XYZ will take another two years to build and the boss wants to ship tomorrow.

Yep. Until the capacity to say unoverridably "No" materializes, there's a lot of code I refuse to have responsibility for delegated to me.

As a profit non-taker, which responsibility a worker can even have? Realistically it lies in range of their monthly paycheck and pending bonuses and in a moral obligation to operate a failing system until it lands somewhere. Everything above it is a systemic risk for a profit taker which if left unaddressed is absolutely on them. There’s no way you can take responsibility for $400M unless you have that money.

> It's like writing code that flies a jumbo jet.

and upgrading it from a coach seat

I'm so glad I'm not wasting my life working in finance.

I've worked in various small to medium IT companies, a FAANG and another fortune 500 tech company. 6 months ago I moved to a proprietary trading company/market maker and it's the most interesting and satisfying place I've worked so far.

I hope to continue to "waste my life" for many years to come.

May I ask which one, and what your process was that led you to them?

I'm sure all your jobs have contributed to the well being of humanity.

Most jobs do in fact contribute to the well being of humanity, however little. It's few jobs, like most in financial trading, that actively reduce the well being of humanity.

Never will you meet a more self-deluded and pathetic set of humans. Desperate money addicts that often become other kinds of addicts. Whole thing should be abolished.

Source: I worked in finance when I was young and dumb.

I, for one, am so glad to “own” the “compose” button at a democracy destabilizing adtech-conglomerate

> Most jobs do in fact contribute to the well being of humanity, however little.

No, they don't. A lot of jobs hold os back, actually. Salespeople selling things people don't wanna buy, finance and tech bros vampirizing third world countries without the safeguards that western countries have on their capital markets, etc.

Hey, can you please review the site guidelines and stick to them when posting here? We have to ban accounts that won't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yes.

I expect that the comment above describing jobs in finance as a "waste of life", with no other content is also unacceptable.

It sounds like it! but I didn't see that one.

Out of curiosity - in what domain do you work ?

I find the work in finance / tech very interesting. Societally useful ? Almost certainly not. But probably still more than most good-paying tech jobs.

I work in finance/tech, but my code doesn't execute million-dollar trades automatically. Cash transactions are reviewed by a human, and its mostly data analysis type work.

It's one thing to make recommendations or calculations and give the report to a human. It's another to start trading high volume in real time automatically.

Actually it's one of the few truly intellectually-pure endeavors. Everything else is the same pursuit with extra steps:

Make a trading strategy to make money

vs

Make a cutting edge machine learning classifier to back out latent meaning in search queries to produce better search results to drive more traffic to google to sell ads to make money

You're not wrong, but the problem is those steps are also the steps that produce food, or improve health, or solve climate change or solve any of the innumerable problems we face as a society. As you identify, there are plenty of pursuits other than finance that are not particularly socially useful - it's not a very exclusive club.

It feels anxiety inducing at first, but if you have good controls and monitoring in place, it becomes daily routine. You basically address the points you naturally have and the more reasonably anxious you are, the better for the business. From my experience with finance, I’d wager that problem at Knight was 10% tech issues, 90% CTO-ish person feeling ballsy. In general, not exactly that day or week.

I don't know if it's like this at every company, but typically there are plenty of humans keeping a close eye on what's going on whenever the software is placing orders on an exchange.

I suspect we can thank this incident in part.

Things are somewhat different now than 5, 10, 20 years ago.

There has been a wave of "individual accountability regimes" released by pretty much every regulator.

I have worked with the SFC the most, so that's what I will describe here, but all these regulations are pretty much copy/paste of each other anyway.

I was MIC under the SFC (HK) for various operational and financial resps for approx 8 years responsible for close to $3B exposure across equities, IRS & FX, and am now licensed with the FCA (UK) since approx 1 year.

Basically, on top of the usual regulatory framework defining a top level Operating Officer (MOO) and subordinate Responsible Officers (RO), the new individual accountability regime creates the notion of Managers In Charge (MIC).

The MICs fill the gap that, increasingly, a considerable amount of operational responsibility lie in the hands of non licensed individuals (i. e. tech people).

The SFC defines a number of responsabilites (e.g. DRP/BCP, kill switches, backups, fail overs, rollbacks, load testing, etc) and these responsibilites need to be allocated to one or more of the allocated MIC.

The SFC has a right to reject an appointment of MIC if the individual is not seen as fit and proper (that is assessed generally on an annual basis by a compliance officer, but can be re-assessed on the spot if you end up displaying unfit traits). The SFC also mandates a track record of experience and expertise on the assigned responsibilities, as well as a direct capability by the MIC to have control on his responsibilities. In clear terms, that means you need to have the actual power of saying "no", you need to have the power to hire someone if that is necessary for the safety of the operations, etc.

Once you get appointed as MIC, most of your responsibilities are based on _means_, not _end results_:

If Karen breaks production, that's not much of your problem (regulatorily speaking) as long as you can demonstrate that you had Karen attend 6h of training this year on how not to break production.

In terms of actual developer experience, the _means_ often take the form of trainings, code review, pre prod impact assessment, incident reporting procedures, etc.

So on one hand you have a very heavy personal and professional responsibility. But on the other end you are at fault only if you did not setup a proper framework for things to work.

In terms of the professional responsibility, there is not much to do if you are deemed guilty. You will most likely be temporarily or permanently barred from having a licensed position. Nobody will hire you anyway.

For the personal responsibility, it is usually limited to single digit millions, and most big asset managers have an insurance to protect you (otherwise noone would accept the role).

If you are interested in the actual additional responsibilities that were added after KC, then I suggest you have a look at MiFID II (the European régulation, well written and understandable), especially segment RTS 6 "Technical standards specifying the organisational requirements of investment firms engaged in algorithmic trading":

https://ec.europa.eu/finance/securities/docs/isd/mifid/rts/1...