They're focused on the language. The language isn't the problem. Of the people I've met in finance, there are some really strong and offputting trends: they're uniformly dismissive of work/life balance, they're almost uniformly the worst stereotype of tech-bro, and aside from the rampant cocaine use, they're hugely socially conservative, and every single one values profit over ethics.
It's not the language, it's the extremely toxic culture. Any programmer worth their salt can march into a nasty codebase of whatever language, and make it dance. But financial folk don't want to employ humans with all their complexity, they want robots who will run themselves into the ground for cash. So they get young men who burn out quickly and retire ASAP. The problem isn't the language. The problem isn't the pay. The problem is the extractive culture. Finance folks focus on short term profits to the detriment of their future. And now they're wondering "where can we find programmers" after they've been burning them like so many trees. Go figure.
> Any programmer worth their salt can march into a nasty codebase of whatever language,
Correct, I wonder why people both technical and non-technical focus on this aspect a lot. ( my guess is that they are incompetent themselves).
Agreed, if you want someone for two or three months you probably want someone who knows the language and it's ecosystem pretty well. Any work that is more than six months should be nearly language independent.
> Any work that is more than six months should be nearly language independent.
I'm not sure this is true in finance. Speed matters. A lot. It's called high frequency trading for a reason. These firms will spend a million bucks just to make their fiber optic cables 1 foot shorter.
Just the kind of short-sighted idiocy that keeps good people out of the industry. How long does it take to get that network upgrade installed? It doesn't happen overnight. It takes me a week to get decent at a new language, a month to get good. That's, what, $10-20k on "training" assuming an output of zero in that first month? That's peanuts.
It really makes me wonder. I see so many job ads where specific-language mastery is a top-line requirement. And I know people who know that this is not justified, but keep doing it...
It's not the language, it's the extremely toxic culture. Any programmer worth their salt can march into a nasty codebase of whatever language, and make it dance. But financial folk don't want to employ humans with all their complexity, they want robots who will run themselves into the ground for cash. So they get young men who burn out quickly and retire ASAP. The problem isn't the language. The problem isn't the pay. The problem is the extractive culture. Finance folks focus on short term profits to the detriment of their future. And now they're wondering "where can we find programmers" after they've been burning them like so many trees. Go figure.