jmillerinc

Your last sentence: that's exactly what I took to be the point of her post.

Super lame that people upvoted this story. Way off topic for HN.

What would your strategy be to get that 5%?

That's different. The security is: if a programmer implements the code correctly, but the market turns against the strategy and the strategy loses money, the programmer generally won't lose his job.

"Prove the algorithm correct" - gosh, if only that were true.

Of course, but the traders are taking risks in the sense that they can get fired for losing money. Programmers generally won't. They have a lower-risk, more secure job.

I have a feeling this article confused the creators of the trading algorithms, which is what makes the money, with pure programmers, who are hired to implement someone else's pre-existing algorithms.

Sometimes these are the same person, but in those cases that person almost always has a profit sharing contract, not only a base salary. (And if they don't, they're crazy.) The fact that the programmers in the article only had base salaries leads me to believe that they weren't the actual creators of the trading algorithms, so they don't really deserve a slice of the profits anyway, because someone else a) created the profit machine and b) is taking all the risks of running it.

What really happens is that these programmer guys learn the trading secrets after a few years on the job, then depart to a different firm to recreate the machine themselves. There's no oppression or revolts here.

Yes, you're in the db. :)

Gosh, I had to upvote this just for the crustacean research citation alone.

Sure, I'll email it to you.