Why I Learned to Code Instead of Pursuing a Career in Finance

Growing up, a career in finance seemed like the perfect fit for me. I excelled in math, was fascinated by the stock market, and dreamed of working on Wall Street. So when it came time to choose a college major, I didn‘t hesitate—I would study finance and economics to set myself up for a lucrative and respectable career in investment banking or wealth management.

But a funny thing happened during my time as an undergrad. As I delved into financial theories and case studies, I couldn‘t help but notice that nearly all the firms and industries we examined were being radically reshaped by technology. It started to seem like understanding software, big data, and advanced analytics was becoming just as crucial for business success as accounting and valuation skills.

Software is Eating the Financial World

A few key trends really drove this home for me:

1. The Rise of Algorithmic Trading

Algorithmic trading now accounts for the majority of volume in equity and futures markets. According to a report by Mordor Intelligence, the global algorithmic trading market reached a value of $12.14 billion in 2020, and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.5% from 2021 to 2026.

Quant hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies and Two Sigma use machine learning models to devise entirely automated trading strategies that no human can match. As the chart below shows, quant funds now manage over $1 trillion in assets, up more than 3x since 2010.

Source: BarclayHedge

2. Automation of Wealth Management

Robo-advisors like Wealthfront and Betterment are using software to disrupt traditional wealth management. By automating portfolio management and tax-loss harvesting, they enable personalized, tax-efficient investing at a fraction of the cost of human advisors.

Assets managed by robo-advisors surpassed $1 trillion for the first time in 2020 and are projected to reach $2.4 trillion by 2024. Meanwhile, the number of human financial advisors in the U.S. is expected to decline by over 4% in the coming decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

3. The Blockchain Revolution

Blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies are threatening to upend everything from capital markets to payment systems. The total cryptocurrency market cap now exceeds $2 trillion, up from less than $20 billion just five years ago.

Source: CoinMarketCap

Deloitte has launched a blockchain lab and Goldman Sachs is among the many banks investing heavily in the space. Decentralized finance (DeFi) startups are using smart contracts to automate financial services in innovative new ways. DeFi apps now hold over $60 billion in assets, up from less than $1 billion a year ago.

4. The Primacy of Data

Data has become the new oil, and financial firms are in an arms race to extract insights from the explosion of data generated from markets, transactions, alternative data sets, and their own internal systems.

According to Refinitiv, data science and machine learning jobs in finance now outnumber those for equity traders and investment bankers. JPMorgan Chase employs more software developers than Google and more technologists than Microsoft. Citadel has teams of coders working alongside its traders and quants. Two Sigma‘s data science group would rank among the 10 largest in Silicon Valley.

It became obvious that I needed to learn to code if I wanted to stay relevant. Even traditional finance roles I spoke to, from investment research to private equity, said programming skills were becoming a major asset, if not a requirement. I feared getting pigeonholed in a narrow, outdated skillset while the world moved on.

The Self-Taught Coder Path

At the same time, I was inspired reading stories of people from non-technical backgrounds who had taught themselves to code and broken into software development:

• Preethi Kasireddy, who left a prestigious job at Goldman Sachs and Andreessen Horowitz to attend a coding bootcamp. She‘s now a blockchain engineer and founder of TruStory.

• Haseeb Qureshi, who went from professional poker player to Airbnb software engineer by way of App Academy. He‘s since become a prolific writer and speaker on coding, blockchain, and effective altruism.

• Saron Yitbarek, who learned to code at age 30 after careers in nursing and PR. She later founded the CodeNewbie community and now leads a developer experience team at Microsoft.

I realized I didn‘t need to go back for a 4-year CS degree to make the career switch. An analysis by Stack Overflow found that less than half of working developers have a bachelor‘s in computer science or a related field. Many of the best are self-taught.

So I threw myself into learning with online resources like freeCodeCamp, Codecademy, and Udacity. I read books like Eloquent JavaScript and Cracking the Coding Interview. I went to hackathons and coding workshops. Within 6 months I had built a portfolio of web development projects that landed me a paid internship doing data visualization for a fintech startup. After a few more months of intensive learning and building, I got a job offer as a full-stack developer.

Life as a Fintech Software Developer

It‘s been over two years since I started my first developer job and I haven‘t looked back. I‘m now leading the data infrastructure team at a venture-backed startup building AI to detect financial crime. We‘re mining massive data sets to identify patterns of fraud and money laundering that legacy systems miss. It‘s deeply fulfilling work, knowing that the code I write is helping fight terrorism, human trafficking, and other illicit activities.

Some of the most interesting projects I‘ve worked on include:

• Building machine learning pipelines to process billions of transactions and flag suspicious activity in real-time
• Developing a graph database and network analysis tools to uncover complex webs of money laundering
• Prototyping a blockchain-based identity verification system to cut costs and improve security
• Creating interactive data visualizations to help investigators spot anomalies and drill into key risk indicators

Along the way, I‘ve been amazed by how much software is transforming finance behind the scenes:

• Plaid enables fintechs to access customer bank account data and is now valued at $13.4 billion
• Stripe makes online payment processing seamless and recently raised funding at a $95 billion valuation
• Affirm is reinventing consumer lending at point-of-sale and is now publicly traded at a $15 billion market cap
• Chime built a neobank that‘s signing up hundreds of thousands of new customers per month and valued at $14.5 billion as of last year
• Robinhood pioneered mobile-first stock trading with no commissions and filed for an IPO that could value it at over $30 billion
• Coinbase is building the crypto economy and went public this year at an initial valuation over $85 billion

This fintech revolution is still in its early innings. As Marc Andreessen presciently wrote back in 2011, software is eating the world, and "finance is the next big sector to be eaten." Since then, fintech has attracted over $100B in venture investment.

Learning to code opened the door for me to be part of this wave of innovation. I get to build products that move the needle for customers, work with brilliant colleagues from companies like Google and Facebook, and have a real shot at financial upside from equity. It‘s the steepest learning curve I‘ve ever been on, but I grow more as an engineer every week.

Lessons Learned

To be clear, I have immense respect for finance as a discipline. The mentors and professors who sparked my intellectual curiosity in markets, entrepreneurship, and business fundamentals put me on the path to where I am today. But I‘ve learned that in our digital world, traditional finance and business education is incomplete without also understanding the software and technologies driving the economy forward.

I believe that regardless of role, the most effective leaders and operators of the future will be the ones who can "speak the language of code" and understand how to leverage software to solve problems. Look no further than the CEOs of the world‘s most valuable companies – Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook. Even old-school industrials like GE are pivoting to become "digital industrial" companies.

For those considering taking the leap into coding, here is my advice:

1. Focus on building projects, not just tutorials. There‘s no teacher like necessity. Having to figure things out to make your app work is the best way to learn. Share your creations publicly to stay motivated.

2. Contribute to open source. Some of my most valuable learning experiences came from collaborating with experienced developers on real-world codebases. Start small by fixing bugs and work your way up to new features.

3. Don‘t neglect fundamentals. Take time to understand things like data structures, algorithms, and system design. They‘ll make you a better programmer and pay enormous dividends in coding interviews.

4. Go deep on specific tools and technologies. Aim to achieve mastery and become the go-to expert, rather than just a jack-of-all-trades. Differentiate yourself by developing niche skills.

5. Learn how to learn. The tech landscape is constantly evolving, so get comfortable reading documentation, debugging, and googling error messages. Once you can teach yourself new languages and frameworks, you‘re set for life.

The path isn‘t easy, but it‘s worth it. In an era when every company is becoming a software company, coding is the most high-leverage skill you can acquire. It‘s applicable to virtually any field and enables you to build solutions instead of just analyzing problems.

The Future of Fintech

Looking ahead, I‘m incredibly excited about the convergence of finance and technology. Here are a few areas I believe are ripe for disruption:

• Embedded finance: As Stripe‘s Patrick Collison predicts, soon every company will become a fintech. We‘ll see financial services seamlessly integrated into a wide range of software and apps instead of standalone banking or lending products.

• Blockchain and DeFi: Decentralized technologies have the potential to streamline financial infrastructure, expand inclusion, and enable entirely new economic models. Stablecoins, tokenization of real-world assets, and automated market makers are just the beginning.

• Machine learning: AI will power everything from personalized investing experiences to real-time fraud detection to high-frequency trading strategies. Data availability and computing power are reaching a threshold where ML can drive transformative progress.

• Headless banking: The proliferation of APIs and modular financial infrastructure will fundamentally reshape the banking stack. Financial products will become disaggregated and re-aggregated in a myriad of niche bundles instead of remaining as monolithic offerings.

• Alternative data: As more of our lives move online, there‘s a goldmine of novel data sets waiting to be tapped for investment insights and risk assessment. From satellite imagery to social media streams to cell-phone pings, the impact is just beginning.

Making the most of these opportunities will require a new breed of talent at the intersection of finance and technology. If you can combine domain expertise with the technical chops to engineer new solutions, the 2020s will be a very exciting decade indeed.

Learning to code doesn‘t just provide career optionality. I find immense meaning in building tools that directly solve problems and create value in people‘s lives. In the long run, I‘m excited that the code I write can play a small part in making the world better – whether it‘s expanding financial access, reducing the cost of financial services, or combating financial crime.

If you‘re early in your own journey, my advice is this: don‘t underestimate the power of software and its ability to change industries – even long-established ones like finance. Build your technical literacy, learn how code is shaping the business world, and consider taking the leap into this incredible craft yourself. You won‘t regret betting on such a high-impact skill set in our increasingly digital future.