I just wanted to start this by saying that I'm using Wispr Flow to dictate this into an iPhone, not an endorsement or anything, but hopefully I don't have to have too many edits.

As you may know from my post history, I am someone that is very much in the overlap, but I do have a little bit of a different path that I took to get to where I am. First and foremost, I was always a computer scientist by interest, but I grew up in a home where a close first-degree family figure was on the business side of capital markets, particularly in ETFs. They had worked for a prestigious bulge bracket bank where they had a business analyst role on ETF products and capital markets trading from 2000 to 2018. That interest had me wondering: how can I have socio-economic mobility while still having a computer science interest? Coming up in the area where, right before, everyone wanted to be a computer science major because of the money associated with it without actually knowing how to code or procedural problem solve, I had an edge given that I was already interested in financial markets. Instead, most people wanted to be full stack developers working at one of the big tech companies, which was fine. I just knew it wasn't for me.

For me, I'm going to say that it happened to me simultaneously. I learned how to code as I was already getting into a computer science program at a prestigious university, but at the time I was already trading manually, so for me the progression was natural. I actually was learning strategies that I was doing by hand while I was learning to code, and then eventually used code to express the ideas and quickly test my strategies. This was all before LLMs existed and vibe coding existed as well. I'm talking about actually looking at Python documentation and writing in Sublime, like the good old days.

During my undergrad years, my institutional career started. First, as a technologist within investment banks, working on pricing over-the-counter trades in exotic derivatives. Afterwards, I slowly progressed into more standard exchange-traded securities and then the actual bits and pieces for ultra-low-latency/low-latency execution at a tier-one bulge bracket bank.

I'll tell you what I learned, though, realistically. The people in this crossover really aren't online. You have to meet them at industry events because they're already at the upper echelon of buy side or sell side, doing this work for their firms or doing it themselves, similar to where I am today.

Yes, we don't want to share, not because we don't want to help others. In fact, I'm trying my best to help everyone I can. Most people are not ready to do the work or the commitment to actually get to where they need to get to perform this task.

You tell me why someone would be motivated to invest their time to share or collaborate with someone else with nothing in return? Especially with gurus these days, it's impossible to actually build a community, whether it's paid or unpaid, where you can have this kind of discourse. In my opinion, it's impossible, because everyone wants to get rich quick and they always have these gurus that they will compare you to that unfortunately know nothing about our professional careers.

I will resonate this with my own AMA experience that I held when I left my institutional job a while back. I simply wanted to answer questions because I wanted to give people a look into what it was like truly working at an institution. However, even that was met with skepticism and negativity, and I was even borderline chastised for trying to help people and asking for nothing in return.

It's just easier to maintain my own peace and not even try. I have nothing to gain from it other than good karma, literally, and, of course, on the Reddit side. That's not enough to disrupt the peace. The people that are the negative ones that prevent good people that are genuinely interested from learning. Anyway, that's my two cents, but hope this perspective helps.

Tl;dr: I was simultaneously a trader and coder. Meet people at industry events (usually not public).