Waters magazine - Trading Wizards

Waters magazine - Trading Wizards: "A trader on the proprietary desk of Société Générale says banks may be less willing to experiment with IT programmers because the algorithmic trading strategies they execute may take more time to become profitable. He says IT programmers recruited on the bank's prop desk from its IT department struggled to generate profitable returns quickly. 'When you take into consideration the price of a trading seat—which consists of the fees the bank pays for trading and the overall running costs of operating the trading department—it is quite expensive to employ a programmer who may take a couple of years to be profitable. It is not only quantitative models that make money,' he says."