hedge funds, wall street, finance

How do you get into the hedge fund, wall street trade floor world as a Software Engineer?

I've been in IT as a software engineer, web developer, mainframe programmer, c++ and java programmer for over 10 years. But I've never worked in the finance industry. How do you get started working on the trade floor or on wall street or some big hedge fund company? It's where I'd like my career to go toward next.

thanks.
[ June 09, 2007: Message edited by: stephen gates ]

This forum is for posting your resume, and saying "I am available for hire". I think your question would belong better in "Jobs Discussion".

Cold call someone on the telephone and ask for an interview. Mail them a resume also.

As far as what the phone number is, and the address to mail the resume to....

Stephen,

Did you recently move into the Wall Street area? Based on the ratio of IT jobs of finance vs non-finance companies in the wall street area (actually all of the northeast area), it is quite common to know many former colleagues working for a financial corp.

If your 10 plus years have been in New York, and you did a good job at professional networking, you could probably just pick up a phone and get an interview.

If not, "cold calling" is still a good option. All of the big wall street firm have job postings on their official websites. It won't be as good as calling an old beer buddy who is now a managing director, but...

Henry

I have got many recruiter emails for financial institutions in NY, NJ area. Unfortunately, I don't have a desire to relocate there.

The only thing I did was put my resume on Monster.com, careerbuilder.com...

I took my resume off now, but still get a few ...

What kind of things do you have to know to get into one of those wall street firms and hedge fund companies?

A friend of mine told me you needed some ivy league education and high grades. But I always thought that was the brokers and business jobs. I'm sure having that helps in technology, but if you are good at what you do, does it matter that much as a software engineer?

Also if you have a rough stretch and developed bad credit, should you just forget about wall street?

Originally posted by Marvin Trump:
Also if you have a rough stretch and developed bad credit, should you just forget about wall street?

To my understanding, the answer is "YES".

I can't really say for all of finance, but for most of the wall street firms that I encountered (securities) -- they do background checks along with finger printing. A couple that I encountered even take urine samples.

Henry

I'm assigned at a major financial company now (not in a Wall Street office though) and I have to get fingerprinted this week. We can't use email at work or anything, it's very strict at these places.