A question that I get a lot from creative minded developers, is “How do I get a job at one of those Hedge Funds, that pay those BIG bonuses?” Sadly for a long time the answer was either go back to school for four years and study finance or learn to get excited by endless hours of SQL, VBA and Excel…..No thanks. 

Recently however a lot of hedge funds have been hiring creative minded, C# .NET WPF and Silverlight developers. Why is you ask, simple, even the stuffy world of finance is taking a cue from the rest of the world and building systems that everyone can use with simple, easy to use, neat looking interfaces. 

Now I know what you are thinking, easy, I will get a book on WPF and I am good to go. Well its going to take more than that, hedge funders may be as exciting as a white tee shirt, but they still a very smart people that like to surround themselves with very smart people. Chances are you won’t be able to “learn on the go” or “take a month to ramp up.” To go work at a place that basically makes money out of nothing, you need to master your craft, work on some large scale projects and come in day one a C# Ninja. 

So next time your friend goes onto Monster and ask you “Dude, WTF is WPF and how do I get a job at a Hedge Fund?” you can answer, “if you have to ask, you will never know”… Unless you follow this awesome blog.

from Morgan Miller - COO at XL Projects Inc.