just learn ms dos and you’ll be golden.
minocfa Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Hi, > > I have Mechanical Engineering background, not > English… > > I know Fortran, SAS, SPSS, and SQL… Anybody > using them? > > Thanks! In order: SQL - very valuable in finance, even though I hate it and nobody listens to me about it. Being able to extract data from DB’s is obviously a tremendous asset to many firms. Fortran - Nobody except engineers uses Fortran anymore. If you have looked at Fortran 2003 (as I haven’t), I understand that it is a pseudo-modern programming language and you should be able to pick up C#, C++ (sucks), Delphi (good), etc… The first two on the list are pretty valuable in finance. SAS, SPSS - Useful if you’re a statistician which you aren’t. I don’t see these used that much in finance. A somewhat funny story is once I wanted to buy SPSS and was given the blow-off about not necessary for risk management, etc. and then the firm took a large position in the stock.
hobbes928 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > just learn ms dos and you’ll be golden. Learning MS-DOS used to mean learning about interrupts which I spent countless hours doing once. If you can program in assembler and know those interrupts I would be impressed (even if this is a dinosaur skill). It was tough. Edit: (wistful look) You used to be able to do some really cool stuff then. Like write self-modifying code. Instead of all those cumbersome case statements and stuff, you could just have the code write over itself. The total antithesis of structured programming.
No, I am not a native English speaker…I try to pay extra attention to what I am writing, but I may have some mistakes…Sorry for that. Therefore, I would like to find out in which areas of finance quant or computer skills are more important than communication skills. I do not want to go into an area where I am disadvantaged. Thanks!!
you need to learn to use a Mac… finance is definitely moving that direction.
Anybody using SAP?
I always thought those DBA and those sad CS co-op students are the ones who make the SQL models for the analysts. Why does an analyst need to know something so hardcore as SQL?
Because that sad CS co-op student will laugh in your face when you can’t write something like ‘Select * from TechStocks where CFO > 50’. How hobbled do you want to be as an analyst in doing exploratory analyses? I think to be a decent analyst you should be able to do all of it yourself so you’re completely flexible. If you have a great idea on Saturday morning, you might need to check it out.
JoeyDVivre Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Because that sad CS co-op student will laugh in > your face when you can’t write something like > ‘Select * from TechStocks where CFO > 50’. How > hobbled do you want to be as an analyst in doing > exploratory analyses? I think to be a decent > analyst you should be able to do all of it > yourself so you’re completely flexible. If you > have a great idea on Saturday morning, you might > need to check it out. MySql Query Browser is one of my fav freeware tools. As with everything, knowing what something means and how it works is important and I prefer to learn to crawl before learning to run… but a nice interface can help you easily learn to point-click and perform: select, from, where, group, having, order, set, etc. without writing out code freehand.
Really random – are you hobbes928 on Reddit?