Ask HN: Does a CFA Matter in FinTech?
2 by gunshowmo | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi, For quite a while I've had difficulties deciding what I actually enjoy doing and managing my motivation, so I let myself get into a bad place academically, although I have my degree now (Bio Major, CS Minor), and have roughly 4 years of work experience in a large bank as an analyst. During that time, I've learnt a lot about programming, mostly in my spare time but also professionally as well. Although I was in analyst roles, I pushed to make my role a bit more developer-like. I created an end-to-end prototype in Python of a software solution we were building as part of the project that I was assigned to. This was then used as a template for the real developers to base their work off of. In my spare time, I learned how to automate cloud infrastucture deployments using a Packer, Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, and kOps stack. I've also set up full CRUD apps with a Node REST API backend and React frontend, SQL DBs, etc... I've also currently passed the first 2 levels of the CFA program, and plan to finish the third this year. I think I was uninformed when I made the decision to go for the CFA since I find a lot more joy in programming than pure investment management, but I was hoping it could serve as a foundation for a position in fintech. The last time I was searching around for jobs, I didn't get many responses at all for developer/engineer roles given my experience only being in analyst roles. so at this point I'm a bit uncertain about my employability going forward. I'm based in Toronto but did apply at various comapnies (large and startups) across Canada & US. What I was hoping to ask is if anyone here would know if finishing off my CFA would even help me get a tech role at a fintech company given my lack of experience as a developer? Is there anything I could work on as a portfolio app/demo to improve my chances there specfically? Even general advice on what steps I should take going forward would be much appreciated. Thanks for your time.