The best computer language skills for obtaining financial programming jobs

I would say SQL and C# would probably be the most accessible to learn and the most commonly used. I work or a Fin Tech firm that caters to the HF industry and we use a lot of SQL and C# to build out custom valuation fields within our trading system. Developers build out most of these, but our client facing staff as well as some of the ops folks and analysts at our clients do too, so it is useful knowledge.

For most financial professionals in investment banking, private equity, hedge funds, LBO firms, distressed debt firms, etc., Excel is all they will ever need. I doubt Warren Buffett uses anything else.

When you get to financial engineering, I think that a lot of quantitative risk management stuff for insurance corporations, reinsurance corporations, institutional investors, etc., use MATLAB or R or C++ to do stress testing, conducting ginormous optimization routines on crazy numbers of dimensions and complex constraints. So like, there will be some quant guy at MetLife in their QRM department running all these ALM (asset liabity modeling) scenarios to try to best model all possible real world contingencies. For the huge institutional asset management firms, they will do similar stuff with portfolio optimization, whether across various asset classes (gold, bonds, EM bonds, equities, etc.), or within a specific class (such as optimizing equity holdings based on something similar to a 3-factor Fama-French model using conditional factors from current macroeconomic conditions to try to predict fluctuations in the spreads for the various premium factors).

For options & derivatives traders, it's a little less clear. For the real experts, doing Black-Scholes valuations (as you can easily do in Excel) is not enough, as there is a ton of gray area in how to properly value and appraise hedging risk for different types of options (such as path-dependent options, barrier options, basket options, etc.), especially as some of them get close to maturity. It's not easy for equity derivatives traders to mark their books for risk in a completely accurate way.

A lot of asset managers like to use options to hedge a little bit of their risk (such as one firm I interviewed with last week, that had a portfolio that engaged in a covered call strategy for large cap equities), and for these guys, I think Excel is mostly fine, but they will still want you to know how to use software tools like Bloomberg's AIM or Fiserv's APL. (I have zero experience on either.)

But at the more elite hedge funds, there will be all kinds of derivatives strategies going on, and they will likely be using something more. And then there are those insane people on the cutting edge of the new algorithmic trading fad, and I think those people probably do a lot of C++ or R programming, but I really don't know too much about that stuff at all.

If you have experience from SAS, learn how to do that stuff in R. Just Google whatever interests you and it should be on the first page of results. I recommend R Studio as an interface.

VBA and SQL are next most important, I think. Python is very important if you want to do intense data analysis.

Need to footnote that with friends and old roommates were IB and that is what they have said. This is not first hand knowledge as I've never spent a single second in IB, nor ever want to.

Thanks everyone...

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Spirit of Dunson
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I think this will help me make my next self-improvement plan.

I guess the only other thing I would like to hear to cover my bases would be something about .NET or Advent's software packages, and how much value might be added there, but I can look more into that elsewhere, and I'm getting the impression that I mostly just need to bone up on SQL and VBA, learn some C# coding skills, and then maybe run some simple programs on R or PYTHON if I still have extra time left over.

I use Advent's Moxy. It can easily be learned on the job. It's not something I'd spend a ton of time on until you need it. Can't speak for other Advent programs

I just bought the VBA for Dummies to get me started...I should be able to grind through it quickly and then move onward. I literally have zero VBA knowledge as a basis, but I know there will be plenty of uses in my line of work.

Interested to see how easy it is to learn the coding language.

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and ability of other laymen to be able to use it (through Excel).

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This is the key. I can do all kinds of cool shite in SAS and R, but it means next to nothing to the big wigs. Doing it in Excel slightly limits the analysis I can do, but makes things a lot easier for the people who write my paycheck.

This is why dashboarding is a great thing to learn. Hook up PowerPivot to a database, set up some KPIs and send it to the powers that be so they can run their own what-if analyses with a pretty easy UI.