Using English as a coding language won't get you a $600k programming job

Many engineers in finance and beyond are using AI to make themselves more productive, but vibe coding alone won't get you the most lucrative engineering roles in finance. The highest paying coding jobs often involve C++, and its creator refutes claims from those at Goldman Sachs and beyond that English is taking over as the new programming language.

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Bjarne Stroustrup, creator of C++, said on a podcast last month that English is unsuitable as a programming language in the low-latency space because it's "flexible" and "often very ambiguous." He said that C++, on the other hand, is "precise," with a foundation in mathematics. Because of this, hedge funds and trading firms pay up to $600k for C++ engineers who are specialists in low latency coding. Coding at this level  often requires engineers to fine-tune their code to an extreme degree. Stroustrup said "the examples I've seen of attempts for AI to generate code in this domain have not been successful." Part of this is due to the fact that AI agents will edit across your entire codebase whereas human coders will edit code on a much more localised basis. "If an AI writes it, you don't actually know where it has changed [the code]... you need to try and figure it out," Stroustrup said.

Stroustrup also said that AI-generated low latency C++ code is "bloated" and has a higher propensity for bugs and security issues. The talent pool for elite C++ engineers has been notoriously dry for years, which means the AI will often train itself on subpar developers, "imitating old code and getting old performance and old bugs." He said it's such an issue that senior C++ developers are retiring as they don't want to spend all their time evaluating and editing buggy, bloated, AI-written code.

Not all of the top paying firms use C++, however. Jane Street, the trading firm that pays $2.7m per head, uses OCaml, another, more niche low-latency language. Ron Minsky, Jane Street's CTO, seems to echo Stroustrup's assertion that programming languages need a mathematical foundation. Speaking on Jane Street's Signals and Threads podcast yesterday, he said that "a lot of the best ideas in programming languages come from relating the thing you’re doing to very simple mathematical models."

Jane Street seems to prefer a bit more flexibility than Stroustrop, however. Minsky said coding is a "messy and very human process," and that it picked OCaml to use as it accommodates for that; he said it's "like a fancy, wild, high level language," but also "easy to understand from looking at the OCaml code, how that code is going to execute."

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