The benefits of custom programming
If you recall the process of learning a foreign language, it takes minutes to learn the first words, but many hours to speak it fluently and probably years until it becomes almost native. “Achievement”, states Malcolm Gladwell in his bestselling book “Outliers”, “is talent plus preparation”¹. While we strongly believe that to learn a programming language is possible for everyone, it is a time-consuming process nonetheless.
In studies looking at excellence and mastery “the idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again […]. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”²
While it might not be necessary to have this level of expertise to develop a trading system based on your ideas, the amount of time needed in case you start from scratch with learning the language will still be substantial.
In case you work with an expert, not only do you get access to this kind of expertise, but you can also put this time to use in other endeavors (more research or even better time with family and friends) and you will have the results much quicker. Most of the time in the end you will not only save time, but money, as an expert can help you avoiding costly programming errors or help you in avoiding common fallacies and traps with optimizations for example.
In case you already know the programming language to some extent or have done some coding for yourself, you know that something that looked like a couple of hours work can easily turn into taking days and weeks until it is finished. So it can still be beneficial to hire an expert to help dealing with problems you are facing or to get ideas and insights you haven’t thought about, yet.
1: Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. New York: Little, Brown and Company. p. 38
2: Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The story of success. New York: Little, Brown and Company. pp. 39-40