

Whether your team is global or not, working in finance means dealing with markets operating worldwide. In the same vein, another engineer says, "never record an amount without its currency." Synchronize your time So what is the alternative? One engineer says, "if your language does not have a dedicated type for monetary amounts, or one cannot be trivially built, then you should ask yourself if it is really a suitable language for financial tasks." Another gives an example of how their programming language, Haskell, has a predetermined process for storing monetary information. When dealing with small amounts of money this might be acceptable, but as the fintech grows you will need to completely overhaul your code base or risk making your product defunct.

Using floating point types fractionalizes a larger number into individual integers and in doing so rounds them up. Unlucky for you, working in fintech means dealing with money, and that means lots of decimals. Don't use floating point types.īinary and decimal points do not mix well. Among all of them, two pieces of advice stood out the most. On a forum from startup accelerator YCombinator, a group of engineers in the fintech space have shared invaluable experience of their previous errors, giving a comprehensive look at what not to do. Sooner or later, mistakes will be made, however. When taking a high profile engineering job at a fintech (or starting your own), the pressure is on to perform.
