Q&A: Stefan Simons, BlueQuant
The IT director at hedge fund firm BlueQuant Capital Management - and IT Pro Leaderboard member - discusses how IT has evolved.

Describe your role in three words.
IT monkey
Who is your tech hero? And why?
Alan Turing was a pretty cool guy.
What does your current role involve?
Designing, implementing and maintaining the entire IT infrastructure for a small hedge fund.
How did you arrive at your current role?
I worked in Investment Banking for nearly 15 years and in that time built up a few contacts. The opportunity arose to be in a start up from very early on and I took it.
Did you always want to work in IT?
I've always loved programming. I remember as a 10-year-old programming my Acorn Electron. I also remember for my GCSE Computer Science being very proud at using all 32k of the available memory in the school's BBC Micro - 32k!
What do you enjoy most about your role/working in IT?
Building things - actually creating systems and seeing people use them.
And what is your least favourite aspect about your role/working in IT?
The paperwork. Over the years this has got progressively worse to the extent that an individual's initiative is being removed from the workplace. I don't believe that's a good thing.
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