odd_primes
19d ago
Unfortunately your competitors are in the top 1% at better schools and also did grad school or a specialized masters degree in the field. You can argue that it's unnecessary credentialism, but they are spoiled for choice when the salaries are high and supply vastly outstrips demand. If this is something you are genuinely interested in and you have the intellectual horsepower, why not go back and do grad school? Do a bit of research and find a research group with a track record of placing grad students at quant firms if they don't end up going the academic route. It's that or find some other way to distinguish yourself from the crowd.
odd_primes
19d ago
Perhaps the less triggering way to describe it would be "traditional" and "non-traditional". I know a couple people in the field who got in by doing a math PhD, deciding academia wasn't for them, and then getting referred by their advisor. That or specific quant finance programs seem to be the traditional pipeline for the industry. You aren't going to get your foot in the door without either that background, someone willing to vouch for you, or specific skills they need that aren't provided by their existing hiring pipeline (eg. hardware, high-performance computing, security, etc). The signal to noise ratio would just be too low if they interviewed anyone with a CS degree.
It's the same issue as with FAANG companies - sure, there are brilliant students who go to average CS colleges, but for them it's not worth the effort of interviewing dozens of duds to find an occasional hidden gem when sifting through applications for junior positions.
odd_primes
29d ago
Fanficfare works pretty well to create an epub from most popular story hosting sites. I believe it also has a Calibre plugin. It has worked pretty well for me in the past to download from ao3, ff, etc.
odd_primes
29d ago
The AI-airbrushed photos thing did happen apparently:
It feels like basically the same dynamic as software engineering. It's a force multiplier for more senior staff who have good intuition about the problem space and can use agents as an army of extremely fast but error-prone interns. Cybersecurity is a very diverse field as well - the guy who sits at a desk watching a dashboard is probably screwed, while experienced vulnerability researchers are having fun being more productive than ever, plus with a whole new set of poorly secured targets in the form of vibe-coded projects.
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