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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1799 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 8, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Is it worth trying to get into quantitative finance? My background is a CS degree from an okay university, which I went to for financial reasons (scholarship) even though I was accepted to Stanford. I just think my current JavaScript job isn't utilizing my intelligence fully and it's hurting my income, plus it's not as robust against AI as I would like. I currently use Codex extremely heavily and recently I almost never have to write code by hand, I just prompt. I've self-taught statistical theory to the master's level and I'm currently self-studying measure theory and stochastic calculus for quantitative finance. However, I've been told by one insider that many firms only want to hire people who did the Putnam or USAMO which I am too late for; never did these because I had no interest, although I think I would have done okay enough to get hired if I had studied as much as the median good performer. Should I keep aiming for quantitative finance or try to go all-in on coding instead?

Open an E*Trade account and trade your own capital first. Show that you’re good at it.

Uh not really relevant to quant work aside from maybe showing some interest in markets as a thing.

Good idea, was trying to get into the practical side before trying to get hired too. I was looking at Kalshi actually but traditional assets also.

For top end quant stuff, you kind of need the pedigree. But the backdoor option is still good. It may take some networking, but there are a lot of "support" roles for the quants themselves that are still highly technical. In my own lived experience I saw a lot of large scale infrastructure dudes get recruited by quant firms to help manage clusters that included specialty hardware (think high throughput I/O and memory caches). They weren't making crazy bonuses s like the quant strategists / implementers, but they were competitive with FAANG peers at cash plus level.

Calling your route (I assume) "pedigree" and my route "backdoor" triggers me, but thanks for the comment nonetheless. Here's why. The dictionary doesn't even reflect the new definition I see emerging online. It says:

  1. the record of descent of an animal, showing it to be pure-bred. "they are looking for animals with pedigrees"

    a pure-bred animal.

  2. the recorded ancestry or lineage of a person or family. "with a pedigree equal to many of the gentry"

So you're saying you're superior to me by blood, essentially. And yes, I know it's a metaphor, but let's be real, those that call math competition "pedigree" are almost all a different race than I, so it smacks of racial supremacy. What's even funnier is that I'm a Legacy American and it's racial supremacy for a different race that just got here. I have responded before that I have the actual pedigree, only to be told I can't prove it because all of my signals have been ruined by, well, people with superior pedigree.

Anyway, sorry for the TMI. I just figured I'd preempt other pedigree comments, since I've seen it all over X and already had this opinion formed.

Also I've chatted with self-declared people with "pedigree" that are less qualified for the job than me, but they're in the field. Yes they have a Putnam score at MIT, but I seem at least as intelligent and I know more of the math relevant to the topic than them. So in an efficient market, there would be a job for me.

Get used to being triggered. Quantitative Finance is famously ruthless and will chew out anyone with an ego.

If you think this sub talks about humans in a dismissive manner, wait till you meet someone in Quant. Quant alongside top AI-startups are the 2 most sought after jobs in the tech industry. They get 100k+ applications. They use ruthless high-pass filters before they begin to read resumes. Pedigree, prestige, track record....call it what you want, they serve the purpose of bringing a 100k applications down to a digestible hundred that are worth looking at.

I'm a Legacy American

So a white Christian whose religion tells him that lending money and working with derivatives is a sin ? (/s)

So you're saying you're superior to me by blood, essentially

You're putting words in the GP's mouth.

So in an efficient market, there would be a job for me.

The market converges to an efficient state given enough time. That time become near infinite if there is low discoverability, which is true for non-conventional candidates. Hell, Quant relies on the assumption that the market is always temporarily inefficient. And exploiting those inefficiencies is how you make money.

There are 2 ways to get noticed by Quant.

  1. Conventional - Ladder climb - Ruthlessly compete in a crowded field of elite candidates and consistently come out on top. This is the prestige path. Get into an ivy and out-compete fellow smart kids in math. Win math & coding competitions. etc. If you are in front of the line, you become the boring and obvious choice.

  2. Unconventional - Be interesting, be visible - This is a 2 parter. First, do something that makes you interesting. eg: Run your own backyard trading strategy and make $$, win big on prediction markets, be a world leader in an obscure nerd only card-game, make an open-source tool that all the trading people are using, etc. Alongside that, you also need to be visible. Find a way to get your face in front of Quant people (recruiters, employees, etc). If you are interesting enough and visible enough, they will give you an interview. This is the back door. It combines some unconventional excellence with network.

The paths are well defined. if #1 isn't for you, then do #2. If not #2, then idk what's left.

try to go all-in on coding instead?

I am not sure coding is going to be around for much longer

You're putting words in the GP's mouth.

No, he insulted my pedigree by insinuating I don't have one. If you look up the definition of pedigree, it's an insult to blood. I'm sure he meant school but that's almost as bad, especially by repurposing that word.

They use ruthless high-pass filters before they begin to read resumes.

Ruthless or just incompetent? If test scores aren't a part of your "ruthless" filter, you're just doing DEI for striver kids at that point.

Pedigree, prestige, track record....call it what you want, they serve the purpose of bringing a 100k applications down to a digestible hundred that are worth looking at.

So they are just lazy and incompetent? Maybe I don't want to work with them then.

So a white Christian whose religion tells him that lending money and working with derivatives is a sin ?

https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew%2025%3A14-30&version=ESV

The paths are well defined. if #1 isn't for you, then do #2. If not #2, then idk what's left.

Is it really this bad? I can try to kind of do 2 but I'm not going to do anything I don't enjoy that isn't profitable. I kind of assumed a smaller form with some competent, legacy American hiring managers would be smart enough to interpret my résumé correctly.

Whining about the hiring practices of highly profitable and successful firms in a cutthroat industry because they won't give you the time of day is a very bad look.

It's silly to think the correlation between hiring competence and profit is 1. Or even over .70.

You're both right to a degree IMO. Some of the metrics used in Quant recruiting are probably dumb but also they've got 100k resumes from top percentile applicants and can't blame them for leaning on the previously applied great sort.

I doubt they get that many apps from the top percentile. Top percentile is probably top 25% or more at a quant firm.

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If hiring the right people has little relation to making money, I don't know why you think they'd care about your GPA.

Do you think hiring is the only factor in firm profitability?

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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.

I don't just have a CS degree, I had a top 1% GPA which should already put my educational achievement on par with many HYPSM students. I also have several 99th percentile test scores, which even further separates me from the median at my university and puts me on par with HYPSM students.

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.

I need money to start a family and grad school isn't relevant to the job. I really don't believe my competitors are top 1% among HYPSM people on a valid measure. I think a competent firm would interview me based on my credential and my test scores and claimed knowledge. If they don't, they're probably some mixture of incompetent (they're bad at interpreting signals: they don't know what high test scores mean, and overweight brand name, which is really bad from a psychometric POV) or, to be honest, racist. Is it a coincidence these firms seem to value stereotypically Asian signals? Why don't they have killer quant firms in China if math competitions are such a good predictor of performance? Is it any different than only recruiting smart men who were pretty good at rugby or lacrosse? Why don't they do that instead? I mean, it certainly signals something.

Look having been in your shoes of sparkling-good-but-not-elite academic accomplishment, being a mildly autistic egotistical white guy getting moderately discriminated against in hiring and academic admissions. You don't have to be a quant to make money, always opportunities surfacing and trying to wedge yourself into the elite end of the System(TM) is not necessarily going to be the best fit.

Yes, it's galling that your SBFs or whatever occasionally get grabbed off the pile for having the exact right references and autism vibes to align with the hiring team, but that's life. Poke around stuff that interests you and there'll probably be a couple million dollars lying around somewhere.

grad school isn't relevant to the job

It is when the employers you want to work for say it is. You are perfectly welcome to try convincing them that you are worth their time without having a graduate degree (though, pro tip: saying you are in the top 1% of brainpower out there is just going to make you come off as an arrogant jerk, so drop that line). Other people here are trying to give you guidance as to how realistically you are likely to succeed, but if you choose to ignore that and do your own thing nobody will stop you.

pro tip: saying you are in the top 1% of brainpower out there is just going to make you come off as an arrogant jerk, so drop that line

Either that or they'll say "well actually we are kind of after the upper .01%, sorry" -- probably a bit of both actually!

Relevant means that it boosts job performance. It's a disctinct concept from a desired hiring signal.

saying you are in the top 1% of brainpower out there is just going to make you come off as an arrogant jerk, so drop that line).

I don't have to say it directly if they're smart enough to understand test results. I'm beginning to think this whole quant thing is a DEI program for foreign swots, the way actual intelligence is belittled in exchange for inferior signals that are easier for foreign swots to get and game.

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Dude, I've never worked in quant finance. The use of "pedigree" was just short hand for "You should probably have at least an MS in Quant Finance from Baruch / Princeton / Etc. if not a PhD in something applied math related." It had nothing to do with, like, bloodlines. Chill, Bro.

but I seem at least as intelligent and I know more of the math relevant to the topic than them.

Prove it. Solve hard math problems and post your process for doing so online. Start a blog. Push to github. Do something. What else are you asking for? That the hiring managers at quant funds call you up unprompted and ask you politely to show them how smart you are?

So in an efficient market, there should be a job for me.

Stop whining. Understand the world for what it is, not for how you think it should be. These jobs are heavily PEDIGREE and NETWORK driven. You don't have the pedigree, that's fine. Go network. Asking strangers on the internet for advice even netted you free advice - and you 'sperged out about how "there should be a job for me and my smart me brain."

Dude, I've never worked in quant finance. The use of "pedigree" was just short hand for "You should probably have at least an MS in Quant Finance from Baruch / Princeton / Etc. if not a PhD in something applied math related." It had nothing to do with, like, bloodlines. Chill, Bro.

Degrees are subjective and I feel like I have enough degrees and that someone with a different degree is not superior to me, in intelligence or job ability. Implying I don't have pedigree and they do can easily be interpreted as insulting my educational attainment, at the very least.

Prove it. Solve hard math problems and post your process for doing so online.

Problem sets aren't really useful or relevant to the job, personally I wouldn't hire based on that and that's why I'm also not a fan of math competition. I was thinking of trying to get published in statistics journals, though.

What else are you asking for? That the hiring managers at quant funds call you up unprompted and ask you politely to show them how smart you are?

A fair evaluation of my signals, which should be enough for an interview, and a fair, unbiased, interview process, which I believe would reveal I'm at least at the median of their new hires.

Stop whining.

That's not whining. Stop saying I'm whining. It's rude.

Understand the world for what it is, not for how you think it should be

Efficient doesn't mean "should," it describes a set of properties a market can have. Economists often presume markets have these properties, and that there are good outcomes when they do, but I never even said it "should" be efficient. I just said if it's efficient, then I would get a job. I don't know how efficient it is.

These jobs are heavily PEDIGREE and NETWORK driven. You don't have the pedigree

Again, stop insulting my educational attainment, my preferred intellectuals hobbies, and/or my race.

there should be a job for me and my smart me brain

I never said "should," I just said I know I'm at least as equipped for the job as some new hires I've chatted with, but they expressed concern about bias in the hiring market for a specific type of résumé, which gives me inefficiency concerns, therefore leading me to question if I should bother trying to enter even though I'm confident I can do the job.

I've now updated by odds of this being a troll post to >50%. Well done if you got me. If not, best of luck.

Why is it trolling, where am I disingenuous at? Does this not seem like a genuine reaction to being told that I'm not allowed to work a job I think I'd be good at because I don't have the right certificate from Princeton? That none of my education counted towards that, even though I know my stuff?

I think maybe you never heard rebellious thoughts towards the HYPSM hierarchy before and that's why it comes off as trolling. But that's a legacy fact from when they were nice places, they had fair admissions, and there was no internet so they did gatekeep knowledge. I'm just on the younger side, and you'll be hearing this kind of thing increasingly frequently from my generation. Many of us are done with considering those schools pedigree. Their admissions aren't fair, their students are no longer brilliant, we're not impressed by strivers, and they're not affordable to the middle and upper middle class. We won't hire on them, we won't target them, and we will continue voting for Trump style disruption to them, because a ton of us got screwed by their DEI admissions when we were teenagers and we're not going to let foreigners take our nice jobs that we're intelligent enough to do because we were priced out or raced out of "pedigree" schools in the 2010s and 2020s.

Hiring from prestigious universities is kind of like buying from IBM decades ago. It's known not to be the best value but managers also know that they won't get blamed if the Princeton kid doesn't work out but will if he hires the Murray State kid and they don't work out.

Quant firms are high enough on the desirability totem pole, they mostly don't have to risk hiring outside the prestige schools, so if you want to get in the other way you have to be more impressive than their median candidate to be worth taking the risk on.

It's not a risk, they're just incompetent at their hiring role and are committing illegal hiring discrimination at that point.

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plus it's not as robust against AI as I would like

Outside of "surely governments would intervene" or "the world is ruled by an elite cabal that intends to feed 90% of the population into an AI wood chipper and I think finance is in that 10%", what is your rationale for why being a quant is safer than being a programmer?

I'm genuinely asking here. From where I'm standing it seems like they're in similar ecological niches.

Quant supposedly requires mathematical ability; LLMs currently suck at this but are good at JS. I think that's because math is higher on the intelligence hierarchy. AI will automate the most accessible laptop jobs first, because they have the simplest logic and the biggest training sets.

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