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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1833 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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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.

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

Then I apologize for my rudeness, but you are whining. Replying to "life's unfair, but that's just the way it is" with "but it's unfair!" is called whining.

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.

Sir, this is a Wendy's culture war forum. You are not talking to people who are rejecting you from quant jobs, though if I were the hiring manager for one, I would reject you just on the basis of these posts. Not being so thin-skinned that you would fly off the handle over a tortured misinterpretation of a word is also a job requirement.

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