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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1837 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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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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