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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
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?
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:
the record of descent of an animal, showing it to be pure-bred. "they are looking for animals with pedigrees"
a pure-bred animal.
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.
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.
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?
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."
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.
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.
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.
That's not whining. Stop saying I'm whining. It's rude.
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.
Again, stop insulting my educational attainment, my preferred intellectuals hobbies, and/or my race.
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.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link