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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3638 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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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.

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.

Go find your couple-million dollars lying in the gutter, then. You don't need quant finance as an elite human capital.

Yet apparently not smart enough to understand how the world works and how to get what you want out of it. Maybe the world is optimizing for something other than what you think it should be...

Why do you need Quant Finance if you're already at the 95th percentile? There's plenty of ways to make money in this world.

I think I have a better grasp on empirics of the world than the median mottizen.

Idk you seem to be struggling with the concept of pedigree and large interview sample size. I'm not sure anyone I know who is smart fails to understand the concept of a social/meritocratic signals in the form college pedigree, credentialism, etc. You seem pretty pissed about it.

I'm 95th %ile income for my age

This is not hard, depending on how young you are. $250k in the Bay area for a 30 year old is 97th percentile and is a starting salary for any SWE of that age and commensurate experience. I was apparently 93rd percentile a couple years back, and I'm not a money chaser and I don't live in the Bay.

I think I will be in 5 years, given my intelligence and track record

Good luck, however understanding the lay of the land will be important. I think this thread has some good advice when it comes to the fact that a large percentage of the population in our culture wants to be rich and many of them are quite smart. Degrees like quants are actively setup to winnow out people, and many times to winnow out those who lack the requisite class markers like a ivy league school or advance degrees. If you really want to be rich, and are as smart as you seem to think you are, then the easier route is to be a startup founder.

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!

Quant here, though at a bank and not a prestigious quant firm. Top 1% of intellect is thick as pigshit. The kind of retard you find in your local MENSA chapter. The sort of intellect we are looking for hangs out in the tearoom at CERN. To get hired at Jane Street based on conventional demonstrations of extreme intelligence, you need to be top 0.001%. The actual IQ threshold to do the job is probably only top 0.01% if you go the interesting and visible route discussed by @DirtyWaterHotDog.

If you can't get hired then you've failed the only test that matters.

The next time you want to sound like you're discussing hiring practices in a purely abstract way, maybe don't dedicate so much of the argument to how you, specifically, weren't hired. Despite being top 1%!

Cool, the answer to that is the usual one: if your competitors are leaving money on the ground by acting suboptimally, prove them wrong by outperforming them. Polymarket and several cryptocurrency trading platforms have open APIs, you can go and write code to fleece the foreign swots with your superior ability right away if HFT is your thing.

(Honestly, though, to me it just sounds like you farmed good scores on easy tests and are very good at finding excuses for avoiding the hard ones that satisfy yourself.)

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