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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   2245 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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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.

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.

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

A worldly comment which derails abstract discussion of hiring practices.

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%!

I never discussed how I, specifically, wasn't hired. I haven't even applied yet!

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.)

The fallacy of sufficient competition is asserting that observed practices are optimal because you assume without evidence that the market is competitive enough to optimize itself, when the reality is often that people and firms are too finite to reach perfect optimization through competitive processes alone.

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.

We know how SAT translates to IQ, we don't know for math competitions, though I suspect the ceiling is in the 130s just the like the SAT and it's just ethnic chauvinism that leads to unsupported assertions to the contrary.

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