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How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

financejobs.co

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Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#91

Post by graycat »

FD3SA wrote: post #85
graycat wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long time ago, e.g., Fisher Black was still alive (maybe he's not now). I hadn't yet heard of James Simons. The rumor I heard was that Simons liked to hire mathematical physicists from Russia. I had no way to go to Wall Street and already know all about everything they they were doing. The martgingale convergence theorem, measurable selection, power spectral estimation, sure, all about Wall Street, no. When I was in…

Sounds like you'd have been a much better fit for Renaissance Technologies than Goldman.

I heard that at GS Rubin pushed algorithmic trading.

Sure, would've been great to have met Simons. Heck, I never got around to working in differential geometry but at one time did get the notes of S. S. Chern! And once tried to understand a seminar of an A. Gleason student! But I did cover exterior algebra, from both Fleming and Spivak. Now I have Cartan's book, now in English!

I have no idea just what Simons did to make his $12 billion or so, but likely it had to do with algorithmic trading in some sense.

Once I did get an interview at Morgan-Stanley, showed them some work I'd done in mathematical statistics, I later published, and mentioned that I'd like to work in the applied math of trading but got no interest.

The people on Wall Street made plenty of money and didn't need me.

So, I decided to go where I could make money just by pleasing users/customers -- do a start-up, i.e., hire myself.

From headhunters, I got a lot of just hostility: The main reaction was that in looking for a job I was doing something wrong. For another, my resume said I'd been a professor. Right, I had been. So, the head hunter got all twisted out of shape suggesting that I claimed the title of Full Professor. Nope, I claimed no such thing. The headhunter was eager to be nasty. Bizarre. Dysfunctional. Destructive. Nonsense.

I don't know what Wall Street wanted; I have to doubt that much of Wall Street knew what Wall Street wanted; whatever they did or didn't want, they didn't want me.

It's a very old problem: If working very high up, then are almost certainly (Simons is a grand exception) are working for people who, net, don't know measure theory. Then a person actually making use of such math will have a huge interpersonal interface problem.

Quite broadly one of the main bottlenecks in getting value from technical work is the problem of the awkward, often bitter, interface between a good technical person and a less technical superior.

I have heard that the lawyers have a solution here: A working lawyer is supposed to report only to a qualified lawyer.

Really, then, a technical person with some valuable technical work should just start their own business.

Or, how many people on Wall Street working as applied mathematicians and not for themselves earn money enough to live in a nice Manhattan townhouse or apartment? My guess is, not many and that, instead, the big bucks, say, for a $20 million townhouse, are going to non-technical people, management, sales, IB, trading, firm ownership, etc.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#92

Post by foldr »

murbard2 wrote: post #86
FD3SA wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these have any similarity to brainteasers. In fact, these are all excellent subjects on their own that could be tested directly. For example: "Give me an overview of a numerical method used to solve differential equations." The more time you spend asking brainteasers, the less time you have to devote to your actual skills of interest. You may even find that quizzing someone on mathematics may help refresh and…

Do you have experience interviewing candidates? Many candidates will answer this question correctly and yet be totally unable to do anything when they're confronted with a non textbook case. To be clear the brain teasers I ask are mathematical problems, not the type of brain teasers used in consulting interviews. For instance: We play a game where we each draw a secret random number uniformly between 0 and 1. We each…

There's two ways of interpreting that result, though. Maybe it shows that mathematical brain teasers aren't a good way of testing for mathematical ability.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#93

Post by mahyarm »

nether wrote: post #46

I'm filled with envy and rage over the fact I'm not good enough at math for this. I barely did above average in my grad level math courses in college (studied aerospace engineering). I worked my ass off; I should have breezed through it if I had the ability to be a quant.

Math classes I've noticed just take more time because there is more detail to them, but if you keep up with the workload and go ask TAs questions at labs, it can be done. Out of all of my university courses, the math classes were the most workload heavy. They were 2x the workload of almost any CS class I took.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#94

Post by dreamweapon »

chollida1 wrote: post #43
michaelochurch wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now if you are a programmer, how do you get into the industry? You need to know stats, machine learning, and programming, really well. My experience being a quant and being around quants is that, sadly, they don't get to use much machine learning. Some do, but it seems like 97-98% of the work is much more mundane. Am I correct in perceiving that many hiring managers expect more in the way of interesting experience th…

> Am I correct in perceiving that many hiring managers expect more in the way of interesting experience than they really need (or have to offer in the work that needs done)? Yes I think you are Michael. Especially for quant jobs 2 and 3 that I enumerated. The only reason I listed machine learning is that it is the trogan horse that gets programmers to learning stats. I can't over emphasize enough just how much you ne…

Me: ...So do you have any questions for me?

Instead of trying to "expose" these people for supposedly over-representing their competence in some skill area X mentioned in an ancillary way on their resume (relating to some job they had N years in the past), you might want to try just asking them a simple normal, human question first: "So was this something you go to delve into the internal workings of? Or did you just use an API for some small task?"

If it's the former answer, then fine -- drill away into the internals. If it's the latter (which is by far the more typical case -- the way things go in most dev environments), then you can just say "That's fine", and look for some other bullet point to zoom in on. Or if in fact X is a major requirement for you -- you can say "That's fine, but we're really looking for people who have done at least a fair amount of X here. But we thank you very much for taking the to talk with us."

Either way -- there's no reason to go into snark mode and assume these people are frauds or idiots just because they don't have a lot of detail to offer you. The bottom line is that unless they mention X as some major skill area, you pretty much have to assume that it was just another random thing they were forced to learn that day (you know, to keep their jobs). And unless it's mentioned in a way that would suggest they spent a significant amount of time on it, of course they aren't going to remember very much beyond the most superficial aspects of how it works.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#95

Post by sheepmullet »

dreamweapon wrote: post #94
chollida1 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I correct in perceiving that many hiring managers expect more in the way of interesting experience than they really need (or have to offer in the work that needs done)? Yes I think you are Michael. Especially for quant jobs 2 and 3 that I enumerated. The only reason I listed machine learning is that it is the trogan horse that gets programmers to learning stats. I can't over emphasize enough just how much you ne…

Me: ...So do you have any questions for me? Instead of trying to "expose" these people for supposedly over-representing their competence in some skill area X mentioned in an ancillary way on their resume (relating to some job they had N years in the past), you might want to try just asking them a simple normal, human question first: "So was this something you go to delve into the internal workings of? Or did you just…

"The bottom line is that unless they mention X as some major skill area, you pretty much have to assume that it was just another random thing they were forced to learn that day"

If you call yourself a data scientist but don't know a lick of statistics then you are the one being misleading. You can't just pick this stuff up overnight. It is a bit like claiming you are a systems developer but then in the interview you don't know a thing about pointers or what the heap is. If your actual knowledge of systems development is "I wrote a python wrapper around a c library once" then representing yourself as a systems dev is intentionally misleading your interviewer.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#96

Post by walshemj »

branchless wrote: post #26
Rainymood wrote: post #3

Interesting! Thanks a lot for writing/posting this. I enjoyed the read. One thing I had to chuckle at was this: >Mark Joshi obtained a B.A. in mathematics (top of year) from the University of Oxford in 1990, and a Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1994. He was an assistant lecturer in the department of pure mathematics and mathematical statistics at Cambridge University from…

Pure math to head of QR risk management over the period when RBS took on insane leverage and relied on wholesale lending markets staying at low rates forever. An assumption that was incorrect and led to RBS being bailed out by UK tax-payers. Good work fella.

should have paid more attention to the machines in the dinosaur pen :-)

For non uk peeps a while back RBS had major screw up on the mainframe side that meant that some people where not able to access their bank account for days weeks for one of the NI subsidiary's

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#97

Post by upquark »

murbard2 wrote: post #86
FD3SA wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of these have any similarity to brainteasers. In fact, these are all excellent subjects on their own that could be tested directly. For example: "Give me an overview of a numerical method used to solve differential equations." The more time you spend asking brainteasers, the less time you have to devote to your actual skills of interest. You may even find that quizzing someone on mathematics may help refresh and…

Do you have experience interviewing candidates? Many candidates will answer this question correctly and yet be totally unable to do anything when they're confronted with a non textbook case. To be clear the brain teasers I ask are mathematical problems, not the type of brain teasers used in consulting interviews. For instance: We play a game where we each draw a secret random number uniformly between 0 and 1. We each…

I wouldn't describe this as a brainteaser. It's a well-defined math problem, not some BS question about manhole covers or barbers in Chicago.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#98

Post by jskonhovd »

chollida1 wrote: post #24

Having hired a lot of quants and programmers in finance I can probably give a bit of background on what to expect: Get this book, read it and understand it. http://www.amazon.com/Heard-Street-Quantitative-Questions-In... Quants tend to be in 1 of 3 categories: 1) pricing quants, you work for a bank or investment house like Goldamn. You know stochastic calculus very well, you know finite differencing like the back of…

Do you have any advice for a back office developer trying to move into the front office? I am getting my master's part time from a good program in CS with specializations in Systems and Machine Learning. But, I am worried that my back office experience will get me stuck in those type of roles.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#99

Post by findjashua »

chollida1 wrote: post #24

Having hired a lot of quants and programmers in finance I can probably give a bit of background on what to expect: Get this book, read it and understand it. http://www.amazon.com/Heard-Street-Quantitative-Questions-In... Quants tend to be in 1 of 3 categories: 1) pricing quants, you work for a bank or investment house like Goldamn. You know stochastic calculus very well, you know finite differencing like the back of…

Thank you for writing such a clear and detailed post. I wish I had this information back in grad school.

I am very interested in #2 (quant trader). I studied Electrical Engineering back in school, and took classes on stats+probability as a part of my degree. I wanted to do something mathy, but through an interesting turn of events, I ended up in software development (Java -> Python -> Javascript).

I'm thinking of kicking the tires and refresh my stats/probability knowledge, but most online courses I could find are pretty introductory in nature. What would be a good path for me to be seriously considered for #2?

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