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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

#111

Post by fat0wl »

dreamweapon wrote: post #103
sheepmullet wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

If you want to find out if a candidate knows "a lick of" statistics, try asking about something generic, like confidence intervals. But he didn't do that; instead he grilled them on the default partition scheme for algorithm X. Which (unless the candidate advertises themselves as having significant experience in algorithm X) is about as useful as asking them if they know the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.

No regrets.... if you are going to suck up to traders to get in on their pile of gold, either commit to it or don't. I used to complain about code exams until i realized "this is how you prove you want/deserve the job.... if someone else can pass where i fail, that is not necessarily the hiring managers fault". if you cant answer their questions dont expect the job.... you either want it enough to fortify your defenses or you dont. Even if they are going to ask a bunch of redundant, irrelevant, easily Google-able crap -- not having an answer is going to beg the question "how come they never, out of curiosity or to impress people in my position, Googled this easily Google-able crap?"

i just dont think these environments r made for you or me...... i used to win many math comps and was at the top of my class for years & years. in college i went into media programming & psychology because i didnt really want to study stuff i thought was boring all day just to be a market kiss-ass

as a result, i have a pretty boring job but i let my mind wander creatively & still work on a ton of music & creative projects. I've designed some pretty sophisticated machine learning algorighms/research in audio signal processing but i don't get to study it all day because there is not much market demand.

i know i have more raw talent than most people i interact with (in fact im confident i can self-teach myself various technical disciplines to near-expertise) but i've also come to understand that employers don't care. beyond entry level, they are just looking for someone who says the right things and has already done work that resembles the job they are hiring for.

sometimes i consider self-teaching toward a goal like being a quant, but then i remember that that world is not for me. im not insanely greedy so its not a big deal. and though my enterprise work now is boring, there are several things on the horizon that seem much more promising & appealing than finance. i am accumulating skills & enjoying having room in my head for other thoughts. i don't work in the startup world because i haven't encountered anyone with compelling ideas but i suppose thats where people like me are destined to end up.... i stay sharp & am confident that i could code a mini-enterprise in a year, once i find the right idea.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#112

Post by gjm11 »

abrichr wrote: post #66
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…

This article and discussion are quite timely for me, as I was recently offered a position as a "quant analyst" at a derivatives arbitrage firm -- from what I understand, similar to 3). My other two options are working at an ambitious new robotics startup, and a PhD in deep learning. I have a few questions: 1) What would you say is a reasonable salary range for someone with a master's degree in computer engineering an…

> How can you reconcile the opportunity cost to society [...]

There are two fine institutions that may help with this: taxation and charity. If you earn a lot of money, then you pay a lot of taxes and can afford to give a lot away.

Everyone likes to complain about taxation, but it's what turns a free market full of individuals and corporations all (to a good first approximation) trying to maximize their own wealth into something that benefits everyone.

And the most effective charities seem to be able to save a life (or provide a kinda-equivalent amount of other benefits) for something in the vicinity of $2000. (Important cautionary note: all such figures are very rough and you shouldn't trust them too much.)

So, suppose you have a choice between a quant-finance job of, let's suppose, exactly zero social value, and a job in medicine that pays $50k/year less. And suppose you'd be equally happy in either aside from ethical concerns. Then by taking the quant-finance job and giving away all your extra earnings, you give your government (let's say) an extra $20k/year to spend on schools and hospitals and police and roads -- and, unfortunately, various other things you might approve of less, so let's say it's the equivalent of $10k/year going to something obviously valuable like teaching, so you're paying for about 20% of an elementary-school teacher. And you give an extra $30k to (I hope) very effective charities, so maybe you are saving 10 lives a year.

So it comes down to the question: is the medical job more beneficial to the world than 20% of an elementary-school teacher and 10 poor Africans' lives per year?

You might answer that either way, but at any rate I don't think it's obvious that the answer is that the medical job is better.

(Some notes: I am not claiming that anyone who goes into finance in preference to another worse-paid job is obliged to give away all the extra money they earn. Only that doing so is one option, and that it might work out pretty well ethically speaking. It might be psychologically difficult to give away so much of one's earnings. It might be harder to "derive meaning and satisfaction" from things as indirect as tax and charity, compared with deriving them from one's actual work. It can be argued that quant-finance has positive social value, but I'd be skeptical of claims that it has much. I do not work in finance and never have, though being a mathematician it's always possible that one day I might.)

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#113

Post by gjm11 »

lucozade wrote: post #77
vasilipupkin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sampling bias. At least in HFT, the days of hiring quants who can't code are over.

I can personally vouch for the fact that there is a large space between "can't code" and "write high performance production quality code". Quants are no exception.

And a large space between "can't write high-performance production-quality code" and "doesn't write high-performance production-quality code".

I can write high-performance production-quality code, and occasionally I do, but maybe 95% of the code I write is hackish, primarily intended for exploration and experimentation, and written in a language fundamentally ill-suited for high performance. Engineering it all carefully and optimizing it would be a tremendous waste of time and effort.

I work in technology rather than finance, but I bet there are plenty of quants for whom much the same is true.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#114

Post by dreamweapon »

grayclhn wrote: post #104
dreamweapon wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to find out if a candidate knows "a lick of" statistics, try asking about something generic, like confidence intervals. But he didn't do that; instead he grilled them on the default partition scheme for algorithm X. Which (unless the candidate advertises themselves as having significant experience in algorithm X) is about as useful as asking them if they know the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow.

You are seriously underestimating the importance of deep statistical knowledge in some of these jobs. In the example, the candidate wasn't grilled on the default partition scheme; he or she was grilled on the partition scheme that was used. If someone thinks that's an unimportant implementation detail, why would you ever want to hire them?

You are seriously underestimating the importance of deep statistical knowledge in some of these jobs.

In some of these jobs, maybe. But the person I was initially responding to wasn't looking for someone with "deep statistical knowledge"; rather, he was looking for that species which goes by the trendy, loosey-goosey catch-all moniker, "data scientist".

And if you're going to put "data scientist" in a job title -- with no further qualifications -- then you had better understand that it's nearly useless as a description of anything (beyond a few colloquial definitions floating about, which there's still no real consensus on).

If on the other hand, you want an "MS/PhD background in Machine Learning and/or Statistics, or equivalent work experience" then that's fine too, of course -- just put it in the job description. It's really quite easy to do, and it will save everyone tons and tons of time (and grief).

In the example, the candidate wasn't grilled on the default partition scheme; he or she was grilled on the partition scheme that was used. If someone thinks that's an unimportant implementation detail, why would you ever want to hire them?

Again, it matters to the extent that they, themselves, emphasize it as a core skill area. When someone simply says "did $foo using X" in some project description, I personally don't read anything more into it than that.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#115

Post by deathflute »

graycat wrote: post #82
deathflute wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I wanted to send you a message but your profile has no email. Can you send me a message or put an email in your profile? Thanks.

How do I send you a message?

You can find my email in my profile by clicking on my username.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#116

Post by grayclhn »

dreamweapon wrote: post #114
grayclhn wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are seriously underestimating the importance of deep statistical knowledge in some of these jobs. In the example, the candidate wasn't grilled on the default partition scheme; he or she was grilled on the partition scheme that was used. If someone thinks that's an unimportant implementation detail, why would you ever want to hire them?

You are seriously underestimating the importance of deep statistical knowledge in some of these jobs. In some of these jobs, maybe. But the person I was initially responding to wasn't looking for someone with "deep statistical knowledge"; rather, he was looking for that species which goes by the trendy, loosey-goosey catch-all moniker, "data scientist". And if you're going to put "data scientist" in a job title -- wi…

I can see why you read it that way, but that's not how I read the initial comment and it's at odds with the top-level post. I might be out of date, but I don't think quant jobs are listed as informal "data scientists;" those postings are more for what were characterized as "mundane back office jobs." (Again, I could be wrong.)

But the question's not as esoteric or impossible as you're making it out to be. "What's a confidence interval" is something any good undergraduate applying for finance jobs should be able to answer, regardless of major. I'd expect an enthusiastic undergrad stats or compsci major to care about the implementation details of an estimator they'd used for something nontrivial. (Which seemed to be the case in the original comment.)

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#117

Post by graycat »

deathflute wrote: post #115
graycat wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I send you a message?

You can find my email in my profile by clicking on my username.

I do see URL

     	www.localmeze.com
but I see no e-mail. When I do the same click on my Hacker News user name, then, yes, I see a line for my e-mail but the line (a text box) is empty because I haven't given my e-mail to HN.

What's going on I don't know.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#118

Post by dreamweapon »

grayclhn wrote: post #116
dreamweapon wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are seriously underestimating the importance of deep statistical knowledge in some of these jobs. In some of these jobs, maybe. But the person I was initially responding to wasn't looking for someone with "deep statistical knowledge"; rather, he was looking for that species which goes by the trendy, loosey-goosey catch-all moniker, "data scientist". And if you're going to put "data scientist" in a job title -- wi…

I can see why you read it that way, but that's not how I read the initial comment and it's at odds with the top-level post. I might be out of date, but I don't think quant jobs are listed as informal "data scientists;" those postings are more for what were characterized as "mundane back office jobs." (Again, I could be wrong.) But the question's not as esoteric or impossible as you're making it out to be. "What's a c…

Fair enough, and points taken. Thanks.

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#119

Post by NhanH »

gjm11 wrote: post #112
abrichr wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article and discussion are quite timely for me, as I was recently offered a position as a "quant analyst" at a derivatives arbitrage firm -- from what I understand, similar to 3). My other two options are working at an ambitious new robotics startup, and a PhD in deep learning. I have a few questions: 1) What would you say is a reasonable salary range for someone with a master's degree in computer engineering an…

> How can you reconcile the opportunity cost to society [...] There are two fine institutions that may help with this: taxation and charity. If you earn a lot of money, then you pay a lot of taxes and can afford to give a lot away. Everyone likes to complain about taxation, but it's what turns a free market full of individuals and corporations all (to a good first approximation) trying to maximize their own wealth in…

If the financial job in question is an exact zero sum job (with 0 social value), then neither taxation nor charity would help at all, because essentially while doing your job you're already causing a negative value to someone else. And even if you give always ALL your wealth, you'd just return those wealth back to society. In essence, after a lot of shuffling of wealth around, you still didn't contribute anything. (And again, that's an "IF". I'm not stating whether the premise - financial job is a zero sum game - is correct or not.)

Re: How to Get a Quant Job in Finance

#120

Post by deathflute »

graycat wrote: post #117
deathflute wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find my email in my profile by clicking on my username.

I do see URL www.localmeze.com but I see no e-mail. When I do the same click on my Hacker News user name, then, yes, I see a line for my e-mail but the line (a text box ) is empty because I haven't given my e-mail to HN. What's going on I don't know.

I did not realize that the email is not publicly displayed. I have put in the about section now.

hn At machine.imap.cc

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