> 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 need to know stats. half of trading is knowing stats as all good traders trade only when they have the advantage. 100% upside for 10% downside is a good rule of thumb.
I mentioned the deep dive into the machine learning techniques as unfortunately most of the programmers I meet who call themselves data scientists, just aren't very good at stats. I'll ask them what methods they use and they'll tell me the library they used.
Unfortunately most interviews go like this:
me: I see you did some K-means clustering, tell me about it.
them: Well, we used R to cluster related books into groups.
me: how did you choose the inital partition
them: blank stare, um the library does that.
me: yes, well I mean did you use Forgy or Random Partition
them: I don't know what those are. That's just random trivia that I would look up when working. Do you find asking random trivia helps you hire people:
me:...So do you have any questions for me?
Hedge funds have lots of mundane programming jobs. Most are back office stitching together WPF and accounting systems. Even at the HFT firms I've seen only a small portion of the programmers actually do anything on the main trading system.
I'd love to hear about your Jane Street experience here:)
Like most things the closer you are to the money the more you'll make and the more exciting your job will be:)
Most quant jobs that I've seen were very mundane, category 3 is most of the quant jobs. Though most will tell you that they are in category 1 :)