A frank, honest letter shocks the financial world.
No. doubt.
Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
School is a filter you apply before you take the effort to figure out whether someone is a "good candidate." The uphill battle for people from no-name schools is to give hiring managers an alternative reason to put in that effort. That seems to be exactly what this kid did. He knew he wouldn't get past the hiring filter, so he went out of his way to make a contact in real life and then follow up with an eye-catching…
I can see that if you were getting dozens or hundreds of applications for a role you'd have to be pretty brutal about who to cut before you even spoke to them. I've never had that luxury, though. Any job i've been involved with advertising has had trouble attracting many applicants at all.
Goldman receives about 10,000 job applications per year (disproportionately for junior analysts). McKinsey receives about 100,000 per year.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#73>I wouldn't be surprised if this guy gets at least a call from every bank out there I think that's funny. My brother works in finance, and I work in engineering. We both interview candidates and we were discussing our approaches recently. What struck us is how different our approaches are. A few key differences: * In general, his approach is based more on intuition, whereas mine is very objective. We both spend a lot…
I'm interested in what you say about extracurricular activities. I can certainly agree that in most cases they are a waste of space "I like music, movies and videogames". Surely though there would be some extracurriculars that might impress you? Contributions to a high profile open source projects , doing something that requires good organisation/people skills or just something that might tell you a bit about the per…
I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. We both filter on GPA about the same.
I can't see how either of those things is even slightly relevant, at least in isolation. The school someone chooses may reflect a great many factors, and it's entirely possible someone went to Midwest Tennessee State Agricultural and Technical College instead of Harvard, even if they could have been accepted by Harvard. Who knows, maybe they didn't bother applying to Harvard because they thought they couldn't afford it, or the wanted to stay close to home for family reasons, etc.
GPA? Feh... how do you discriminate between the guy with the 3.8 GPA who took Underwater Basket Weaving and other throwaway classes for all his non-major electives, and the guy who took String Theory, Quantum Electrodynamics and Abstract Algebra as electives?
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. Would an otherwise good candidate be excluded solely for going to some no-name school?
I've recruited for Google, Facebook and NASA. It just blows my mind that people STILL filter based on school. I got admitted to a bunch of great schools and stayed close to home because my mom was ill. Does this make me not worth hiring? There are millions of people in semi-unique situations that kept them from attending an Ivy League school. I don't get why someone would want to eliminate tons of potentially great p…
Yeah, same here. Look at it as a blessing though... it means that their competitors can snag great people by not applying such arbitrary filters. Hell, that's probably one reason startups can attract awesome people who didn't get scooped up by Goldman Sachs or whoever.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It even says at the bottom "This email is confidential..."
I suspect that footer got added by the first person who forwarded the email, not by the original sender. Random people sending cover letters don't tend to add crazy confidentiality footers to email; business email systems do that.
It's cut off, but I thought it was a joke. It doesn't quite read as official.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I filter far less aggressively, somewhere around the top 50-100 school mark. Would an otherwise good candidate be excluded solely for going to some no-name school?
I've recruited for Google, Facebook and NASA. It just blows my mind that people STILL filter based on school. I got admitted to a bunch of great schools and stayed close to home because my mom was ill. Does this make me not worth hiring? There are millions of people in semi-unique situations that kept them from attending an Ivy League school. I don't get why someone would want to eliminate tons of potentially great p…
Banks and consulting firms are in a somewhat unusual situation. They get 10,000 applicants for ~100 analyst positions, but even after they hire an analyst they're really just rolling the dice to find the ~10 (or whatever) of those that are going to be managing director or partner material. The rest will be pushed out after a certain number of years.
So what they do is operate on the following principle: not all smart people go to Harvard, but most people who go to Harvard are smart. They're not worried about missing out on candidates that are "worth hiring" because they have many more such candidates than they have open spots. What they want is a practical sorting mechanism that maximizes the number of potential stars in each analyst class.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Forwarding emails is a copyright violation.
Always amazes me how HN is full of incredibly intelligent people yet some are so spectacularly void of common sense. Only on HN would the discussion turn to whether or not the kid would be annoyed at an email that's forwarded without someone asking him. Course he wouldn't - they are all lauding him. His email has achieved exactly what it set out to do - it's got him a gig at an investment bank.
Course he wouldn't - they are all lauding him.
So basically, the ends justify the means?
That's like suggesting that me giving away your credit card number is okay if you end up buying the product that the third party tries to sell you.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect that a large chunk of HN's lurkers are thwarted engineers, who got recruited out of college by IBs and are trapped in the world of finance by their bloated compensation packages, now living the carefree life of the programmer vicariously by hanging around here.
Not sure which carefree life of the programmer you're talking about -- do you mean the one where you work at a startup, constantly aware of the risk of showing up to a locked door from mass layoffs, expected to work crazy hours out of devotion and loyalty, loaded with stock options that will likely be worthless, even if the company gets purchased on its way out? PS Good choice on editing that last line out.
No no, he's talking about the collective fantasy in which we own that startup.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure which carefree life of the programmer you're talking about -- do you mean the one where you work at a startup, constantly aware of the risk of showing up to a locked door from mass layoffs, expected to work crazy hours out of devotion and loyalty, loaded with stock options that will likely be worthless, even if the company gets purchased on its way out? PS Good choice on editing that last line out.
No no, he's talking about the collective fantasy in which we own that startup.
Bingo. I think there's a lot of vicariousness going on all round here. It's a pervasive problem with the internet.
I tried to replace the last line with one about how I am partly hanging around here vicariously living the life of a cleverer and more highly paid programmer, but I couldn't make it work so I just got rid of it. Hmmmm.
Re: Kid Sends Blunt Cover Letter and Now People are Trying to Hire Him
#80One of the responses, fourth from the bottom: > Not sure if either of you guys are still looking for a lackey to build models and fetch coffee, but this kid could be worth a conversation Does "build models" mean what I think it does - actually coming up with the mathematical method that projects risk, return, etc ? And if so, is the author being sarcastic, or do they really consider this to be unimportant work best p…
No, the models are already built. However they need someone to comb through a company's financial records and plug the appropriate numbers into an Excel spreadsheet.
It's a glorified data entry position, but interns will gain knowledge and experience.