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So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. One thing my experience in HFT has taught me is that technical ability is only

So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. One thing my experience in HFT has taught me is that technical ability is only loosely correlated with profitability. So I wouldn't conflate Renaissance's success with their hiring practices.

kchoudhu 9y ago
Message me. I'm looking for other finance refugees to do tech things with.
triplesec 9y ago
Two things: 1. what was more or equally important than technical ability for HFT programmers' success in increasing profitability for the company? That was an interesting statement: can you elaborate? 2. That fun might have these heuristics that GP talks of, and for them, the people they hire may well be the best for them. As in, motivated and attitudinally oriented towards what they want, and more able to work free from the assumptions of _knowing_ how it's done in finance. They may be wrong in your case, but that's how heuristics work. To me, that's less of a bullshit case than trendy languages etc.
- shortoncash 9y ago
  Trading always has this trade off in terms of (dumb and fast) vs (smart and slow). In the past few years, I think it's been more beneficial to be fast enough, but very smart. So, in this sense, technical ability only takes you so far since "smarts" come from domain expertise or, plainly, just creativity. Team composition matters, since your technical guy needs to be complemented. The objective, of course, is making your team take your organization towards the holy grail of (smart and fast). I'm not sure if this directly answers your question, but perhaps it describes the scenario in which technical ability isn't everything. I do not think assembling a team for HFT is easy at all, especially now. There are a lot of good reasons for being very peculiar and selective. I am not sure industry outsiders who are just applying understand the dynamic or, in many cases, why a seemingly great candidate is rejected.
omginternets 9y ago
>So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. Picking up on your use of the word heuristic, "hiring the best" is very much an optimization problem. Specifically, there's a signal detection problem inherent to hiring in which you want to maximize your hits (selecting the best candidates) while minimizing your false alarms (hiring someone who turns out to be a bad candidate). There's another layer to this optimization problem, which is that you want to minimize costs, both in time and in money. As such, there are bound to be many heuristics that are close-to-optimal. I don't know whether excluding people with a background in finance is one of them (in fact, I suspect it's not), but the use of such a heuristic is not prima facie absurd. In fact, using (good) heuristics in hiring is a feature, not a bug. The problem here is that the heuristic is (I think) bad.
ejnulls 9y ago
Can you be "the best" if the way you think the company works is at odds with the rest of the company? Maybe you're just the best at extracting value for yourself but not at creating value for the company. "The best" is super subjective and can mean so many different things.

kchoudhu 9y ago

Message me. I'm looking for other finance refugees to do tech things with.

triplesec 9y ago

Two things: 1. what was more or equally important than technical ability for HFT programmers' success in increasing profitability for the company? That was an interesting statement: can you elaborate? 2. That fun might have these heuristics that GP talks of, and for them, the people they hire may well be the best for them. As in, motivated and attitudinally oriented towards what they want, and more able to work free from the assumptions of _knowing_ how it's done in finance. They may be wrong in your case, but that's how heuristics work. To me, that's less of a bullshit case than trendy languages etc.

shortoncash 9y ago
Trading always has this trade off in terms of (dumb and fast) vs (smart and slow). In the past few years, I think it's been more beneficial to be fast enough, but very smart. So, in this sense, technical ability only takes you so far since "smarts" come from domain expertise or, plainly, just creativity. Team composition matters, since your technical guy needs to be complemented. The objective, of course, is making your team take your organization towards the holy grail of (smart and fast). I'm not sure if this directly answers your question, but perhaps it describes the scenario in which technical ability isn't everything. I do not think assembling a team for HFT is easy at all, especially now. There are a lot of good reasons for being very peculiar and selective. I am not sure industry outsiders who are just applying understand the dynamic or, in many cases, why a seemingly great candidate is rejected.

omginternets 9y ago

>So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic. Picking up on your use of the word heuristic, "hiring the best" is very much an optimization problem. Specifically, there's a signal detection problem inherent to hiring in which you want to maximize your hits (selecting the best candidates) while minimizing your false alarms (hiring someone who turns out to be a bad candidate). There's another layer to this optimization problem, which is that you want to minimize costs, both in time and in money. As such, there are bound to be many heuristics that are close-to-optimal. I don't know whether excluding people with a background in finance is one of them (in fact, I suspect it's not), but the use of such a heuristic is not prima facie absurd. In fact, using (good) heuristics in hiring is a feature, not a bug. The problem here is that the heuristic is (I think) bad.

ejnulls 9y ago

Can you be "the best" if the way you think the company works is at odds with the rest of the company? Maybe you're just the best at extracting value for yourself but not at creating value for the company. "The best" is super subjective and can mean so many different things.