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"Hirers tend to be looking for strong programming and data management skills as much as mathematical ability" This cannot be over emphasized. You cannot just
by mlrtime 12y ago
"Hirers tend to be looking for strong programming and data management skills as much as mathematical ability"
This cannot be over emphasized. You cannot just have an aptitude for math/statistics/probability. You will need to be able to write high performance production quality code.
- brador 12y agoBug free first time and write code fast also helps.
- markovbling 12y agoSpot on. I got a job in finance as a quant and spent the first year building automated processes to pull portfolio holdings data from email attachments and scrape data from a bunch of different sources.
- branchless 12y ago95% of quant code is not only fails to achieve low-latency, it's utterly incorrect, unmaintainable and frankly deranged.
- Hansi 12y agoAgree mostly, even when wanting to deliver a perfect solution that's simply not an option because of requirements for speed of delievering results and lack of man power.
- dreamweapon 12y agoSo true. Of course, you better not tell that to the person who wrote it. You might not get your bonus.
- ratsbane 12y agoThat might also be true for 95% of all code.
- kasey_junk 12y agoNow admittedly this is sampling bias, but I have never seen code written by a quant that could be put into production without being reworked by a software professional. The skill sets are in some way exclusive of each other. Quants do lots of exploratory work. This involves tons of one-of experiments and throwing away things that don't work. They often frequently don't have the operational understanding of the way the systems they interact operate. Further, making stuff fast on a computer is a very, very particular skill. People that could do all of that are extremely rare (such that I've never met one).
- vasilipupkin 12y agoSampling bias. At least in HFT, the days of hiring quants who can't code are over.
- lucozade 12y agoI 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.
- gjm11 12y agoAnd 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.