I once had a very challenging technical job interview there. Several interviewers had PhD in Computer Science.
IIRC, even the HR person I spoke to had a PhD (russian literature, I think).
They are a very impressive firm, and I hope they recover from their recent misfortunes.
my coworkers at morgan were all physics or cs phds. and a consulting expert got a nobel prize while i was there. amusingly, i interviewed at google around the same time, and some of the engineers were condescending about the quality and education of my coworkers.
What's sad is that these smart people, including ones I've met while working as a SysAdmin for a Prop Trading firm often don't have access to the capital to start their own shops. This is due to the incestuous nature of the Finance world, where it's a lot more about who you know than what you know.
Sadly, they're often in the employ of third-rate CEOs, who always get a cut off the top, and pay the producers a mere fraction of what they made for the firm and their clients.
FWIW, in my experience the handful of citadel programmers I've interacted with aren't quite in the same league as shaw/rentech/getco/jane st/etc. I have no idea how that reflects on their returns though ;-)
They show off to attract similar candidates because they know they are nowhere compared to these biggies.
If I have a offer from Goldman why the fuck I join de shaw or xyz company.
I would not invest in anything from them however. Medallion has been closed for new money for many years now and all other offerings performed poorly to say it politely.
No degree.
But I was laughing a couple months later when I was working across the hall at Akamai ...
If it's the bottom 10%, it should actually improve company's performance.
I personally think it's terrible management practice, but it seems to work for them, and there's always fresh young blood coming in at the bottom.
Now, I agree that quantifying that is non-trivial. I've always been interested in places where they actually do that (and wonder how accurate it is), but I wouldn't be surprised to find that people who find themselves in that lowest 10% don't find themselves there on a whim.
This is almost a pure software business, so why aren't these companies more like startups? Is it because of the expense of getting fine grained and low latency market data [eg. exchange colocation]? Or is it due to the contacts needed in the biz to get the 'investment' funds to trade with? Or is it because only large financial entities have access to these risky speculative trades?
Side note : I see Jane Street Capital use Ocaml, and some other quants use KDB/Q for implementing these kinds of algorithms, so it seems innovative languages give leverage here. I was thinking Node.js + a js BTree api to access streaming data would be a nice dev environment.
A trading firm needs above 2 items in addition to technical skills to succeed. A team of good people with all 3 above items (capital, trading, tech) have a good chance to succeed.
In fact, Citadel (one of the largest quant hedge funds) was started by one person (Ken Griffin) when he was a undergraduate from a Harvard dormitory. It is pretty much a startup success story.
There is a major culture difference: trading is the key activity; coding is only secondary. This may explain why trading firms usually have a typical wall-street tough culture, and don't feel like a typical silicon-valley startup.
There are. http://www.forbes.com/2010/07/28/high-frequency-trading-pers...
Incidentally Jane Street isn't a hedge fund, it's a proprietary trading firm.
ps. I never really understood the difference - Hedge Funds seem to be more about speculating via leverage than 'hedging'? [using their own proprietary algorithms to do that]
Market changes constantly. Many trading algorithms are essentially market-data driven and need to adapt to the market or lose.
