what's the best part/wost part about being a quant?

[omd]

Worst part about  being a quant was spending a lot of hours looking for memory leaks in other peoples' crap spaghetti code - no doubt about that.  Trading is more fun for sure, but the entry level part of being a trader can often involve a lot of crap that quanty type people would feel above doing (and therefore they cannot do it) - in order to do it you must learn a lot about humility!

[quantnoob]

My observation in finance is that the happiest people either sit right on top of the P&L-- the rock star traders-- or far, far away from it in quasi-academic R&D quant positions. People in either of these categories tend to see themselves as "lifers", meaning that they have no problem with the idea of staying in the same career indefinitely. When they move into management, they still prefer to spend a significant amount of their time trading or doing quant research, because they love the work.



The no man's land in the middle, consisting of IT, clerks, and support quants, tends to be much less pleasant. You're close enough to the P&L for it to influence your work activities in a boreward direction-- you aren't exactly implementing your own ideas-- but you're not in an adrenaline role where you directly generate revenue. Work in this mid-range is not bad in absolute terms, and the pay is quite good compared to non-finance alternatives, but most people in this range are either trying to get into one of the two aforementioned roles, or will leave finance in a couple of years.



Traders tend not to mind the sacrifices involved in working in finance -- being bound to regular hours, noisy environments, high levels of stress, nonexistent offices, lots of data-plumbing type work -- because no other environment is possible for them. There's no such thing as a trader at Google. A rare few "true" quants (R&D) might be exempted from these sacrifices, since their job is seen as that of coming up with interesting, potentially profitable, ideas. But developers and support quants do have to make these sacrifices-- you gotta be there when the traders need you. Finance is a rather bad environment for developers-- what many quants are, in practice-- who tend to want closed-door offices, a predictable reporting structure (in finance, you don't meet your boss for coffee at 3 pm each Thursday to discuss progress; you report to your boss whenever he needs you) and an unpolluted abundance of interesting/creative work (there is some interesting work in finance, but the probability of you never having a boring project is effectively zero).

[kr]

I don't know if this is a comment about quant life, but guessing at things without a complete or orderly framework for making the decision is an acquired taste. I think that's right - if you need a quiet room and ample time to think things out, then this might not be the right business. If you are completely on the other end, like to gamble without thinking things through, then it's also not the right business. I am still thinking about the balance a bit. On the desk I think I am the more analytical pole, and I am more than aware of the drawbacks. MOST of the time the modelling assumptions are dubious; rather than moaning about it, we just have to get on with it. What bothers me is depending on approvals from other departments who can't get past the fact that it is an EXPERIENCED BUSINESS DECISION to plow on even when the model is a complete guess and a fudge. By definition, you are not blazing a new trail if you already have the map.



In the aftermath of the megabank mergers - which only looks to continue - I worry that the culture of trailblazing is going away. Personally, I don't think hedge funds are the alternative. So what I really want to say here is that if you like to be 'the police' then please choose another line of work. It's not really a 'blow up the bank' mentality we have at all - it's that the good stuff is all gray-area, and what we need is for people to assist and suggest, not to give definitive answers to a question that was not asked (i.e. should we do the trade or not?)