Confession: I'm 32 and, after 7 years mostly out of finance, I want back in.
To make it clear that I know what I'm getting into, I worked as a quant for 14 months. Had I been able to manage certain health problems that are now no big deal (I was 24, and this particular condition is one that actually tends to disappear in the 30s) I would have been very successful at that firm. However, I got too sick, resigned and (this was late 2008, so finance jobs were thin on the ground) worked in a startup while I recovered my health. Then I joined a large tech company. More startups and more tech companies.
VC-funded tech is unstable and most of the companies are poorly run (I won't name names) and this led to frequent job changes, most of my choosing, a couple otherwise. I kept fighting, studied machine learning (I'm not an expert, and would have a lot to learn from an actual quant, but I know more than 99% of the people calling themselves "data scientists" in the SillyCon Valley) and learned a bunch of programming languages (Haskell, some C, Clojure, some Python and R for the data science tools).
My "job hopper" CV, which is completely normal for VC-funded tech, has made it hard to get back into finance. (Okay, it's my fault for, at age 25, entering a startup industry where 2/3 of the companies aren't at all legitimate.)
I love programming and mathematics, but I want out of the tech world. Anything VCs fund is likely to be a marketing ploy using technology instead of a legitimate technology company, and I'm sick of that game (and getting too old for it, to be blunt). And I want back into finance. I like Chicago, I don't like California, and I like being paid what I'm worth instead of in promises and equity that is often worthless. I like being surrounded by really smart people (let's be honest, finance quants are way smarter than VC-land executives and even their "data scientists") and I don't like being anywhere near people who think that insulting horror show called "Agile Scrotum" is an acceptable thing for a 30-year-old, highly capable programmer to have to take seriously.
If anyone out there has ideas or leads, I'd love to hear them. Thanks in advance. Hope this was at least entertaining and therefore not a waste of anyone's time.
Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.
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october
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
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goldorak
- Posts: 0
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.
Welcome and good luck with your search. There are quite a few people from Chicago area hanging around here. Hope you will be able to contribute to the community too once in a while.
Great to hear that you have been able to go over your condition. Most people who claim strongly their great successes tend to forget that health is an important factor to be included in 'luck'.
Regarding: "I love programming and mathematics, but I want out of the tech world. Anything VCs fund is likely to be a marketing ploy using technology instead of a legitimate technology company", well... you would definitely love most of what happens in the hedge fund industry... Cry
Great to hear that you have been able to go over your condition. Most people who claim strongly their great successes tend to forget that health is an important factor to be included in 'luck'.
Regarding: "I love programming and mathematics, but I want out of the tech world. Anything VCs fund is likely to be a marketing ploy using technology instead of a legitimate technology company", well... you would definitely love most of what happens in the hedge fund industry... Cry
If you are not living on the edge you are taking up too much space.
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october
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.
"There are quite a few people from Chicago area hanging around here."
Great! I hope to be speaking to them soon.
"well... you would definitely love most of what happens in the hedge fund industry..."
I like finance's honesty. Both finance and VC-funded tech are all about the money, but one is honest about what it is, and therefore shares the money with the people doing the work, and the other tells a bunch of young idiots (like me, some years ago) that they're "changing the world" and going to get rich off their unicorn equity, and therefore manages to create a culture of absurd hours, cultish conformity, and sloppy work.
Finance has a lot of cutthroat and slimy people, but it also has a lot of smart, ethical people. The VC-funded startup world has slimy people at the top and decent-but-clueless (and usually under 35, meaning that I'm about to age out of "cultural fit") people doing the actual work.
Also, finance respects talent and has people who are smart enough to recognize it. VC-funded startups don't, except in a few companies that do intense machine learning, because the fact is that most VCs are people who failed out of PE and aren't smart enough to separate talent from talk, which means that they choose founders who aren't smart enough to separate talent from talk... and the result is that you get an anti-intellectual culture where most CTOs would rather build teams of 60 mediocre developers than teams of 5 excellent Haskellers who can get just as much done. The surprising irony is that the forefront in the commoditization of technology talent (e.g. that humiliating, childish "Agile/Scrum" garbage) is the technology industry.
Great! I hope to be speaking to them soon.
"well... you would definitely love most of what happens in the hedge fund industry..."
I like finance's honesty. Both finance and VC-funded tech are all about the money, but one is honest about what it is, and therefore shares the money with the people doing the work, and the other tells a bunch of young idiots (like me, some years ago) that they're "changing the world" and going to get rich off their unicorn equity, and therefore manages to create a culture of absurd hours, cultish conformity, and sloppy work.
Finance has a lot of cutthroat and slimy people, but it also has a lot of smart, ethical people. The VC-funded startup world has slimy people at the top and decent-but-clueless (and usually under 35, meaning that I'm about to age out of "cultural fit") people doing the actual work.
Also, finance respects talent and has people who are smart enough to recognize it. VC-funded startups don't, except in a few companies that do intense machine learning, because the fact is that most VCs are people who failed out of PE and aren't smart enough to separate talent from talk, which means that they choose founders who aren't smart enough to separate talent from talk... and the result is that you get an anti-intellectual culture where most CTOs would rather build teams of 60 mediocre developers than teams of 5 excellent Haskellers who can get just as much done. The surprising irony is that the forefront in the commoditization of technology talent (e.g. that humiliating, childish "Agile/Scrum" garbage) is the technology industry.
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TSWP
- Posts: 0
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.
>finance respects talent and has people who are smart enough to recognize it
october, welcome to the forum, I sincerely wish you great success in your quest for a new career path.
I am not so sure I agree with the fact that finance respects talent.
Finance respects:
a) money
b) proven track record/ability to make serious money
c) a combination of a) and b)
Talent is not respected in finance, it (or better: the fruit of it) is stolen wherever possible, and otherwise enslaved by employers that pay incredibly well for that talent (read: a proven ability to make money, that is the only talent respected as we said).
If you will start (or have started) reaching out to recruiters or directly to hedge funds in the next few weeks you will find out quickly if your skills and CV match the checkboxes on the list of the first filter and you will realize how little they care about your talent or potential.
In the end is just about numbers: did you make money, yes or no, where and when, how much, can you program in C#/C++/Python/Java, can you deal with Matlab/SQLs, etc., are you a mathematician, a physicist or a computer or data scientist, possibly with a PhD? And so on...
I am going to end by saying that some years ago I had a client that was the "Head of Quantitative Research" at a 5B mostly-macro fund in NY (not sure what Quantitative has to do with it, but that was his clown title at the firm). He left the job, roughly 1M USD a year including bonus, he was convinced he could start a fund on his own, this was circa 2009 in the aftermath of the crisis.
He raised zero capital and 3 years later he went back to various recruiters and employers convinced he could get back into finance quickly. He was sadly mistaken, recruiters told him he did not stand a chance. He told them he had 15 years of real life experience in the field. Nobody gave a damn about his "talent".
FastFWD to 2015, he is still unemployed, as far as I know.
Keep us posted about how it goes, I am truly sympathetic with your effort and I really hope you succeed.
october, welcome to the forum, I sincerely wish you great success in your quest for a new career path.
I am not so sure I agree with the fact that finance respects talent.
Finance respects:
a) money
b) proven track record/ability to make serious money
c) a combination of a) and b)
Talent is not respected in finance, it (or better: the fruit of it) is stolen wherever possible, and otherwise enslaved by employers that pay incredibly well for that talent (read: a proven ability to make money, that is the only talent respected as we said).
If you will start (or have started) reaching out to recruiters or directly to hedge funds in the next few weeks you will find out quickly if your skills and CV match the checkboxes on the list of the first filter and you will realize how little they care about your talent or potential.
In the end is just about numbers: did you make money, yes or no, where and when, how much, can you program in C#/C++/Python/Java, can you deal with Matlab/SQLs, etc., are you a mathematician, a physicist or a computer or data scientist, possibly with a PhD? And so on...
I am going to end by saying that some years ago I had a client that was the "Head of Quantitative Research" at a 5B mostly-macro fund in NY (not sure what Quantitative has to do with it, but that was his clown title at the firm). He left the job, roughly 1M USD a year including bonus, he was convinced he could start a fund on his own, this was circa 2009 in the aftermath of the crisis.
He raised zero capital and 3 years later he went back to various recruiters and employers convinced he could get back into finance quickly. He was sadly mistaken, recruiters told him he did not stand a chance. He told them he had 15 years of real life experience in the field. Nobody gave a damn about his "talent".
FastFWD to 2015, he is still unemployed, as far as I know.
Keep us posted about how it goes, I am truly sympathetic with your effort and I really hope you succeed.
The only thing that counts: can you make money?
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MCgeneratedname
- Posts: 0
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.
hello october and good luck.
@TSWP. This might be relevant for october and something I ask myself all the time:
Is there any way to show that you can make money without actually having a track record?
From your post it sounds that it would be impossible.
@TSWP. This might be relevant for october and something I ask myself all the time:
Is there any way to show that you can make money without actually having a track record?
From your post it sounds that it would be impossible.
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svisstack
- Posts: 0
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.
Depends on what quality of track record we are talking about, everyone can make own track record on PA self funded.
Time well wasted.
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october
- Posts: 1
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.
TSWP: Thanks for this reply. It was very helpful.
"Finance respects:
a) money
b) proven track record/ability to make serious money
c) a combination of a) and b)"
I see what you're saying, and I think you're obviously right. The thing that I would say is that the VC-funded startup world is even worse. Ultimately, my belief (which may be naive) is that a talented person *can* make a shit-ton of money, and that other high-talent people will recognize the possibility. Obviously, I'm not going to be deciding on trading strategies in my first year. I don't expect that. I'll have to be someone's implementation guy, a quant or an IT director or a hacker, for 5-10 years while I learn how the markets work from him. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with banging code together (hell, I actually like programming) while I learn the details of the financial side. I'd rather smash my head against complex algorithms as the protege of an aging financial genius than as a Director of Engineering with 0.25% (subject to vesting, cliff, and a bunch of shitty terms like "participating preferred" that are out of my control) of some goofy toilet check-in app company.
Neither finance nor VC-land respects talent for its own sake, of course, but finance has people who are as smart as me and who can recognize 4+ sigma talent. In VC-land, there are some seriously smart people, too, but they're all ivory tower weirdos with no decision-making power, and the shots are all called by people dumber than my average morning dump.
I guess that I mean to say: I know what I'm getting into. The Valhalla where talent and culture and curiosity are recognized and valued for their own sake does not exist and never did. I'm old enough to understand that. It's all about money, everywhere. That's true in finance and in "technology". The difference is that finance has people in high places who can recognize 4+ sigma talent, whereas +4's and +5's in technology/software/Silicon Valley are either bitter as hell (like me, in 10 years, if I don't get the fuck out) or working on irrelevant Google X shit and can't call shots or make careers.
"Talent is not respected in finance, it (or better: the fruit of it) is stolen wherever possible, and otherwise enslaved by employers that pay incredibly well for that talent (read: a proven ability to make money, that is the only talent respected as we said)."
Again, my point of comparison is VC-funded technology, where the same is true, except for the "pay incredibly well" part.
"I am going to end by saying that some years ago I had a client that was the 'Head of Quantitative Research' at a 5B mostly-macro fund in NY (not sure what Quantitative has to do with it, but that was his clown title at the firm). He left the job, roughly 1M USD a year including bonus, he was convinced he could start a fund on his own, this was circa 2009 in the aftermath of the crisis.
He raised zero capital and 3 years later he went back to various recruiters and employers convinced he could get back into finance quickly. He was sadly mistaken, recruiters told him he did not stand a chance. He told them he had 15 years of real life experience in the field. Nobody gave a damn about his 'talent'.
FastFWD to 2015, he is still unemployed, as far as I know."
Shit. What the fuck happened? Did he make enemies on the way out?
I've seen this in technology, too. People take 2-5+ years out to do a startup that never goes anywhere and they get age-discriminated (which starts at 35 in the Valley) when they try to get back in to regular jobs. They often have to reinvent themselves as "angel investors" and try to get VC jobs, which are sinecures handed out based on connections rather than any definition of merit. (None of the celebrity VCs have any idea what they're doing. They're good at self-promotion but they're mostly bad at their jobs.) It's sad.
You'd think that a good recruiter could help him spin the 3 "lost years" as a success, and that he could just plain make a track record up. Why wasn't that an option? I mean, it's bad to lie on your CV, but it's ethically worse in my opinion to be unemployed for 3 years and let your family down like that.
I suppose that if I can't get back into finance, I can go around to high schools and give that warning speech, but instead of it being about meth, it'll be about startups and software engineering and how much it fucks up your ability to get back into a career for adults when you grow up. "Tech industry. Not even once."
"Finance respects:
a) money
b) proven track record/ability to make serious money
c) a combination of a) and b)"
I see what you're saying, and I think you're obviously right. The thing that I would say is that the VC-funded startup world is even worse. Ultimately, my belief (which may be naive) is that a talented person *can* make a shit-ton of money, and that other high-talent people will recognize the possibility. Obviously, I'm not going to be deciding on trading strategies in my first year. I don't expect that. I'll have to be someone's implementation guy, a quant or an IT director or a hacker, for 5-10 years while I learn how the markets work from him. I'm fine with that. I'm fine with banging code together (hell, I actually like programming) while I learn the details of the financial side. I'd rather smash my head against complex algorithms as the protege of an aging financial genius than as a Director of Engineering with 0.25% (subject to vesting, cliff, and a bunch of shitty terms like "participating preferred" that are out of my control) of some goofy toilet check-in app company.
Neither finance nor VC-land respects talent for its own sake, of course, but finance has people who are as smart as me and who can recognize 4+ sigma talent. In VC-land, there are some seriously smart people, too, but they're all ivory tower weirdos with no decision-making power, and the shots are all called by people dumber than my average morning dump.
I guess that I mean to say: I know what I'm getting into. The Valhalla where talent and culture and curiosity are recognized and valued for their own sake does not exist and never did. I'm old enough to understand that. It's all about money, everywhere. That's true in finance and in "technology". The difference is that finance has people in high places who can recognize 4+ sigma talent, whereas +4's and +5's in technology/software/Silicon Valley are either bitter as hell (like me, in 10 years, if I don't get the fuck out) or working on irrelevant Google X shit and can't call shots or make careers.
"Talent is not respected in finance, it (or better: the fruit of it) is stolen wherever possible, and otherwise enslaved by employers that pay incredibly well for that talent (read: a proven ability to make money, that is the only talent respected as we said)."
Again, my point of comparison is VC-funded technology, where the same is true, except for the "pay incredibly well" part.
"I am going to end by saying that some years ago I had a client that was the 'Head of Quantitative Research' at a 5B mostly-macro fund in NY (not sure what Quantitative has to do with it, but that was his clown title at the firm). He left the job, roughly 1M USD a year including bonus, he was convinced he could start a fund on his own, this was circa 2009 in the aftermath of the crisis.
He raised zero capital and 3 years later he went back to various recruiters and employers convinced he could get back into finance quickly. He was sadly mistaken, recruiters told him he did not stand a chance. He told them he had 15 years of real life experience in the field. Nobody gave a damn about his 'talent'.
FastFWD to 2015, he is still unemployed, as far as I know."
Shit. What the fuck happened? Did he make enemies on the way out?
I've seen this in technology, too. People take 2-5+ years out to do a startup that never goes anywhere and they get age-discriminated (which starts at 35 in the Valley) when they try to get back in to regular jobs. They often have to reinvent themselves as "angel investors" and try to get VC jobs, which are sinecures handed out based on connections rather than any definition of merit. (None of the celebrity VCs have any idea what they're doing. They're good at self-promotion but they're mostly bad at their jobs.) It's sad.
You'd think that a good recruiter could help him spin the 3 "lost years" as a success, and that he could just plain make a track record up. Why wasn't that an option? I mean, it's bad to lie on your CV, but it's ethically worse in my opinion to be unemployed for 3 years and let your family down like that.
I suppose that if I can't get back into finance, I can go around to high schools and give that warning speech, but instead of it being about meth, it'll be about startups and software engineering and how much it fucks up your ability to get back into a career for adults when you grow up. "Tech industry. Not even once."
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v510R
- Posts: 0
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
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svisstack
- Posts: 0
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.
>> What is "4+ sigma talent"?
sigma from normal distribution dude!
sigma from normal distribution dude!
Time well wasted.
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v510R
- Posts: 0
- Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2004 12:00 am
Live in Chicago. Once a quant, worked in many startups, machine learning and Haskell. Want to go back to quant path.
Do people really measure talent like that? How exactly does someone bin him/herself in the "+4 sigma" category?