After 10 years working as a quant developer in finance, I find myself forced to pursue a different career in order to feed my family.
First of all, "quant" is only my denomination. The firm I worked for (won't call them a company since they don't deserve that) does appear on this site too, apart from the usual glassdoor, with one guy interviewing for them and the common knowledge about it is that it's pretty shitty. I can attest to that
For funk's sake, it's not like from my point of view you can describe them as "a $1B fund without a single quant" but even more, they were doing options market making without having a prior guy specialized in that or investing into training an interested guy in that (ME, ME!).
The market making desk is long history, not before they attempted a resurrect by hiring some guys (trough internal references of course, if you're not referred and not a billionaire already, you've no chance of making it to this position, and if you're a billionaire you don't need this position anyways).
The guys were recently laid off by a big bank (which company lays off it's best employees first?). They enhanced our system to the point where every last half-competent guy resigned, and their enhanced system wasn't able to tell them they're going to go from +5M to -3M in a single day. They weren't laid off since they pulled the argument they only need like $100B to make this work and they're used to those kind of money (yeah, gimme infinite money and I can do anything). Eventually (even) they too left in disgust and I was left alone with the retards.
After 10 years I left too. Took me 2 years to get back a little bit of hope and now it's not that bad. I'm payed double as I was while doing stuff that could make or break millions (like tell the traders: "guys, did you notice there's a problem in our system which causes the volatility of commodities XAU, XPT etc not being updated in a year? they didn't, nor did our QA, or our systems, but I'm a systems guy albeit massively overworked and underheard, so I didn't escalate it and to what purpose?).
But it's an unrelated domain and having invested 10 years in the prior, I recognize that this is about the amount I'm going to have to invest in this one too (3D graphics for your premium car display) if I'm going to get near to where I'm at now.
And don't feel much like it. But what options do I have otherwise?
I'd have plenty of options if I had money. But having been born in a wrong geographical place, this means the entire amount of my 18 years of savings equals what I save in a single year while working for my new guys. So it's not like I have many options. For now.
First of all, "quant" is only my denomination. The firm I worked for (won't call them a company since they don't deserve that) does appear on this site too, apart from the usual glassdoor, with one guy interviewing for them and the common knowledge about it is that it's pretty shitty. I can attest to that
For funk's sake, it's not like from my point of view you can describe them as "a $1B fund without a single quant" but even more, they were doing options market making without having a prior guy specialized in that or investing into training an interested guy in that (ME, ME!).
The market making desk is long history, not before they attempted a resurrect by hiring some guys (trough internal references of course, if you're not referred and not a billionaire already, you've no chance of making it to this position, and if you're a billionaire you don't need this position anyways).
The guys were recently laid off by a big bank (which company lays off it's best employees first?). They enhanced our system to the point where every last half-competent guy resigned, and their enhanced system wasn't able to tell them they're going to go from +5M to -3M in a single day. They weren't laid off since they pulled the argument they only need like $100B to make this work and they're used to those kind of money (yeah, gimme infinite money and I can do anything). Eventually (even) they too left in disgust and I was left alone with the retards.
After 10 years I left too. Took me 2 years to get back a little bit of hope and now it's not that bad. I'm payed double as I was while doing stuff that could make or break millions (like tell the traders: "guys, did you notice there's a problem in our system which causes the volatility of commodities XAU, XPT etc not being updated in a year? they didn't, nor did our QA, or our systems, but I'm a systems guy albeit massively overworked and underheard, so I didn't escalate it and to what purpose?).
But it's an unrelated domain and having invested 10 years in the prior, I recognize that this is about the amount I'm going to have to invest in this one too (3D graphics for your premium car display) if I'm going to get near to where I'm at now.
And don't feel much like it. But what options do I have otherwise?
I'd have plenty of options if I had money. But having been born in a wrong geographical place, this means the entire amount of my 18 years of savings equals what I save in a single year while working for my new guys. So it's not like I have many options. For now.
