Quant developer role

Just out of curiosity,

  1. What are the exit opportunities like ?
  2. What are the typical candidates like ?
  3. Is it true that there’s about 4-5 of them per quant ?
  4. Any other stuff I should know ?

Shouldnt you know to put this in careers by now?

Assuming this is for bank, hedge fund, etc. This is based on my experience.

  1. The opportunities are more vertical. Become manager of small team, manager of manager, etc. Kind of like the same job at tech companies. It’s pretty hard to switch roles, just like in any job to be honest. From my observation, the finance developers are paid more per quality of person compared to people at Google or something. However, the tradeoff is not being at the front of the business and feeling lower in the organization somehow.

  2. The spectrum is pretty wide. Best companies have MIT type true nerds. It varies from there. The elite firms tend to be very elitist; if it’s one of these, you will know from the very pretentious job listing. If it’s just a normal role, then the listing will tend to be more normal.

  3. More or less. I don’t know the true numbers, but a lot of developers work on interface for internal applications, reporting processes, or other mundane things. The sheer volume of this stuff relative to analytics guarantees that the developers outnumber quants. However, not all developers are smart enough to do the quant work, so this might be a different job.

  4. You might have to marry an Indian to help your career in the long term.

Thanks Ohai,

A Few BB banks were recruiting at my school at the Math/CS department for this role.Funny how the business majors were practically told to F off whenever they tried to pass on their resumes.