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Are quant job more and more like developer

SimonZheng

SimonZheng

Joined
3/3/10
Messages
169
Points
28
Recently, I heard words from different professionals.

"One recuriter said 99% his quantitative openings job are developers. "

"The number of programmers hired by JP Morgan every year are more than Microsoft."

"Due to regulation, banks don't want to take risk to create new models any more. Modeling role requirement from bank are decreasing."

Does it mean quant job require more programming skills and less math stuff on current job market?
 
I see another pattern here - recruiters try to sell more and more positions with words "quantitative" and "front office", even if responsibilities mean work on wrapper around wrapper around quant lib with other unrelated stuff they would still try to sell this position to you as "quantitative" and say that it's "somewhere between quants and IT with a great exposure to quantitative part of the business" (c) which is the well known industry lie.
 
@SimonZheng

That is certainly a bitter truth. I have seen this shift of paradigm in last 5 years, a quantitative job that requires to build models (if at all) is more suited for PhDs in numerical descipline.
 
The optimum is somewhere between. Extract from one WS CEO speech: "I hire quants with good numerical skills and mathematical knowledge and background but that is insufficient for a job requirement generally. I have to hire another one who is programmer if that quant doens't program". Concentrating more on one of them - math or programming - steals your time from and creates a huge opportunity cost for another field. As for the patern that develops, it'd be interesting too observe the number of programmers recruited in the past decade by financial institutions and compare it to the previous decade. Decade time interval is a logical time pass to see how technological development influences the employement pattern in this field...
 
I don't know enough to comment much but at a conference I was at not too long ago a panel did say that the BIGGEST bottleneck currently is TECHNOLOGY, not the mathematics. So it only makes sense to hire more developers.
 
This raises the question of what do you think "quant job" is to begin with? If the image of a guy with a chalk in front of blackboard is first in your mind, you will be disappointed.
When is the last time that you read about an MFE guy whose name is associated with a quant model?
To that extent, readers of this website aka MFE grads will mostly have programming as part of his daily job routine, be it hardcore trading system development, model building/fixing to running risk report using excel/vba/software packages.

And the trend of recruiters slapping a "quant" in front of IT jobs to lure unsuspecting people in is not something new or surprising. If people judge a value of a job by its title, they deserve to be strung along. This is an industry where if you are not career savvy, chances are people will take advantage of you over and again. That's sad but true.
 
KaiRu said:
I see another pattern here - recruiters try to sell more and more positions with words "quantitative" and "front office", even if responsibilities mean work on wrapper around wrapper around quant lib with other unrelated stuff they would still try to sell this position to you as "quantitative" and say that it's "somewhere between quants and IT with a great exposure to quantitative part of the business" (c) which is the well known industry lie.
Click to expand...

If you can marginally improve any of existing models that would demonstrably do a better job in practice, you will find enough recruiters out there that will not ask you to code wrappers.

The level of sophistication of some already existing models is such that just implementing them is a challenging job.
 
This is not the case only in quantitative finance. If we take a look at physics and other natural (or many social) sciences, we'll see that programming is invading heavily in those fields. Some points are valid and clear: pure math is not that needed and applicable. We, students frequently come across problems where it's impossible to resist with mathematical toolbox. Software programs are taking a big part int this field and have swallowed many jobs considered a pure human work just a decade ago. Many of jobs are still waiting to be victims of computer programs. If some time ago, financial engineers competed to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities by a "who first that wins" principal, today computer scientists have replaced that work of speed. If some time ago people struggled to fit the distributions with the data manually, those were the greatest statisticians, today their jobs are not almost needed (at least in this context). So some positions are still getting useless. No need to fear with it. It is normal and expected...

...to be continued 10 years later...when the useless jobs list will host another members :(
 
Tsotne said:
This is not the case only in quantitative finance. If we take a look at physics and other natural (or many social) sciences, we'll see that programming is invading heavily in those fields.
Click to expand...
There are two reasons
1) The toolset is becoming more computational and less pencil/paper math. You may have laughed when your high school teacher told you that "use a calculator" was a valid approach to solving a math problem, but you won't be laughing when you realize that the set of analytically solvable physics problems is a set of measure zero.
2) Data. I did research for LHC so I got to read up on some of the data requirements. Check this out http://www.universetoday.com/17672/...hysics-can-it-revolutionize-the-internet-too/

Average aggregate data throughput requirement of 1 GB/s or more. And this is only a vanishingly small fraction of the events produced by the collider. True, most of those uncaptured events were uninteresting in the first place, but it's pretty astounding nevertheless.

Edit: http://supercomputing.caltech.edu/archive/sc09/docs/BWCPressRelease.pdf

Moving towards Terabit...
 
As an analytics developer in an investment bank, here is what I have observed over past 5/6 years. Days of heavy deal structuring and securitization are over, so new opportunities for roles like derivatives pricing/calibration took a backseat. And, that resulted in less emphasis on educational courses like Stochastic Models, Advanced Probabilities, Survival Analysis etc. Major banks ( as well as their trading/CVA desks ) are busy with Risk and its different flavors like VaR, tail risk, hypothetical stress scenarios to bulletproof their portfolios. The recruiting groups in those banks look for courses like Multivariate Statistics, Numerical Methods more nowadays. Roles of deal structuring in the past were more suited to PhDs, whereas requirement for developer roles on risk side can be fulfilled by an MS in Math/Stat.
 
Academics should keep up to follow the speed of development in numerical capabilities like high technology, fast algorithms,etc...All in all, those numerical models are also based (might be simple) but on theories. We are expecting to see replacement of pure stochastic knowledge, advanced statistical capabilities (which is performed analytically by human) by single software (or some highly utilized softwares) lifting the heavy weight of doing mathematical work by hand from human shoulders and placing them on those of themselves.
 
Hi
An off question but wanted to ask about quant/finance jobs in California?
Do many students end up in NY even after studying in Cali.
 
99% of recruiter positions are quant dev:

That's because most recruiters center around the IT field. Why the heck that is I have absolutely no clue. Perhaps because the overseas kids that can't speak English need some recruiter to find them, and the perfect English speaking kids can go and network their way to something.

As for quant jobs in California: uhh...you know that search engine that you probably use 5 times a day? You know one of the candidates they love most for some of their statistical positions are people wi th MFEs and R coding experience, correct?
 
Specifics of the quantitative jobs are moving towards more numerical computational way which requires the intervention of computer scientists and developers.
 
Andy Nguyen said:
This raises the question of what do you think "quant job" is to begin with? If the image of a guy with a chalk in front of blackboard is first in your mind, you will be disappointed.
When is the last time that you read about an MFE guy whose name is associated with a quant model?
To that extent, readers of this website aka MFE grads will mostly have programming as part of his daily job routine, be it hardcore trading system development, model building/fixing to running risk report using excel/vba/software packages.

And the trend of recruiters slapping a "quant" in front of IT jobs to lure unsuspecting people in is not something new or surprising. If people judge a value of a job by its title, they deserve to be strung along. This is an industry where if you are not career savvy, chances are people will take advantage of you over and again. That's sad but true.
Click to expand...

Thanks Andy for the answer. I have a question.

What exactly should be the path taken by some one who wants to become an analyst ? I understand that the initial jobs after MFE might involve a lot of programming, but what steps should he take then to grow to an analyst level ?

Thanks
Babinu
 
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