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From Trader to Tech Executive

It's the math; tech firms are after math whizzes to make sense of and use the huge amount of data on the web.
 
Andy Nguyen :: I think this is THE BEST thing about the field we are in...we are very capable of moving to where the jobs are. As long as I'm being challenged and making money, it doesn't matter what I'm doing (ethical/moral dilemmas aside)
 
JacobK :: so what are some examples? or what articles/books/blogs are a good read for the type of maths that is being used, e.g., Google's algorithms, etc.
 
Oh btw a slight bump...I actually interviewed at Phat's new company and Phat himself spoke to me for a bit. He hasn't been at the company too long though, and I'm not sure whether I spoke to enough people to get a hiring decision, so I'll ask for a do-at-home data analysis assessment as is customary for all technical roles I'm applying for.

He's an awesome guy though, with a career track very similar to mine.
 
Diego,
Here's a great lenghty article in Businessweek that also talks about the commonality between wall street quants and mathmeticians who analyze data http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_17/b4225060960537_page_3.htm It even talks about a guy who worked on Wall Street and than transferred over to Facebook to use his quant skills there just like Phat Loc.
"On Wall Street, the math geeks are known as quants. They're the ones who create sophisticated trading algorithms that can ingest vast amounts of market data and then form buy and sell decisions in milliseconds. Hammerbacher was a quant. After about 10 months, he got back in touch with Zuckerberg, who offered him the Facebook job in California. That's when Hammerbacher redirected his quant proclivities toward consumer technology. He became, as it were, a Want."
I really don't know anything about the industry. I only remebered reading about big tech companies who were after mathmeticians. After finding this article online I'm pretty sure I read it in the paper edition of Businessweek.
 
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