To put a positive spin on the experience Anthony's friend...
This guy has worked hard to get a job, and scored two interviews.
Obviously I have no way of telling how smart this guy is, but one signal in this data is that people with his level of ability who worked less hard at job hunting did not score enough interviews to get a job.
It raises the question of what 'normal conditions' are ?
My view is that a market where a reasonably smart person can do a one year course, and then have a reasonable expectation of a very high paying job is not stable.
Basic economics tell us that as price goes up, supply will tend to rise as well.
That is indeed what we see. I don't have exact numbers but my call is that the supply of new MFEs has grown at around 30% for the last decade. A mindlessly simplistic projection of that implies that all masters graduates will be MFEs before very long.
When I wrote the first edition of the guide to quant careers with Paul Wilmott, I developed a model independent view of how you should look for jobs. That was before the peak of the market, and still holds true.
The model is so simple that at first I was wary of putting it on paper, because I felt that it would be seen as trivially obvious to anyone smart enough to do this work. But I now know that many people still don't get it.
I simply say that the job market is always competitive. Maybe you have skills, tenacity, brains, education and a father who owns a major bank, but the best jobs still require you to beat other people. The job you can easily get is almost certainly less good than the job you could have got with a bit more effort and luck.
