Liam,
[...]
Although what you say quant doesnt' earn a lot, I would regard >85K is easily obtained by a quant even as a quant developer.
[stuff about Canada and PhD cabbies snipped...]
Not only so, from conversation with a friend who is taking a master degree in one of a university in Canada (i wouldn't disclose which university) that many of those who finish their master can't find jobs so they continue studying PhDs.
[...]
I can build that knowledge by reading books and doing coursera courses online. In fact, in signal processing we have equations to compute weight factors to combine signals from different antennas. Those equations are indeed the same equations as in finance to combine portofolios to achieve maximum yield. This is one of the reasons why i choose finance. In fact, even if i dont' get a quant analyst position. A quant developer is interesting enough for me.
. In fact, i've tried quant analyst jobs, but to no avail. It looks like it is very difficult to get in. However, from my research on people's resumes on linkedin, some of PhDs in EE straight from BSc to PhD even in my area succeed in making their ways to quant without any finance degree. Having said that, of course the majority usually take 2 more years to study master of finance to make their ways in.
thanks
I'll address the main points above. In the style of Liam's entertaining (but helpful/informative) postings, I'm gonna be very opinionated, but also ramble a bit (it's late).
Salary: 80-90 is obtainable by starting technology analysts at big-enough investment banks. To get the higher end, you might need a masters, but 80k is definitely doable with just a bachelors and you don't have to be a rock star. But then again, if you're a bit of a wannabe rock star, the Valley offers more potential, salary, and benefits.
PhDs and the job market: these people who struggle on to attempt a PhD because they find the job market is tough... they are not the creme of the crop, are they? Even if they get a PhD, they will be the bottom of the barrel (generally speaking). Using them as your sample is going to lead you astray if you are actually the type that pursued the PhD because your professors all thought you had potential to be a good researcher.
While headhunters can often appear like idiots, a fair number know what they're doing and they can figure out pretty easily which PhDs from <insert state university> are actually better than PhDs from <brand name university>. The market's crowded though, so if a headhunter wants to insure a placement, it's easy enough to find someone else almost as good but with a brand-name on their resume.
Knowledge about finance: The truth is, whatever job you apply for at a big, big company (which includes the well-known investment banks) what you actually end up doing is going to be quite different. That's assuming you even understood the job description, which I doubt (don't try to argue, you really don't know unless you've worked on the Street). So yeah, talk up your signal processing knowledge and that maximum yield crap you just bs-ed about. You'll look enthusiastic at least and it won't hurt.
When you're trading a large sum of money on a yield calculation, I don't think you understand how paranoid people get, and how much structure is built into a bank's system to avoid problems with the calculation. As an entry level worker, you're likely going to be extending an already very well-developed system. Even if you miraculously get tapped to work on code that incorporates the type of equations you're talking about, you're likely going to be neck-deep in ensuring the robustness of the calculations and how to extend them to some weirdo instrument that is somehow different to all the other ones. And to make things worse, the code will have been written by some dude in a manner that contradicts all major well-known software guidelines., and he'll have left the company before you joined (maybe you're his replacement) so you can't ask him wtf he was thinking.
Quant developers: There are some delusional people that are just technologists but call themselves quant developers although there's nothing "quant" about their jobs. Excluding those people, actual quant developers tend to be something of rock stars. Yeah, their jobs do tend to be much more interesting than the average technologist job in finance, and correspondingly they get paid a lot more and surprise, it's a lot harder to get in. Unless you are actually a very strong coder, I wouldn't count on it as a "backup" career to being a quant. You'll get torn to pieces when they start asking how to compare the performance of alternate floating point schemes to the IEEE standard. Or when you say "I'm pretty good at Java" and they start interrogating you on the Java memory model.
