July 19th, 2015, 10:32 am
Both, although the industry has been contracting in the last few years it's still pretty big in terms of role variety and different skills that are required for different roles.On stats vs development skills, they simply aren't mutually exclusive. Our team is loosely split into quant devs and quant analysts and devs have average stats, great dev skills,analysts have great stats skills, average dev skills but then again we also have people that are great in both.Although not perfect this is a decent intro to what kind of roles are out there and what skills they require: issue for you will most likely be getting that first 'foot in the door' role. Most of the time these tend to be in the larger financial centres.One thing worth noting is that development roles are quite frequently set up as contracting roles (at least in the big banks) which pay a good day rate but no benefits or bonuswhile the quant analyst roles tend to be permanent positions.My view when recruiting tends to be aiming for a 'jack of all trades, master of one'. So aim for someone that understands the business, finance as a whole, programming, math etcat surface level but really outshines all existing team members in one area so adding that person to the team will make it stronger as a whole.
Last edited by
Hansi on July 18th, 2015, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.