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ISayMoo
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 4th, 2019, 10:59 am

Mental problems are often caused or enhanced by alcohol, so stay away from it. While drunk you can do some pretty stupid things (such as sending people death threats over the Internet - I knew such a guy once), you don't want that coming back to haunt you, do you?
 
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bearish
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 4th, 2019, 12:21 pm

It would be nonsensical to discriminate against a candidate because of a gap in their CV. Different things could have happened in your life. Besides, everybody knows that the most talented people have problems or drop out of the academia these days. Serious companies have their own recruitment systems.  If you perform well during the interview, you will score enough points to get the job. Show motivation, interest in the area, excitement about the role, ... - that's what they expect from you apart from the declared skills and knowledge. After all, they can kick you out after the probation period. And it's way more informative for the interviewers to read your research paper than some unverifiable claims in your CV about the scope of your work at some company.
I somehow missed this post a couple of weeks ago, but I will say that almost every single statement made here conflicts directly with my experience. And I’ve spent most of the last quarter century as a hiring manager of PhD types, most of the time for what I think would be considered “serious companies”. You can’t have gaps in your resume. There is nothing wrong with “screwing around time”, but it needs to be documented as such. Otherwise, the default assumption is that you served the time in prison. As for those most talented people who drop out of school? Let’s say most of us are really not looking to hire the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Very difficult people to manage! Finally, if you have ever fired somebody at this level (we are not talking strawberry pickers here, however expensive they may be), you would not casually talk about kicking people out after a probationary period. In the US we can, more or less, kick people out whenever, but it is almost always a painful process for all involved.
 
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ISayMoo
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 4th, 2019, 12:52 pm

Being fired from a strawberry picking job is also painful, at least for the picker.
 
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bearish
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 4th, 2019, 1:08 pm

Fair enough. I was just limiting myself to situations that I’ve had first hand experience with - in this case being on either end of PhD level job terminations.
 
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katastrofa
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 4th, 2019, 3:41 pm

Bearish, that's why I think that someone like the OP should target research groups in tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc. Managers there are not supposed to "manage" them, but to guide them through the internal career process. Besides, I know people who sit years in the same company doing literally nothing - I'm sure they are easy to manage.
 
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bearish
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 4th, 2019, 4:37 pm

Bearish, that's why I think that someone like the OP should target research groups in tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc. Managers there are not supposed to "manage" them, but to guide them through the internal career process. Besides, I know people who sit years in the same company doing literally nothing - I'm sure they are easy to manage.
Good points. Although to the extent those companies turn into regulated utilities, in addition to being vast corporate organizations, the difference between them and large financial institutions may shrink considerably over time.
 
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Alan
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 5th, 2019, 12:14 am

I don't know the answer here, but it seems to me the problem with signalling "serious (unspecified) health issues" is that the default assumption will be that you have cancer in remission. That will lead to its own can of worms ...
 
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katastrofa
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 5th, 2019, 2:20 am

Bearish, that's why I think that someone like the OP should target research groups in tech companies like Google, Facebook, etc. Managers there are not supposed to "manage" them, but to guide them through the internal career process. Besides, I know people who sit years in the same company doing literally nothing - I'm sure they are easy to manage.
Good points. Although to the extent those companies turn into regulated utilities, in addition to being vast corporate organizations, the difference between them and large financial institutions may shrink considerably over time.
I can't imagine any functioning business to reject a candidate because they are presumably difficult to manage for a manager. This is wrong on so many levels. For example, managers aren't supposed to have their lives made easier - they are supposed to make life easy for those working their arses off on the project. If the managers can't provide that, maybe they should be replaced?

In fact, do we need such managers at all? Or do they create the need for themselves by holding endless meetings, messing in people's work with their often ignorant and dubious advice or drinking with their manager boy clubs (I often see them working hard on their already second pints when I go out to grab some carrots for late lunch). I've never had a manager since I started working as a "consultant". I'm usually in a team where everybody is an expert in some field. One or two of us are assigned reporting the progress and requests to... the guys with the money. All they need to know about me is that I have the required expertise and my bank account number. [Redacted the part about my own worthiness ;-) ]
Last edited by katastrofa on February 5th, 2019, 3:58 am, edited 1 time in total.
 
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bearish
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 5th, 2019, 3:17 am

Should you desire a job in the greater NYC area, please let me know! Contrary to what you may think, I actually have a decent track record of hiring people smarter than myself (not too hard) and let them loose (a lot harder). 
 
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katastrofa
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 5th, 2019, 3:42 am

You're very kind as always, but I'm not smart. I just work and study a lot. For the record, it's been always obvious to me based on what you posted in the forum in the past that you are not one of the "managers" I described above.
 
gettingback
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 8th, 2019, 2:52 pm


I somehow missed this post a couple of weeks ago, but I will say that almost every single statement made here conflicts directly with my experience. And I’ve spent most of the last quarter century as a hiring manager of PhD types, most of the time for what I think would be considered “serious companies”. You can’t have gaps in your resume. There is nothing wrong with “screwing around time”, but it needs to be documented as such. Otherwise, the default assumption is that you served the time in prison. As for those most talented people who drop out of school? Let’s say most of us are really not looking to hire the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates. Very difficult people to manage! Finally, if you have ever fired somebody at this level (we are not talking strawberry pickers here, however expensive they may be), you would not casually talk about kicking people out after a probationary period. In the US we can, more or less, kick people out whenever, but it is almost always a painful process for all involved.

The more I reflect on it, the more it occurs to me that I might be better off not mentioning my health issues at all. My advisor is willing to attest that I worked for him remotely during the time that I was away - technically, I never stopped working on my PhD and other lab research, so this is true. It's just that I wasn't productive for a while. So basically I won't have a formal university affiliation for all these years, but I will have some research output to show in terms of publications, patent applications (that I am currently preparing), etc. I am thinking that I would simply say that I took a break to pursue independent research and other alternative career options. I did at one point a couple of years ago think about starting a company based on my work, and one reasons I did not resume my university affiliation sooner was because this way, I would have the sole claim on the Intellectual Property I developed during the past few years. But since I am no longer planning to be an entrepreneur, I am on the job market.
 
gettingback
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 8th, 2019, 4:00 pm

I noticed that several hedge funds and even a few HFT shops are hiring specifically for Machine Learning roles. Would I stand a chance at any of these places? 
 
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mbunea
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 16th, 2019, 7:43 am

Man, these hedge funds and HFT shops and in general "world renowned investment bank", they only hire THE BEST. Crème de la crème. Top 2% of the already very competent. How does it work? Enrico Fermi on "great generals" nailed it long ago, just replace "army" with "banks" and "greatest generals" with "best quants": "As to the influence and genius of great generals — there is a story that Enrico Fermi once asked Gen. Leslie Groves how many generals might be called “great.” Groves said about three out of every 100. Fermi asked how a general qualified for the adjective, and Groves replied that any general who had won five major battles in a row might safely be called great. This was in the middle of World Wat II. Well, then, said Fermi, considering that the opposing forces in most theaters of operation are roughly equal, the odds are one of two that a general will win a battle, one of four that he will win two battles in a row, one of eight for three, one of sixteen for four, one of thirty-two for five. 'So you are right, general, about three out of every 100. Mathematical probability, not genius.'"

Fuck banks and stupidly competing among us for these fuckers.
 
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ISayMoo
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 16th, 2019, 3:49 pm

What this anecdote really shows is that even when physicists think they know statistics, they don't know statistics. Fermi not being an exception.
 
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Cuchulainn
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Re: Searching for a job after a multi-year break

February 20th, 2019, 1:43 pm

What this anecdote really shows is that even when physicists think they know statistics, they don't know statistics. Fermi not being an exception.
He didn't have to.