March 31st, 2012, 3:20 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: gianluca19QuoteOriginally posted by: CuchulainnQuoteOriginally posted by: gianluca19QuoteOriginally posted by: spv205As with any field, you need many more people implementing theories than doing research.The large volumes of quants required was for programming/implementing new payoffs etc ( in existing pricing library).its not to say that people aren't encouraged to do their own research/ give presentations etc, but as catastropha says the majority of quant work is programming.you then have headquants presenting their research (derman, piterbarg, balland etc, and that hasn't really changed)- which may or may not ever be implemented within the bank.the reality is that there are just not that many new models required.gianluca19: they don't need Phds in maths- just smart people. Put it another way - they don't care whether your phd is in algebraic topology or stochastics. Its just a filter to get smart people with minimum effort- ie without interviewing 1000 people.what i don't get is why they need smart people to do a programming job...probably because they need to understand what they are implementing then...Interesting viewpointDo you consider programming to more menial than let's say, maths? Or that it is easier?Probably there are different levels of programming...but I remember when i used to program (i did the informatic olympiads) the hard thing was to imagine the reasoning, the mathematical stuff behind the problem you wanted to solve.then the programming part was just about memorizing the syntax and writing a code without errors.i'm not saying that this is easy, but if you have got the idea, then you will implement it, somehow. while if you don't have the right idea you will never finish.In real-life industry, the situation is much much different. There you build systems with 100 people, 3000 customers and the s/w must last 20 years. And make a profit."memorising syntax" I have never heard that before. Strange..
Last edited by
Cuchulainn on March 30th, 2012, 10:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.