i am looking to update that advice sheet, any comments gratefully received

QuoteOriginally posted by: energydudeQuoteOriginally posted by: twofishSomething interesting is that I've noticed that whenever someone asks about quant hours, the response tends to be "if you have to ask then you shouldn't consider the job." Yet, whenever I've seen hard numbers, the work load is actually fairly reasonable compared to some other jobs. 8-6 M-F is not excessive compared to the life of a Ph.D. student or junior faculty or for a developer who has to run support for a business critical app (and hence gets calls at random times in the weekend). And its positively relaxing compared to say a developer in a startup or a game company.The reason that I never went into particle physics is that I didn't like to deal with large massive bureaucratic organizations. The job market in theoretical astrophysics is pretty awful, but curiously theoretical astrophysics is something that one can almost do as a hobby.heh, well said. i've never understood either the lack of response on this important question of lifestyle.for my part i'd say 8-5pm is something you have to do everyday. beyond that depends on various factors such as deadlines and any personal research you might be interested in pursuing. there is also the issue of what the boss does...in your beginning days at least you don't want to leave earlier than him. once he has confidence in you, you can skip out earlier. i tend to average about 8-6 with difficult days going upto anything beyond, that is 10pm, midnight etc have occured. however i think some of that was also my own initiative...If I were your boss, I'd promote you .

agree with energydude's qualifications of my statement regarding hours.ab1, the tasks of a quant are VERY job-specific. joshi's intro divides the quant roles pretty well, although i've never been exposed to the pure research quant roles. a quant developer will work much longer hours and is basically a professional programmer who understands how to discretize an SDE. i'm somewhere between desk quant and research quant, and for me, the less enjoyable part is the beginning of a project which requires ingesting legacy code rapidly so that you can begin to modify said code. however, this is balanced by the excitement of being exposed to a new idea and reading widely in the literature surrounding the idea. other than that, there's very little i find unstimulating. the job requires such a wide range of skills that i feel constantly challenged, to be honest. the only drawback (for some) is that you can't spend too much time doing pie-in-the-sky dreaming about what models to implement. so i can't say, "gee, i think that a random field model for interest rate dynamics is theoretically intriguing. i'll spend my next six months trying to make it work". this actually works well for me, since it keeps me focused, but coming from academia, it might seem restrictive.

Thanks everyone for your responses, you've been very helpful. I now have much more useful information than I had before; I will be able to make a more informed decision regarding my career.Anyone else want to put in their 2 cents?Thanks,ab1