QuoteOriginally posted by: flankUgh. So many roadblocks. I'm starting to think that an economists such as myself should just forget quant and go work for boeing or caterpillar or some other large corporation.The bad news is that there are a huge number of roadblocks. The good news is that there are all sorts of ways of getting around the roadblocks. In the end, just figure out what you really want, and go for it.

QuoteOriginally posted by: needacluebefore giving up you should go out there and apply and see what happens. i have seen postings for quanty positions where c++ is not important, but stuff like SAS and matlab is.What does seem to be standard operating practice is that people extract econometric parameters using statistical software like SAS, R, and matlab and then throw it over the wall for the c++ people to do their calculations. Physics people tend to be weak in doing statistics, and there is one job that I know of that I was at a very strong disadvantage because I'd never used any statistical software at all (and no doubt that job was probably the tip of an iceberg of jobs in which my resume got tossed long before I was aware of them.)One thing that is the case is that the running a successful work place requires a huge diversity of skills, and no one is good at all of them. What is important is to find one or two skills that are marketable, and be really, really, really good at it.

Unfortunately flank plans to take monetary policy class instead of econometrics. A phd in high energy physics spends five, six years analyzing terra bytes of data by C++ programs they wrote themselves. Folks in Mech.Eng. solves PDE with finite element day in and day out, so finite difference is like kindergarden stuff to them, and there are folks who Monte Carlo global warming wich distributed algorithm on thousands of CPUs. And twofish is right, 90% of the time, you bang your head and want to smash the monitor because you can't figure out what is wrong with your "inspirational" algorithm. It might just be an uninitialized variable in the end. and remember, sometimes you had to debug with people waiting and watching over your shoulder. The classes don't teach you how to keep a running library for many years, when new demands come in continuously, several people work simultaneously, people leave and come. a lotta headaches, just to write programs. the CVS branching and merging we had to use are confusing enough on their own, simply because we had to maintain a production version while adding new inspirations.I think what flank needs right now, is to have the right expectation, right perspective and right attitude. do not just dream about thrusting anywhere. people hire new grads because of their value which will only show after some training and re-education, not because of their glamour. Quote flank:Probably I'd wind up getting paid more too 'cause I'd be thrust into upper management positions within the company as opposed to performing the same kinds of tasks.

One problem here is that I'm just telling you what I see in the peephole. All of the jobs I've been seriously considered for involve hardcore programming, because I'm eliminated from anything else at the start of the game.Few quants do hardcore programming, most think de Morgan's law is something to do with ideal gases and a directed acylic graph is an option for charting data, I guess 25% could not tell you the difference between call by name and call by reference.But when you are interviewed for a good job, you are expected to be really rather good at the things you say you can do.I'm not sure if your characterisation of being treated as 2nd class is quite correct. People in this game typically respect being smart in an academic sense, more than almost any other area of commerce.Certainly with more respect than in most engineering firms.Fact is that as a good economist you will know stuff they don't and if that's relevant people will respect that.But conversely like anyone else they have a view of stuff "everybody knows", and if you can't get past that it gets a bit sad.