Guys,I thank you for your suggestions to some of my questions. It has been a pleasure interacting with you.From the responses I got from my postings in the careerforum it seems to me this message board is very elitistand one needs to be very diplomatic.Coming from a silicon valley culture I feel more comfortable wherethere is more freedom. It is time for me to take a break from this forum.Are there other good forums related to applicationof software tech in finance which is more down to earth?

and one needs to be very diplomatic. Coming from a silicon valley culture I feel more comfortable where there is more freedom. It is time for me to take abreak from this forum.personally i think you should be thankful for what you've been able to learn with only 42 posts on this forum. and however little time you've spent on the forum is a hulluva lot better than spending the money and time to go to school to learn the same thing!when i look around at front office s/w developers (including many "quants") i see a lot of stress, high turnover, and frankly a bunch of a*holes pretending (to everyone that can't understand bond vocab) to be some kind of "new market wizard". the truth is, you need less diplomacy in this world, not more. you need to not be afraid to lock horns and call people on their bullshit. there's plenty of freedom here, but don't expect anyone to hold your hand to find it. apparently you don't like this world - which is cool, i mean different strokes for different folks. i'm from the west coast originally, so i sympathize to a point, but hell man, what do you expect coming to a forum chock-full of traders and want to be traders and academics that wish they could be traders* and asking about mixing your career ambitions as a quant with your ballet ambitions?good luck with whatever you do.*b4 you get upset - this is not meant to be a comprehensive list of forum participants, just a sizable sub-set

Come on Samudra, Hari was just pulling your leg, something that also happens in Silicon Valley start-ups. Why take everything so seriously?Samudra >> After all once youth is over is there much left to life?With reference to your post on the careers thread I think that in general you should lighten up a bit. I agree that 'the golden years of youth' are good, but it's mostly in the mind - I haven't mentally moved on much since I hit 20 so I don't see a problem. Quit worrying so much.

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This forum is far from elitist. There are one or two people who will criticise others, be provocative and occaisionally go off onto a bizarre tack, but there are far more who will respond to a request on almost any topic. A few days ago, dcfc posted a link to despair.com, I wasted a good half hour browsing the site and came up with a few slogans that fitted me, my role, my department and my firm. For this forum (or at least some participants), I would recommend "Pretension". Also bear in mind the maths teacher I had from 1986 to 1989, who had on his classroom wall a poster containing the slogan "Those of us who think you know what you're doing are annoying those of us that do." Good luck in your ventures. The only advice I would give is if you jump onto a bandwagon, its probably too late and all the best seats are already taken. Perhaps this is what happened with your .com career? Quant finance will continue, but whether it will be as big over the next twenty years as the previous is very much open to debate. Much could depend on how quickly the big firms return to making big money, and then how soon they forget their cautiousness on both strategy and expenses.