FE Managers
Posted: March 25th, 2008, 5:38 pm
I get a number of job descriptions from firms or forwarded by universities or top quants, looking for FE Managers. Unfortunately I can seldom come up with good candiates. Very good quants are generally where they already want to be and lesser quants are trying to hold onto their jobs as long as they can and generally would not be people you'd recommendto be managers. Of course a number of quants want only to be on the desk and make lots of money [many ONLY interestedin hedge funds] or others who want to hold-up in their office and come up with theories [generally are not 'people people' so management lets them be.] Some quants do get an MBA along the way [even on top of a math/physics PhD] but few MBAs in any field or level of school want to manage---they want to advance in their technical field [and still do technical work themselves] or be an 'Executive' not a Manager. A good quant [or IT or engineering, etc.] manager would manage their people [i.e. the standard definition of 'Getting things done through other people'] instead of think only they can do things correctly or that their technical work is all they want to really do and that 'manager' just means more money and recognition. Good management means doing the necessary administration [including getting the human and technical resources and telling upper management when you don't have enough or something "cannot be done" with current resources], 'protecting'/defending your people from politics in the office, and of course dealing with pay/bonuses and personel issues. While a trader or former trader might have the management skills to be a Quant Manager, often they seem to want to be junior quants themselves, make all the quant. decisions and even withhold information until they [can try to] understand it. There are many quants who can lead projects and supervise lines of research and do so very well but not have to deal with budgets, personel issues, etc.. I saw one example of this that worked well but part of that was the person was able to stay away from corporate politics and had a 'manager' above him that dealt with all the non-research issues [unfortunately that manager was into office politics and hurting competition in the company and thus really blew apart the group]. I believe [it has been many years since I saw the book] it was Ronald Graham who wrote a book about the difficulty of management of a place like Bell Lab's research where you have to manage very intelligent people [some with Noble Prizes] with egos as large as their intelligence. Sometimes it seems potentially good quants might be able to become good quant managers but they hold on to long to the 'quant only' position until they are no longer effective in that and get laid-off before they can transitiion to management. Much of this also applies to IT, engineering or any technical field.