Hacker News Reader

Comment by hft09876 | Hacker News Reader

I've worked at two of what are broadly considered to be the top firms. Most of these comments are inconsistent with my experience.

Everybody's talking about what it takes to write trading systems, but OP asked about "skills required to land a job" not skills needed to do the job. Aside from a few specialized roles (like FPGA dev or security), the firms I'm familiar with only evaluate general dev skills. The interview process is pretty much the same as you'd experience at a top tech company. They don't care at all if you know the languages they use. Once you're in the door, the firm will teach you everything you need to know.

View on HN

Which firms are broadly considered to the top ones?

Jane Street is one

Two Sigma, Renaissance Technologies possibly. Jane Street like the other reply mentioned

What about Bridge water and Hudson river trading

Bridgewater is not an HFT, they are a hedge fund.

That being said - Bridgewater are looking for more than just skills. Bridgewater is very heavy on meetings and those meetings being recorded. You can ace the skillset, but would be completely inadequate.

Their interview process is great. It's very honest and revealing. I don't fit the company and I made the decision at their campus interview, their opinion matched mine as well.

But, unlike most other companies, you are shown exactly what the company is. Which is very good.

If you can land an interview, you like them and get an offer - I hear that it's a pretty good place to work.

two sigma, de shaw, aqr, etc.

Citadel.

Don't they also care a lot about pedigree? I heard that they only hire from Top 10 colleges and companies like Google and Facebook. Paraphrasing an acquaintance from Citadel - "You don't find us, we find you."

It's true that most of our recruiting is focused on a small set of top schools. But it's not because we think those schools magically make people amazing. We just have a small recruiting team, and the easiest way to find good people to interview is to let somebody else (i.e. the school) do most of the filtering for you. We're happy to interview people from elsewhere when we have reason to believe they'll be successful, but it's hard for a small firm to build the capabilities to find them.

To add onto that, firms like Citadel still do cast a wide net even if their targeted recruiting is primarily at top tier schools. They advertise in common business classifieds like Crain's, for example.

Firms like this also employ a wide number of third-party recruiting services and internal contractors, I know at least one. If you can impress one of these third-parties you can get in the door without a degree from Stanford.

It's true about not caring about if you write whatever language that they do - what I've found is that most firms are generally interested in your combined intuition for markets, math, and analysis. If you "get" market mechanics, have a solid grasp on mathematics, and have the creativity and skills to apply those skills in an innovative way, they could care less what your primary programming language is.

For example, if you have the market intuition to understand the common underlying drivers between RBOB gas and WTI crude, are creative enough to come up with a new form of analysis, and have the math skills to take that idea from conception to delivery, they really don't care if you have to learn CPP to integrate your intelligence and creativity into their infrastructure.

Source: Work in/around the industry building data processing for trading firms, funds, etc. Also received a couple of prop shop offers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com