hft09876

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.

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.