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a few people have approached me asking how best to get a job in trading/finance, is this worth a thread with my advice? the caveat is that i lucked into everything and do not know anything
okay y'all: a thread. (please feel free to comment at any point to tell me im entirely wrong if any of you know better, probably bc you do). GETTING A JOB BEEPING THE BOOPS: a short primer.
first thing's first: a disclaimer. past performance does not guarantee future results, i am not an IB chad who moves sick size before crushing lunch, this is mostly about my experience in the prop/quant job market:
i think it's important to take stock of the current environment in trading when considering this. mostly gone are the days of calling your guy at GS to settle today else you get margin called or something, it now seems to me mostly to be a test of technical skill/ability to learn
to that point, many firms (mine *usually* included), won't hire experienced traders bc its usually easier to teach a nerd to trade than it is to teach a trader PDEs or something, and this is due to our favorite four letter word: Math!
imo, mathematical literacy/competency is the single most important skill one can have trying to enter the extremely low-stakes world of picking off retail orders. it's not necessary to have a phd, but:
you should have the ability to look at some terrible regressions and understand why they suck, and how to make them better. this is, to me, more important than our next point, which is programming skills/comfort
its passe, but learn to code. familiarity with python/sql alone can get you a long way if you want to stare at (or even make) your own bad regressions, and it's just good advice since everyone's job is on the computer
so now you've learned to code and you're awesome at math and stuff. this is where my experience i think diverges from the norm, so i can only share my experience and the experiences of people i've interviewed:
always remember this fun step: 1) NO ONE* cares about your retail trading track record. this may not be true if youre like a turbo genius or have actual alpha but i have never even seen a resume where someone mentions their personal trading other than to color their technical exp
my experience was: i previously had a job writing CRUD apps at a smaller firm but it was a nice place to learn and i had built up some decent experience on decently sized systems, also i had put some code into prod which is the whole point. YMMV on this i was very lucky
so, we get to the interview. you've passed your phone screen and convinced HR and one (1) dev you're not a fraud or a serial killer. this is the part that sucks the most but is by far the most gameable.
1) be good at systems design and small interview questions. it's stupid, and not really applicable to the job, but grind out a zillion leetscode until youre comfy you can recursively find a DFS cycle in a linked red black tree or something idk
1a) to stress the systems thing, we often ask people to design a toy order book, or something like that. read this, get good at it, etc https://github.com/donnemartin/system-design-primer
2) do not try to pretend you know more than you do. it's painfully obvious when someone is repeating something they don't understand, and if an interviewer keeps drilling down into the "why's" of your answer, you should be able to give them
3) you don't need to be a data scientist, but you should understand why modeling covid infections with a cubic made people angry
4) oft overlooked: get a hobby! the joke is that you should put two interests on your resume, one exercise related and one job related, but it kind of rings true. being able to talk about something you're passionate about is nice
5) twitter is a great tool for networking, and as @kchoudhu mentioned, being nice is a really good way to make friends. i have not gotten a job via twitter but that is only because @bennpeifert has not hired me yet.
6) everyone fails at things! i was walked out of a jane street conference room without an offer (and it wasn't the only place that's happened to me), but it's important to not give up! interviewing is a skill that needs to be honed.
adding to the thread to offer tips on things NOT to do at an interview (from my experience)
a) do not ask the final interviewer if the woman you interviewed with right before that (me) was a "diversity hire", especially when you cant find a good solution to the algo question.
a) do not ask the final interviewer if the woman you interviewed with right before that (me) was a "diversity hire", especially when you cant find a good solution to the algo question.
^this went poorly for the candidate.
b) the interview will be roughly 9 hours onsite. do not leave earlier than this mid-process because you "were only told it would be 8 hours" and it ran long. not good.
b) the interview will be roughly 9 hours onsite. do not leave earlier than this mid-process because you "were only told it would be 8 hours" and it ran long. not good.
c) do not tell the interviewer you wrote a large parser generator with ANTLR on your resume and not be able to tell me what an LL(k) parser is
