I went to a couple onsite recruiting “mixers” for hedge funds and HFTs in NYC. I was an intern for a financial services company, and didn’t go to one of those schools, but I guess I had a strong set of work experiences.
Every other student there had (to me) a shockingly naïve understanding of software engineering, and many of them were done with school at this point, and had interned at big companies... 90%+ went to a school like the one you mentioned, and started looking through me when I shared the school I went to.
Maybe HFTs and hedge funds feel they need to hire from these schools, because they assume that the pool of candidates outside of these schools is even worse?
The actual engineers I spoke to were either very bright but kind of self conscious that they were “marrying down” for money, or very excitable and coming from non-eng backgrounds (physics, etc).
Can someone correct me if my impressions were wrong? I don’t want to name names, but these were two pretty successful companies, one was a Hedge Fund and the other was an HFT firm.
I'm not sure why HFTs can often feel the need to hire from these schools. I think it's a little different in NYC, but in Chicago, it tends to be the devs that couldn't land jobs in silicon valley that end up working as devs in trading.
Generally speaking (so obviously not for everyone - but for most) working as a developer in trading was not anyone's first choice. Go figure what this means for the kids from brand names schools who end up working there. I say this is as someone who went to work at an HFT firm after MIT.
Every other student there had (to me) a shockingly naïve understanding of software engineering, and many of them were done with school at this point, and had interned at big companies... 90%+ went to a school like the one you mentioned, and started looking through me when I shared the school I went to.
Maybe HFTs and hedge funds feel they need to hire from these schools, because they assume that the pool of candidates outside of these schools is even worse?
The actual engineers I spoke to were either very bright but kind of self conscious that they were “marrying down” for money, or very excitable and coming from non-eng backgrounds (physics, etc).
Can someone correct me if my impressions were wrong? I don’t want to name names, but these were two pretty successful companies, one was a Hedge Fund and the other was an HFT firm.