I'm not at Jane Street, but at G-Research (also quant finance). Much as a joke goes which I first heard in the Effective Altruism sphere, our quants come from all kinds of backgrounds: their PhDs are in fluid mechanics, statistical physics, pure maths, you name it!
The one small firm that everyone in the industry has heard of is basically all phd guys screwing around with theory and execution and getting filthy rich in the process.
Then there is a set of research interviews and usually a research job talk.
The main observation is that hiring researchers, after passing basic tech rounds, is much more about taste and how people subjectively rate someone's research. It's insanely competitive, but in a sense it is also easier than pure SWE because there are not as many whiteboard hurdles to pass. You just can't really leetcode your way into the role, without a good track record with really interesting research most teams will not be interested.
Do interviews tend to include system design, if the applicant doesn't have industry experience?
Been curious about this too: do FAANG companies hire, say, professors with strong research records, but poor coding skills? I always wondered if everyone on these sort of team were all solid coders, or if there were people there that are exceptions.
Based on your experience do FAANG companies tend to be invested in basic research, or more product focused research?
System design is not a typical part of a research interview.
Yes, they do. The rule of thumb is: The higher the level you are hired, the more wiggle room is there. A random PhD grad will need to pass the normal coding screens which are carried out by SWEs who do not know anything about the candidate.
Last q depends on the FAANG org, everything exists. MS research is very pure, Amazon/Apple very applied, everything in between.
You may be interested in Paul Tough’s “The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us”. Tough makes similar points like this throughout the book.
This is interesting data I hadn't seen, thanks. Intuitively its a little bewildering to see the Median family income of someone from MIT be around the same as someone from UNC (a school I got into) - I wonder how the median incomes of international admits factor in.
The bottom 20% of US incomes is between $0 to $25k a year for a household - call me a skeptic but I think its unlikely ~58 (938 x 6.2%) people came from backgrounds like that in America,
Confused, you think it’s just too improbable to believe that MIT admitted 60 kids whose parents make <25k yearly? MIT can cherry pick the highest achieving kids in pretty much any national, heck even global, cohort. It seems reasonable to me that there are (way more than) 60 such kids.
