i don't know what the point of this book is - there's nothing rockstar about being a quant. not only do not all quants "generate alpha", even the ones that do are just overworked data scientists. ask anyone that actually works in the industry - fancy math is no longer a thing ("exotic option pricing"). so would "how i became an accountant" be just as interesting? how about (more accurately) would "how i became a data scientist"?
In finance, if you have a better understanding of how to price a certain asset then you can make better trades than your competitors and thus make money.
Some assets are very easy to price, like bonds. Others are esoteric, like Exotics which are options or other securities with uncommon pricing structures. This is where the "fancy math" kicks in. But as time goes on, more and more firms figure out how to better price all the various assets that they trade, which erodes the competitive edge between market participants.
The assertion is that today, most firms have most things mostly figured out as far as how to value them. There's little to no competitive advantage to be mined from esoteric stochastic calculus. In contrast, it's rumoured that one of the most successful firms of all time, Renaissance, owes a large part of their success to their absolutely pristine data which comes from a massive data ingestion and cleaning pipeline, allowing them to get a clearer statistical picture of what the current market forces at play are, and how they're going to manifest.
The “fancy math” associated with quant usually refers to pricing derivatives like options.
The thing is that there isn’t really strong institutional demand for exotic derivatives, people are happy using existing methods and just applying those to current markets.
The other type of fancy math has to do with deriving alpha, which is also not that complex, from a statistics perspective you’re mostly using linear regression or other basic forms of regression.
The hard part of quant is implementation, making sure your data is right, hunting through poorly understood markets, and managing risks carefully and understanding them.
There’s also ML but that’s equally complex in quant as it is anywhere else.
> The hard part of quant is implementation, making sure your data is right, hunting through poorly understood markets, and managing risks carefully and understanding them.
In my experience I have seen far more division of labor than you describe. Real quants don’t do work like making sure your data is right or even much of implementation; they delegate that to software engineers. But a cheap quant shop might be too cheap to hire SWEs so quants end up doing this work instead. The real quant work is just hunting through poorly understood markets.
The days of doing some calculus, having a moment of brilliant insight, and writing down a pricing formula then getting paid millions probably only ever existed in people's imagination.
Fancy math definitely is part of derivatives pricing. However financial world has become too complicated for simple models. Adding things like the risk of counterparty default to your pricing equation quickly leads you into the world of equations without closed form solutions. The common approach these days is some kind of huge multi factor Monte Carlo model. These are still solving pricing equations but the challenge is more about numerical methods than brilliant algebraic gymnastics.
i would take a 50% pay cut (FAANG) to move to denmark (with an accelerated path to perm residency) to work on whatever thing they want. any takers? actually any EU nation...
Edit: with all of the negativity under this comment I'm reminded of a hilarious experience I had when I first interned at FB during grad school: I was on some online game with a friend of mine and his friend (whom I'd never met) and we were on voice chat. My buddy asks me how the internship is going and I gave the standard "it's hard but I'm learning a lot" response. Afterwards the third guy chimes in and asks if me I don't feel ashamed (or whatever) about working for FB. It was literally my first tech internship so I said something equivocal. Then I asked the guy what he did/where he worked. I shit you not the guy was literally a radar engineer for the US army. The irony was clearly lost on him and he even went as far as insisting he (as opposed to me) was doing very good/valuable work.
How about instead of taking the easy way out and preserving your wealth you stay in the US and take up your generational responsibility and figure out how to fix the situation that you and your fellow citizens have created?
Same feeling from me. I also disliked his framing of moving his FAANG wealth to outcompete EU workers on jobs and housing, then making it sound like he's doing Europeans a favor with this.
"Yeah guys, I got enough blood money now from ad targeting people in the US, so to clear my conscience I can come give you guys a hand to fight the evil guys I had no issue with when they were paying me big money, but only IF you pay me 50% of what they pay me."
How about thanks but no thanks. We don't need this kind of fake virtue signaling "help". Enjoy your money somewhere else.
The fact that the US didn't take your attitude and allowed workers from all over the world to come to Silicon Valley and compete with Americans for jobs and housing ("compete for housing" being the most ridiculous concept I have ever heard of) is one of the many reasons why SV is in the US and not in Europe.
>"compete for housing" being the most ridiculous concept I have ever heard of
How can I have a productive discussion with someone who doesn't know or refuses to acknowledge the reality of housing supply/demand and resulting gentrification?
Gee, if only there was a city in the world that's a big tech hub and we could study the effects on its housing market and citizen who don't work in tech and how they're impacted.
>is one of t many reasons why SV is in the US and not in Europe
I've been to SF and I'm not sure I want the issues I saw there over here.
And to correct you, SV is what it is due to the WW2 and cold war military electronics industry rooted in government spending brewing there instead of being bombed to the ground like Europe, plus the financial engineering leavers of the US FED being able to print virtually gold and use that virtual gold to buy everything they ever need to win including foreign competitors and suppliers while offloading the resulting inflation burden onto the rest of the world, or use trade restrictions and military force as the second option to block any potential rising competitors that threaten the existing hegemony.
SV is in the US because of heavy government spending to further national interests. And US intelligence community was one of the first to realize that total domination of home computers / smartphones / social media allows them to exert a lot of power.
SV took workers from all over the world because these workers were extremely skilled and cheap. They didn't compete with Americans for jobs because there were simply not enough Americans with the needed skills.
Foreign tech workers need housing but they don't own land and can't vote in your elections, so the fact housing is bad is 100% on US citizens.
2. There are plenty of Americans with the skills. I know because I went from never having written any code or having any technical education to full time employment in SV in under a year.
3. Housing issues are 100% the fault of the local US citizens and their idiotic policies, but immigrant tech workers absolutely do own land and I know several who do. Plenty of them vote because they are now citizens.
- Are zoning laws affecting only immigrant born population from buying, or simply everyone moving to SF for work?
- If the locals are preventing the foreigners to buy housing via zoning laws, then how did those immigrants manage to buy housing like you said?
- And once immigrants become citizens and homeowners, are you saying they don't vote for the same zoning laws that protect their housing investment just like the natives?
That's where your contradictions are, and this is my last response you get on this discussion, since it's clearly not going anywhere.
Let me spell it out for you. This is 100% a stupid regulation issue and has fuck all to do with immigration. If the US had a more restrictive immigration policy the same thing would have happened because so many native born Americans (including myself) moved to SV for high paying jobs. Supply and demand is what it is whether that demand comes from a US citizen or an immigrant.
lol where are you getting all this from? first of all there are 3 letters in FAANG which don't do ads, second of all i didn't express anywhere that i felt i was doing anyone any favors, third of all are you aware that US citizens are double taxed no matter where they live, where they earn their money, fourth of all are you aware there's an exit tax on your total net worth if you renounce citizenship?
y'all are extra spicy on this topic seemingly.
EDIT:
> We don't need this kind of fake virtue signaling "help"
i wasn't virtue signalling anything - that's why i said money is still an important part of the calculus. i was literally just curious if there were such accelerated pathways for SWEs...
> there are 3 letters in FAANG which don't do ads,
FAANG is Facebook(Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google(Alphabet) right?
Facebook and Google are heavy on ads, Amazon has ads all over their shopping experience and in their video product; AWS isn't connected with ads though, Netflix has an ads tier in their video product too, I opted out of Apple so I don't know what ads look like on their products but I think they have a small ads product?
I'm not quite sure why the negative responses to your offer though. Sure, it's a bit mercenary, but it's an offer. Personally, I don't think it's really about personnel though, recruiting FAANG employees to Europe wouldn't generate European FAANGs; Europe needs to look at the business conditions that spawn these kinds of companies and see what they can change to encourage the kinds of companies they want. Why did Apple survive while early computer companies from Europe all folded and also where have all the European handset makers gone; where are the online megaretailers for Europe and why didn't they consider selling their surplus computing resources; why haven't Euro television companies developed a cross border streaming service; maybe something about search engines, maybe what stopped Europe from playing in the search engine wars before Google became dominant; bonus non faang question, why did Europay merge with Mastercard.
> recruiting FAANG employees to Europe wouldn't generate European FAANGs
Yep, this. We already have enough local FANG level talent, talent is not the problem in Europe.
What we don't have is:
1) the printing press of the world reserve currency so that VCs backed by our central bank can keep spending the fake money we print on tech gambles while the rest of world absorbs our inflation as if it were gold, and
2) the world's biggest military to nudge (enforce) our products and services on the rest of the world to ensure our hegemony
Until you fix both these point, or at least point 2 and kick out the US military and companies from our continent, like China did, you can't have a domestic SV that challenges the one from the US no matter how much good talent you have.
And we can't do that since we can't even kick Russia's ass right now after 4 years, let alone stand up to the US hegemony and enforce our will over them, so we'll continue to be dependent on them.
<rolls eyes> alright i'm totally responsible for the trumpocalypse because somewhere someone in my company is running some kind of ads service </rolls eyes>.
> then posturing like a anti-FANG freedom fighter for 50% cut, which might rub some people the wrong way as being a by hypocritica
The only place I was posturing was in your imagination. I guess you're salty about FAANG salaries in the US (and that's what has you tilted) but I was literally just asking about comparable salary and accelerated immigration pathways. The comment is very short - I don't know where you're getting all of this content from.
People don't like how you both virtue signal and show ignorance at the same time.
It's not about "someone in my company is running some kind of ads service" but that you and your colleagues collectively have had a net negative impact on free societies all over the world.
Nobody is jealous about FAANG salaries if you need to step over unconscious homeless people on your way to work, fear about healthcare, university tuition and that your kid might be shot at school.
Nobody said you're responsible for ads, but people have an issue with you accepting to take the big FANG money which you knew comes from ads and other nefarious monopolistic anti consumer things FANGs do, and then wanting to be a anti-FANG freedom fighter but only if you can maintain 50% of FANG money, which might rub some people the wrong way as being a by hypocritical.
I don't agree with these bitter Europeans at all, but offering to take a 50% pay cut does come off very much like you are trying to do someone a favor.
Calling people "bitter" doesn't win an argument. I think US tech workers get quite emotional once they feel the slightest headwind that threatens to burst their bubble.
I call you bitter because bitterness is dripping from your comments:
> How about instead of taking the easy way out and preserving your wealth you stay in the US and take up your generational responsibility and figure out how to fix the situation that you and your fellow citizens have created?
This feels even more bitter than if you had written "I am bitter over the success of the US tech industry."
I think the point is more that 50% of senior FAANG total comp is still a lot more than you get at most European places.
100-120k net is considered quite a good salary and is unattainable even for most as a contracted employee. You do get benefits like healthcare and pensions which work differently. You can get higher rates if you are good at marketing, but then you need to insure your unemployment and pension yourself as well.
My latest info on Silicon Valley compensation (Google, Netflix, and Twitter) was that 400k/year gross before tax and RSU was typically achievable with even higher regular occurrences. 50% of that is still way over what you typically find here. (Switzerland excluded but all prices are inflated in Switzerland.)
In the US you have to privately pay for many things that you get for free in more developed nations.
For example safety is not guaranteed due to extreme homelessness and easy access to guns, so you have to pay more for gated communities and security/concierge. You need to privately pay for healthcare and also pay off debt from university tuition, both is much cheaper in EU. If you have kids, you have to pay for private schools.
Then all over the US the infrastructure is so extremely bad that you don't even have sidewalks and you need to take a car to get anywhere, with really bad public transport.
If you want to just emulate European lifestyle in the US you really need to spend a lot of money.
>If you want to just emulate European lifestyle in the US you really need to spend a lot of money.
Even a lot of Europeans today are not having the envied European lifestyle right now. Things are getting worse here too, so you also need to spend out of pocket and have a very good paying job, just to get the European lifestyle that was the norm 10+ years ago with an average job.
And it's only gonna get downhill from here with the increase in defense spending that's gotta come from somewhere, the stagnating economy and increasing CoL, the ballooning retirement and welfare timebomb, etc.
If you make 50% of US FANG wages, then you'll probably be fine, but most people don't.
And there's a lot of places in the US (excluding the major cities) that don't have those issues you mentioned and where you can live a pretty chill and safe lifestyle too if you're a skilled worker on a decent income, similar how there's cities in Europe that have a lot of poverty, crime and failing infrastructure as well where you need a good job and skills to get out. It's not as binary as you try to make it be.
So you're trying to say that taking a flight is some sort sacrifice?
Most of the people I know have lived in at least one other country for several months, while most of US citizens not once in their life have left the USA and don't even own a passport.
The average person has almost no way of making any serious impact on society, especially in this time period. Besides that, the US was founded by people taking "the easy way out" and leaving another country, so it's only fitting.
Though the commenter mentioned working at a FAANG, so maybe they're far more culpable in this situation than the average person. If that's the case, I'd have to agree with you.
It's not generational responsibility. Everyone has at least some responsibility to defend the democratic values, traditions, and nation that have enabled them to live freely and peacefully.
For someone who has greatly benefited from the opportunities the nation afforded them, it's insulting for such a person to behave as if they possess no responsibility to defend the values, tradition, and nation that enabled them to succeed.
It's hard for me to escape how strongly I feel about this. As a European, I don't wish for such sorts of people to immigrate here. They can go back.
LOL my family immigrated to this country from a "shithole" when i was a kid and i've managed to claw my way out of immigrant poverty. i have exactly zero "generational responsibility".
You're getting very emotional about this. Are you a US citizen or not?
Because IIRC in one comment you complained about double taxation for US citizens when living abroad and here you suddenly play the immigrant family card.
It's hard to accept your victim role when you've been personally profiting off a FAANG company.
Bro you people must be mind-readers (or just poor readers) - the guy said I should stay and "fight" because I have "generational responsibility". I said no thanks I have no generations in the US (I am first gen). I am also a naturalized citizen which means the US will tax me bigly when I move abroad no matter who I work for and even renouncing the citizenship will cost me money. I said all this not because I'm a victim but to explain why I'm only willing to take at most a 50% pay cut. Are we clear now?
You don't have any generational responsibility, but not because you are an immigrant. You don't have any because "generational responsibility" is not a thing that exists.
It was the USA that gave you those opportunities to succeed and build wealth, raising you out of poverty. Without you would not in the position you are today, that itself deserves at least some responsibility to defend the nation against those who would tear down and destroy the democratic values, traditions, and institutions that enabled you and people like yourself to live freely and succeed.
Truthfully, as a European, I don't want people immigrating here who feel no responsibility to defend the democratic values, institutions, and nation that enabled them to live freely and succeed. Quite insane.
I don’t see what’s wrong with someone wanting to return to their home country instead of staying and risking a middle of the night policy change resulting in their residency status being cancelled and ICE dragging them and their children out of bed at night.
If one must point fingers, a better target is those actually in power.
you're never gonna be able to convince me that i owe some debt to a country/nation that barely ever tolerated me to begin with, you understand this right? also "i'm leaving" isn't "fuck you" in the least, it's just "i'm leaving".
Nope. Its much easier to carry over bloated wealth/income from a higher CoL country to a lower CoL country to live like kings by gentrifying the locals and creating the same kind of problem that caused him to escape from his country.
That is how the US was screwed up in the first place - the internal inequality and gentrification created all the problems the US is in today, including the social conflicts. People like him are literally helping to export those problems by exporting the misery to other countries.
Translation: "Die fighting in a civil war and maybe we'll grant you a visa".
This is, of course, stupid. You're arguing that if a tyrant king comes around, all of his neighbors should work tirelessly and for free to make sure the tyrant king's subjects remain under their control, so that the tyrant king still has materiel to invade you with. Most people are not in a position to individually resist or rebel against the system. Revolution is a collective concept, and the fish rots from the head. There's no causal link between denying someone a path to emigrate from their hellhole and them actually fixing their broke-ass society. They just wind up becoming a tool for that society to throw at you.
Think of every society like a building made of sentient bricks. If the bricks decide to leave, the building falls apart. But if the bricks are prohibited from leaving, then the building remains standing. Even if America doesn't actually restrict people from leaving (in fact, Trump kinda wants that), offering them no place to go is about the same thing as not letting them leave.
And, to be clear, the rot didn't start with Trump. It started with neoliberalism and the destruction of America's welfare system creating a permanent underclass of scammable peons. That same rot is present in much of the EU for the same reasons. America just succumbed to it first. You're watching a preview of what will happen in your country soon if you do not take immediate corrective action to fix the problem.
We are responsible for your nation's failure to be competitive in this industry? There are many European companies that operate freely in the US, so it is not our laws that are getting in your way. The only thing the US could do to help you here is to use force against your government to remove its self defeating policies, and I don't think you would actually like that very much. Actions have consequences. Every choice is a tradeoff. You will never get anywhere with that blame other people for your problems attitude.
We've stopped hiring US citizens becuase they pose a national defense risk to the energy sector. I don't think anyone has any animosity toward US citizens here either though, but I do think you'd find some if you went to a local pub.
If you can self employ (and find housing, but if you have cash from a FAANG job you can probably pay cash), the Dutch American Friendship Treaty is a popular choice.
Sure. Money isn't everything. A broader concern is that many european countries have similar problems like housing costs and a rising far-right without any better solution. And besides, these sky-high wages won't last for long with a state intent on isolating itself and starving its consumer base of wages.
Personally, I'm looking at east asia and latin america.
I think you have the causation wrong. The far right is rising mostly due to social media which is full of fake news and propaganda. People working at US tech companies nurture this "engagement" in order to get rich while poisoning our societies.
In Europe they have an issue with the economic refugees from Muslim countries. And in Denmark has the counter example of Sweden where they cause trouble. That's why the far right gets people's votes. Of course, all they do is point to the migrants. The far right won't be solving any issues, it will just create new ones.
Why you feel the need to discuss a "far right" in Europe while US tech leadership is performing roman salutes in front of live cameras?
Muslim refugees are not responsible for Epstein, Greenland, US import duties, US ignoring Minsk agreement or Facebook actively supporting fake news with engineering resources embedded into political campaigns. The vast majority of muslim refugees integrates extremely well and perform shitty jobs that help our society, all while being traumatized from wars they were born into.
The social media accounts of the "far right" sit in st. petersburg propaganda mills and their advertisement account managers sit in san francisco. Workers at US-tech companies are responsible for the unchecked bombardment of our citizens with propaganda and fake news.
> Workers at US-tech companies are responsible for the unchecked bombardment of our citizens with propaganda and fake news.
They're also responsible for the propaganda and fake news targeting the center and the left. It just works most effectively to drive people right because of.... widely-distributed personality quirks, shall we say. It's not clear this dynamic would disappear if social media disappeared, but I do think it would slow down.
Well, that may be true, although I didn't intend to imply any causal relationship at all. My point is I don't see the general situation in Europe (or the anglosphere) as much improved, just.... less advanced.
specialization - i don't know if general purpose compilers do this but ML compilers specialize the hell out of kernels (based on constants, types, tensor dimensions, etc).
EDIT: i'm le dumb - this is the whole point of JIT compilers.
this is so far from accurate it should be considered libelous; from the link
> PyTorch/XLA is set to migrate to the open source OpenXLA
so PyTorch on the XLA backend is set to migrate to use OpenXLA instead of XLA. but basically everyone moved from XLA to OpenXLA because there is no more OSS XLA. so that's it. in general, PyTorch has several backends, including plenty of homegrown CUDA and CPU kernels. in fact the majority of your PyTorch code runs through PyTorch's own kernels.
Robotic perception is the one relevant to me. You want to do object recognition on an industrial x86 or Jetson-type machine, without having to use Ubuntu or whatever the one "blessed" underlay system is (either natively or implicitly because you pulled a container based on it).
1. use underpowered devices to perform sophisticated tasks
2. using code/tools that operate at extremely high levels of "abstraction"
don't be surprised when all the inherent complexity is tamed using just more layers of "abstraction". if that becomes a problem for your cost/power/space budget then reconsider choice 1 or choice 2.
Not sure this is worth an argument over semantics, but modern "embedded" development is a lot bigger than just microcontrollers and wearables. IMO as soon as you're deploying a computer into any kind of "appliance", or you're offline for periods of time, or you're running on batteries or your primary network connection is wireless... then yeah, you're starting to hit the requirements associated with embedded and need to seek established solutions for them, including using distros which account for those requirements.
> IMO as soon as you're deploying a computer into any kind of "appliance", or you're offline for periods of time, or you're running on batteries or your primary network connection is wireless
yes and in those instances you do not reach for pytorch/tensorflow on top of ubuntu on top of x86 with a discrete gpu and 32gb of ram. instead you reach for C and micro or some arm soc that supports baremetal or at most rtos. that's embedded dev.
so i'll repeat myself: if you want to run extremely high-level code then don't be "surprised pikachu" when your underpowered platform, that you chose due to concrete, tight budgets doesn't work out.
The hardware can be fast, actually. Here’s an example of relatively modern industrial x86: https://www.onlogic.com/ml100g-41/ That thing is probably faster than half of currently sold laptops.
However, containers or Ubuntu Linux don’t perform great in that environment. Ubuntu is for desktops, containers are for cloud data centers. An offline stand-alone device is different. BTW, end users don’t typically aware that thing is a computer at all.
Personally, I usually pick Alpine or Debian Linux for similar use cases, bare metal i.e. without any containers.
That is the moat they tried to cross. Imagine you have a PyTorch app and run on iOS, arm based, amd based and intel … cloud, or embedded. just imagine. You scale and embed as your business case, not as any one firm current strategy is.
Or at least you have some case as heaven never come. Or come just we do not aware now like internet. Can you need to use ibm to rub sna to provide a token ring based network. In 1980 …
Not that I want to encourage gatekeeping in the first place, but you'll have more success if you have a clue what the other person is talking about in the first place (and some idea of what embedded looks like outside of tiny micros, and how the concerns about abstractions extend beyond matters of how much computational power is available).
Clearly you've never used a Nvidia Jetson and have no idea what it is. You don't need a discrete GPU, it has a quite sophisticated GPU in the SoC. It's Nvidia's embedded platform for ML/AI.
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