> They won’t give me the time of day because they “don’t hire people from finance”

RenTech is a weird firm. The following is a fictional account.

Out of school (I was a finance/engineering double major), I interviewed at RenTech. They told me this was my last chance, that if I worked a day on Wall Street they wouldn't want me because they didn't want that culture (I think it's more about ensuring you have no industry connections outside the firm). They're geographically isolated, encourage employees taking mortgages to buy local homes and frown on industry interactions outside the firm. If you try to leave, they will enforce their non-competes (which are legal in New York) and sue your new employer [1].

I was wary of that need for control then. Today, I think it's morally wrong. Few people can predict what will matter to them ten years down the line. If I worked at RenTech today, I'd be depressed knowing (a) my work went to enrich the likes of Robert Mercer [2], and (b) there is no exit.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/renaissance-millennium/update...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Mercer_%28businessman%2...

I imagine RenTech, who have amazing investment returns, are worried that people will pass their techniques along to competing companies.

Mercer and his family seem to seep the hunger for power and control. I'm not surprised the business conducts itself similarly.

The reason 'not to hire people from finance' - is that it's generally not needed at most very early stage companies.

Renaissance Technology has been around decades and is one of the biggest hedge funds in the world. I don't think it qualifies as an early-stage company.

Wow. So many downvotes.

Re: renaissance. Of course. I'm highlighting where the 'we don't hire finance' trope originates. Nothing to do with Renaissance.

For all of you too young to remember:

In the 'dot-com' era - many 'new companies' still hired 'top down'. They would hire an 'executive team' first, and then maybe developers.

Often, a CFO etc..

Think PetStore.com - two MBA's hiring 'others to do the work, as workers do'.

The notion of 'all hands on deck founders' etc. was still novel.

Many people still wore suits.

So - 2000-ish - those attitudes evolved - and the 'CFO' for a very early stage company became obsolete. CFO/finance types are generally not required at the most early stages of a company wherein the issues are 'money in, money out, money in the bank'.

So, the slightly aggressive hipster/startup trope of 'we don't hire finance types' I think evolved essentially out of this new understanding of how early stage companies work.

I'm not disagreeing with your point but I think it's a bit out of context here. The parent comment was specifically talking about what they heard from Renaissance Technologies, not a some hipster startup.

I was literally trying to give context to the 'no finance' trope.

How does taking 'no finance' out of context and applying a much more general comment that in no way applies to the very specific original context help?

I assume he meant fintech and not accounting

Sure they may lose some great candidates that way, but the reality is that they don't want people in finance because:

1. They have preconceived notions about how finance "should" work

2. People not from finance are driven by other things

This is not to say that there aren't people from finance who don't fall under this, but it's a good way to weed them out without inviting a billion applications from people in finance.

So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic.

One thing my experience in HFT has taught me is that technical ability is only loosely correlated with profitability. So I wouldn't conflate Renaissance's success with their hiring practices.

>So then by your own admission they’re not hiring the best due to this heuristic.

Picking up on your use of the word heuristic, "hiring the best" is very much an optimization problem. Specifically, there's a signal detection problem inherent to hiring in which you want to maximize your hits (selecting the best candidates) while minimizing your false alarms (hiring someone who turns out to be a bad candidate).

There's another layer to this optimization problem, which is that you want to minimize costs, both in time and in money.

As such, there are bound to be many heuristics that are close-to-optimal. I don't know whether excluding people with a background in finance is one of them (in fact, I suspect it's not), but the use of such a heuristic is not prima facie absurd.

In fact, using (good) heuristics in hiring is a feature, not a bug.

The problem here is that the heuristic is (I think) bad.

Two things: 1. what was more or equally important than technical ability for HFT programmers' success in increasing profitability for the company? That was an interesting statement: can you elaborate?

2. That fun might have these heuristics that GP talks of, and for them, the people they hire may well be the best for them. As in, motivated and attitudinally oriented towards what they want, and more able to work free from the assumptions of _knowing_ how it's done in finance. They may be wrong in your case, but that's how heuristics work. To me, that's less of a bullshit case than trendy languages etc.

Trading always has this trade off in terms of (dumb and fast) vs (smart and slow). In the past few years, I think it's been more beneficial to be fast enough, but very smart. So, in this sense, technical ability only takes you so far since "smarts" come from domain expertise or, plainly, just creativity. Team composition matters, since your technical guy needs to be complemented. The objective, of course, is making your team take your organization towards the holy grail of (smart and fast). I'm not sure if this directly answers your question, but perhaps it describes the scenario in which technical ability isn't everything.

I do not think assembling a team for HFT is easy at all, especially now. There are a lot of good reasons for being very peculiar and selective. I am not sure industry outsiders who are just applying understand the dynamic or, in many cases, why a seemingly great candidate is rejected.

Message me. I'm looking for other finance refugees to do tech things with.

Sounds more like a cult.

I don’t know much about the company, but a firm with extraordinary long term returns with a penchant for secrecy, cult-like hiring practices, and all of the employees invested in their extraordinary investment vehicle sounds sketchy to me.