I should add that Renaissance Technologies is hiring!

https://www.rentec.com/Careers.action

My group is looking for very strong Java/Kotlin developers.

I know this is not likely, but you should consider setting up an anonymous email in your HN profile to at least receive questions about the company as an employee. Not to answer anything proprietary or to give anything away under NDA, but so that people can speak candidly with someone not in HR without having to rely on HN comments.

Denise is great, but I wouldn't say she's the best source to answer harmless but very important questions prospective Java programmers might have that you can answer, for example :)

Here's an example question for you: do you want candidates to also have tax and accounting experience, or is deep Java/Kotlin enough?

Something to consider.

I'm sorry for missing the key point of your question. It's been a busy day.

Deep java/kotlin experience is far more important. Note that as a developer you might start working with tax accounting, but then shift to risk management or investor relations, etc. as business needs shift, so specific knowledge in one area isn't that important.

Tax and accounting experience is nice, but any development work done in those domains would be done at the direction of our existing tax and accounting teams. It's beneficial to have the domain experience (ie what is a trial balance) but not required.

It's a small world. Denise used to sit outside my office until I moved moved to a new location. ;-)

She has forwarded requests that people may occasionally send directly to me in the past and I generally try to respond. I prefer all communication be done through proper channels to avoid any "issues" that might arise.

I have a son who is a CS major in college now. I completely understand how challenging (and borked) the hiring/interviewing process is now as I speak with him about the frustrations he experiences. Which is why I try to be approachable when people have queries.

Can't say I had the most favorable phone interview with you guys, but I did appreciate the incredibly responsive process even through the "proper channels".

Would you consider applicants that started off with a bad GPA in math and computer science courses but then made significant improvements as they progressed?

The answer is Yes. People have things going on in their lives, so I prefer to not look at a college transcript until after I do a phone interview and have a sense of who they are now. I have passed on people who did OK in everything but the transcript was a mess. I have overlooked a weak transcript if someone has some years of experience or other significant skills. I hired a coder who didn't go to college and is largely self taught.

Life is complicated and a transcript alone captures none of that complexity. As an example, I married someone whose father died of ALS while she was a college student. Helping care for her Dad, and comforting her Mom through his passing, had an impact on her college experience. I look for the A- candidate who perhaps worked during school, took challenging classes and has a passion for their craft, over the A+ candidate who coasted along and who has done nothing. Steel sharpens steel. Resilience in face of challenges is important. If the poor GPA is because you were partying and half-assing your work and couldn't be bothered to apply yourself, then please be honest with yourself and don't send a resume.

For the interview in our group, we will sit you at a keyboard with the OS, language and tools you selected, and we'll give you a coding project that exercises the skills you reported on your resume. And then we'll see how you work. If you are unproductive in that environment or spend all your time using google and stack overflow, then you are not our candidate.

Do you consider candidates from outside the US?

It's simply surprising that they continuously find an edge in an ever increasingly competitive market.

It's not a fair comparison to say they just "did the math" when there are thousands of other, highly qualified, highly intelligent people trying to "do the math" at the same time, all the time, yet RenTech has managed to always come out ahead and not just barely, but massively ahead.

I don't believe RenTech is doing anything illegal. I think they have a extremely significant edge that they've managed to maintain for a significant period of time and that should be suspicious to anyone who participates in the market.

Like seven standard deviations better than their competitors. Maybe they're just that good, but normally when something is that far out of the norm it invites suspicion.

It is right and proper to doubt the results as published in that new book.

It's the tone though that surprises me on what I expect is a more technically oriented site. I'm now half expecting an accusation that Renaissance uses witchcraft, or alien technology from the History Channel.

What’s hard to believe is the immense success, something on the order of 70% annual returns for a couple of decades, the secrecy, and the fact that it’s size is capped. That and the convenient smokescreen of “they did the math,” and the fact that nobody else, given the immense incentive to do so, has matched their “math.” I don’t know if it’s illegal, but my gut says that if it isn’t, it would be if people knew about it.

This fund consistently performs in the extreme long tail of statistical likelihood. Generally when something is that extreme we don't think "welp, statistics! someone is bound to occupy that spot in the distribution!". It's far more likely, given the industry and history of misadventures in it, that there is missing information. And, given the industry and the shenanigans that go on, it is also likely there is something less than above-board related to that missing information.

Mundane explanations, like (legal) information access advantage or superior model execution times, give fleeting advantages that are extremely unlikely to be unreproducible by others for very long, much less years or decades.

The answer to this is in Peter Thiel's Zero to One. Most people believe that universal competition has made it so there's no edge.

Some people have done economic history.