You know how coders are expected to grind out leetcode interviews? For the finance fields, a common interview topic is what you read in “The Journal” (WSJ). So just stay on top of it for a few weeks, see some trends, etc.

I’ve worked in finance for 25 years and never even heard of this coming up in an interview.

Imo it's not out of place in context if one is trying to determine if the candidate has an interest in finance.

Now, I'm not disqualifying them if they dont read the journal. But if they can't demonstrate any proactive interest in finance, or tell me about some happenings/events/stories they personally find interesting (theres a ton of interesting stuff happening) its definitely an amber flag.

So I wrote up how I ended there: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1663668616233885699?s=20

but that story is not the most efficient way (although I do talk about a better approach at the end).

To summarize:

A LOT of hedge funds hire non finance people for specific roles e.g. cloud, Linux tuning, networking etc

The smarter ones have realized that there are great people everywhere e.g. Gaming company SREs have a lot of relevant experience due to high traffic load, short SLAs and lots of financial risk due to outages. Applying for a role in one of those departments is a lot easier than trying to jump directly into a trading desk/operations role.

Finally, knowing someone on the inside also helps a lot which is made MUCH easier by LinkedIn, Twitter etc