Ivanisms

While doing some research this morning I found a nice article today about recruiting A candidates and the dangers of B candidates. I always am seeking the A candidates, but this really summarizes why I stay away from B Candidates:

B players, on the other hand, are the bad hires. They are good enough that they often get things passably done. They may be sloppy or incomplete, but they always seem to have an external excuse. They are usually likeable enough (you hired them!) but there's something about them. They are the people who won't admit when they don't know something, and won't ask questions for fear of appearing dumb. And they are the people who start politics in the office. Because they can't keep up, because they're not an A player and know it, because they think economics is a "zero sum game", they start breeding discontent and negativity.

He's got another good article on retaining employees as well.

But I don't have any finance experience

Yeah, and so what? There is an interesting rule I've noted in finance recruiting -- the better the group, the less important finance knowledge is. Wait, isn't that backwards? No, the better the group the less important is finance knowledge.
Why? Because the best groups need the best coders and realize the true scarcity of engineers at this level. Some of my biggest deals this year have been placing out of industry, out of state developers into front office groups at Morgan Stanley, Lehman, and Goldman Sachs for just this reason.
So if you are a great developer, let's talk.

Strategist Search

Very exciting news, one of our clients is a building a strategy team in Fixed Income. For those unaware of what a strat is, it's a role created at Goldman many years ago for essentially a developer who gets paid from the business, rather than from IT. The idea is that if a developer is paid on the business, their interests are more inline with making money.

Very exciting search, so if you are a quant with strong coding skills or a coder with strong quant skills, we should be talking ...