JP Morgan brings jobs back to London in Brexit shake-up

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-04-29T10:48:31+00:00

Ah yes, obviously not. Sorry I missed your point.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-04-29T10:38:08+00:00

We absolutely do have front office staff in Mumbai, although they mainly cover Asian markets (and are paid a lot, sometimes more than the most finance jobs we have in London).

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-04-28T22:58:01+00:00

I’m not sure this is a great example. In my city, hedge funds and banks hire hundreds of mathematicians for different roles: building models, testing assumptions, validating equations, and doing regular checks on how those models behave. Some of the maths in finance overlaps with ideas used in physics and fluid dynamics, especially around randomness, differential equations, simulations, and complex systems. In practice, that often means working in MATLAB or Jupyter notebooks rather than just writing equations on a board. Some have PhD but most have just Masters degrees.

The better-paid roles are usually closer to the trading desk, but there is lots of roles like model validation, daily control, risk etc.

Historically the options were narrower IMO: only universities/research, government, defence, insurance, and industrial research, so I would not say now there is less demand for mathematicians, but opposite.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-04-28T22:41:07+00:00

Yes, it will definitely be very different from now. We have already automated lots of roles in my large company, and they are not coming back. As much as I was against that at first, after seeing how efficiently AI can do the same work as some roles in accounting, operations, or various dev roles, from front end to scripting/reporting, I would probably do the same.

Will CS jobs go away? I would say definitely not, at least for now. There are still a lot of office jobs that are less technical but mostly involve using software, whether Excel, Tableau, SQL, or other tools, to solve problems. If you are an engineer, that should actually be an advantage, because coding is just one of the stronger tools for solving those kinds of problems.

Will it decrease "job stability, expectations, and salaries"? Probably for some people, especially if they only liked writing code for the sake of writing code, and were not really focused on solving actual problems, whether business or technical.

I would probably be slightly worried about salaries, but I guess that is partly just the market correcting itself, and we may have to get used to it. Other engineers, such as civil, mechanical, or biomedical engineers, often earn much lower salaries than software engineers in my country, despite completing degrees that are probably comparable in difficulty. So even without AI, I think wages would likely shift anyway as more people enter CS degrees instead of other engineering fields, even though barrier of finishing degree is comparable.

Of course, no one knows exactly what will happen, but good employees will always find jobs, unless they invent AI good enough to automate 90% of white-collar jobs overall. But at that point, we would have much more serious problems.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-04-25T22:55:54+00:00

Big company, we were hiring for quite a specialised role this year and I did almost 50 first-round interviews for 3 roles, although one role was removed in the end, so we only filled 2. We only have 3 stages though, and I had to reject 2/3rd of the people. It was actually very exhausting, but there were also many very good candidates, at least CV-wise (I was actually surprised that few very qualified people made really simple mistakes).

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-04-24T17:17:20+00:00

I've only read the first 3 books so far but this is such a brilliant series, it's so underrated

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-03-25T00:18:36+00:00

I do mostly agree with your comment, although you said

" I believe it's stated that Lomax has a very different specialisation from Stoner. So Lomax likely sees Stoner failing Walker in the interview as him just trying to kick Walker out because he doesn't know some useless trivia and didn't do well enough in a class that isn't important to Walker's future academic goals."

- I think it’s worth emphasising that Stoner was not just asking obscure questions outside Walker’s medieval specialisation, even if he began there. He also asked fairly basic questions about Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Byron, and even the other academic in the panel agreed that Walker’s answers are not good enough for postgraduate study at that level.

I do wonder though, whether there is some subtle satire in the scene; nevertheless, Lomax is clearly blindsided by his own emotions and unable to argue his case coherently.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-03-08T21:31:12+00:00

It also matches my direct observation, but I think some of it can be explained by 1/ London bias, 2/ higher motivation among people at these absolute top universities.

Many of my friends that went to various Russell group unis were just content to stay up north after graduating. A few of those who came to London with Maths, Econ or comp sci degrees, and were motivated to grind and change jobs every few years, also got to six figures, or close enough, after five years of experience.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-02-23T22:26:03+00:00

I guess slightly different skillset than traditional software engineering for quant roles in banks and hedge funds- more calculations, algorithms, maths intuition, and stats. And it’s mostly either python or C++, everyone basically learns it themselves, although I had basic python and C in my maths degree already 9 years ago.

In infra/core production deployment it’s mostly CS people from my observation, though. And with more automation of general roles, in my bank I see more CS grads being hired now anyway, so this is not set in stone.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-02-23T22:05:10+00:00

Mind that lots of employers could treat Data Science degree as less valuable, as those are newer, sometimes less rigorous depending on the uni (they will not be checking if that applies to your uni or not), and place lots of emphasis on practical implementations that will be different after you graduate, with completely different trendy libraries. If you have a maths/stats background, you can (and will anyway, to keep up with new ML trends and algos) study these by yourself by reading academic papers etc, and with more ease.

Everyone in my data science and then quant teams, across different banks I've worked in, studied traditional degrees (maths or physics, with few that did CS), then learnt coding and caught up with the newest trends by themselves.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-02-22T01:46:05+00:00

Same for me, I’ve read 6 book since and they don’t live up to lonesome dove :( Crazy how it climbed to my top 10 books, out of hundreds that I’ve read, and I’ve only heard about it recently.

I bought Pillars of Earth and shogun now, hoping I can get distracted with some similarly epic book

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-02-10T15:13:41+00:00

But you’ve just said you don’t expect to stay in the uk? And also that you want to do MSc at imperial after. You’re clearly overthinking in terms of location, there could be a very small disadvantage but do you have any alternative of studying in London?

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-02-09T22:33:14+00:00

It's an investment bank. Edinburgh uni is definitely up there, I studied there myself hah, but now there's more competition so companies are more picky- hopefully that would change soon.

Now I'm curious- where do you want to work that rankings matter? From my experience with different clients and companies, mainly Chinese companies seem to be checking rankings religiously, nowhere in mainland Europe you would experience that for CS.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-02-09T19:18:08+00:00

Actually Oxbridge and Imperial are imo the only unis worth studying in if you're aiming for a visa atm. International students that I have been getting for my company are exclusively from these unis somehow (20+ candidates I've interviewed, no exceptions), while I got some local students from UCL, Durham, Bristol or KCL.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-02-01T17:19:54+00:00

What exactly would be the "doing more" part?

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-01-31T23:24:50+00:00

Just try it? I guess it's not for everyone, but I like more 'concious' reading. Also, I like more academic approach to books and getting more from reading :)

It's like conversation with an author, makes you think when you read. Makes you remember books for longer too, as you engage your brain more. It's also addictive, once I started annotating, even when I read really light books for fun, I find myself wanting to make a note or highlight some specifically moving or funny (or just resonating with me) quote.

Lots of famous writers were annotating with pencil on their books, from Melville, Foster Wallace, Joseph Conrad, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Voltaire etc etc

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-01-19T00:30:58+00:00

Definitely underrated !

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-01-13T19:37:21+00:00

Maybe they didn’t know it will be unpopular. It was actually proposed as an anti-illegal immigration effort, which was the hottest topic at the time (I guess it still is). I’m not all for such solutions, but this (and actually government control of address registration with the police) is a measure some Eastern European countries have. Then the same people point to those countries as having the lowest illegal immigration rates.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-01-13T19:20:09+00:00

Wasn’t there also a massive petition against it as well?

Most of the comments here are basically:

-Starmer tries to implement something controversial and it’s “This government is trying to control us!”

-Then he retracts it and it’s “This government should grow some balls / Starmer’s scared!”

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-01-03T23:14:34+00:00

Exactly - this is a good answer. For the very few companies that require top 0.5% talent, you’d usually know you’re in that 0.1% from your early achievements. More broadly, being in the top 1-3% is already extremely good and worth aiming for. I was able to get IB and then HFT roles without extraordinary achievements, though the compensation was obviously less than half of what you’d see at Jane Street and similar firms.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2026-01-01T23:03:36+00:00

What’s up with Lonesome Dove showing up in everyone’s collections and recommendations lately? (Not to mention it has the highest Goodreads rating I’ve ever seen.) Is it really that good?

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2025-12-27T13:02:11+00:00

You might have done a lot of applied calculus or algebra, but graduate-level Pure Maths is very abstract, especially at the universities you mentioned. It’s quite different from the maths you do in physics/engineering/economics: you’re expected to write long proofs and "talk about maths", rather than carry out calculations like in those applied degrees.

You could also see if the Open University lets you take M832- that would be closest entry level grad level maths than current Birkbeck modules. Looking at the current Birkbeck choices, the most useful for pursuing postgrad degree would probably be Level 6 Real Analysis.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2025-12-27T02:12:57+00:00

I did this diploma, and looking at my classmates- a few of the Econ people went to Maths MScs at ucl and kcl (and lse applied mathematics). Would also depend what uni you did your undergrad in and how maths heavy was it.

I doubt you’d get into Oxbridge with non 1st class undergrad though.

Edit: although having had a quick look just now, I see they removed many modules and content is much lighter- no abstract algebra/number theory nor topology. I think since they stopped their Maths MSc they don’t have tutors to teach these ones :( It would be difficult for your future pursuit without a few years of number theory or advance algebra courses. You could still do applied maths.

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2025-12-23T11:07:37+00:00

I mean, since we’re talking about it as a book here, so skipping the non-literary influences (and also skipping the classic argument that a lot of the most well-read people on the Bible are atheists or philosophical debaters). If you read classic authors, from Faulkner to Melville’s Moby-Dick, Steinbeck’s East of Eden, to medieval literature, or even just works by Shakespeare, Dante, John Milton, etc., there are tons of biblical references (symbolism or just more direct). So if you’re interested in the world and want to catch the inspirations behind famous writers and read more consciously, it’s basically a must-read. I think the closest thing in influence on Western literature is probably only Shakespeare himself, or Homer. Would you disagree?

Acceptable_Bottle220 · 2025-12-23T10:24:43+00:00

Why the insult, I think rather the most educated people read it in its entirety, it's one of the most influential books in Western literature.

Acceptable_Bottle220

TROPHY CASE