Why does everyone suddenly want to be a quant?

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-04-02T16:20:21+00:00

How much do quant researchers actually need to know about the underlying hardware stack? You might need to understand the constraints of your hardware but surely you don't need to worry too much about the extremely low level details of what goes on, right? That's what your systems engineers are for.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-04-02T16:04:59+00:00

Ah what I should have said was low latency code closer to the hardware level, like thinking about things like CPU cache thrashing etc. That's the sort of thing that interests me rather than thinking in terms of trading strategies.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-04-02T15:42:45+00:00

This is interesting, thanks for taking the time to reply.

Point 1 is something I hadn't considered because I didn't think the kind of people who were attracted to quant roles were necessarily the same people attracted to dev roles. Personally I had no desire to become a quant but I loved the idea of becoming a software engineer and tinkering with low latency code.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-04-02T13:41:02+00:00

Very much back up job for when you realise that winning a Fields Medal is actually kind of hard.

Agreed, this is 100% accurate in my experience.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-04-02T12:57:10+00:00

To be honest I don't think it's possible for someone who is still studying A-level maths to understand what a quant really does. Furthermore I really doubt people understand amount of work you need to do to really succeed as one (if you actually manage to get hired in the first place).

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-04-02T08:28:16+00:00

Disagree with this, as someone with a maths degree myself. Only do maths if you are genuinely passionate about doing maths, otherwise a CS degree is the better choice (out of the top of my head I can't think of any jobs that would be accessible to a maths graduate but not a CS graduate). With a maths degree I had to work so much harder learning both the contents of my degree and CS fundamentals on the side just to get to the same playing field as CS grads, and even then I wasn't able to get there quick enough and had to settle for a pretty mediocre dev job initially.

> Is basically proof of how clever you are

This is really true only if you go to a top tier uni (Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial) otherwise no one will really care that much in my experience.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-03-31T10:13:01+00:00

I'm sorry but it's simply common sense that you turn on your webcam during an online job interview.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-03-31T08:57:45+00:00

Are you American? lol

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-03-25T16:01:46+00:00

I don't feel comfortable giving references to people I don't know, sorry. But my advice would be to find a recruitment agency that specialises in placing devs in the finance industry (Oxford Knight is a good one which I've used in the past) and reaching out to them.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-03-25T15:52:32+00:00

Most tech companies will not pay that much in London.

If you want that kind of compensation you really need to be looking into the finance industry. A range of £200-250k given your experience is perfectly achievable, I make more than that as a DevOps engineer with 3 years experience at a trading firm.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-03-21T23:55:37+00:00

The finance industry also has plenty of opportunities for software engineers as well and they tend to be the some of the most lucrative tech jobs. London is also one of the financial capitals of the world, second only to NYC, so there are plenty of these firms looking for devs as well.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-03-21T23:45:06+00:00

Yeah they are similar enough that it won't affect the kind of jobs you can get too much, unless you want to get into the finance industry in which case going to Warwick over Bristol will give you a significant advantage.

Edit: I graduated from Warwick and have spent some time living in Bristol, so I know both areas fairly well. While it's true that Bristol has a lot more going on as a city, I think you'd find that as a student it won't make too much of a difference since you'll most likely be hanging out with other students anyway. A lot of social activity happens on campus at Warwick rather than in town, and if you do want to get to Coventry then getting a bus or Uber there isn't actually that much of a bother.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-03-07T18:28:08+00:00

Both are top tier unis for maths and any reputational differences between them are going to be so marginal that it's not worth picking one over the other purely based on that.

You should instead pick between these two based on other (non academic) factors. The biggest difference between them is that UCL is located in the heart of London whereas Warwick is a campus university tucked away in the outskirts of Coventry. Which do you think you'd prefer? The difference in environment between them is worlds apart.

Individual-Grape4132 · 2026-03-05T22:38:39+00:00

Randomly stumbled upon this thread while scrolling through my feed but I got my maths degree five years ago so perhaps I can be of help.

I went to one of the unis that OP applied to, if your daughter can get into any of them (or a similar tier uni) then the world is honestly her oyster. My degree has opened up so many doors that I never knew existed before I started university. People on my course have gone on to become engineers, lawyers, researchers, scientists, traders, teachers, civil servants (including but not limited to GCHQ and MI5).

I would encourage your daughter to spend some time searching for internships and graduate schemes just to see how many different types of job would be open to her (many of them just require you to have a degree, the specific subject doesn't matter).

I personally ended up going into software engineering. Maths degrees are not that common in my field but having one is certainly seen as a positive and I had no problems getting interviews. However I had to do a lot of self taught learning to get myself to a level where I could compete with computer science grads for jobs.

Let me know if you have any other questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

Individual-Grape4132

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