[22SAS]

A lot of the stuff in trading firms is proprietary and pretty secretive like trading strategies, how their systems achieve some level of latency, if they have FPGA/HW teams then what are their capabilities like.

When an employee resigns to go to another trading firm, to ensure that they don't leave right away and use the secret sauce at their new firm, they put that employee on a non-compete or a garden leave. Basically, for a period of time, could be as little as 2-3 months to 2 years, that employee can either sit at home or go work in an industry that is not trading but for that duration they cannot work in the same industry. The logic is that strategies and systems change pretty frequently, so in that time whatever knowledge that employee has, becomes outdated.

If they decide to sit at home, to make it lucrative, most firms will pay their base salary for that period, or some percentage of total comp (base+bonus). Since the employee is getting paid to do nothing, almost nobody in trading has any issues with non-competes.

While this is pretty awesome, it is a pain in the butt for a visa holder making such a transition. Technically, to remain in status a visa worker has to also be performing the duties on their petition, so even if they get paid during non-compete it can lead for them to leave the US. Since this is not as simple to enforce and not rigorously checked, their previous employer does not revoke their petition till they start at their new firm. Since the workers petition is still active with USCIS, they're getting paid and have benefits still active, it just appears that the employee is still working.

[version_five]

> Since the employee is getting paid to do nothing, almost nobody in trading has any issues with non-competes.

That's surprising to me, I assume these are mostly ambitious people who would not want the gap in their work record that came from spending a year being paid to do nothing. Obviously there are other things one could do, but they probably don't advance the career the same way a year of real work does

[ISL]

In some lines of work, it is only possible to get hired by signing a non-compete. As long as such garden-leave practice is industry-standard, it may not be a career problem.

Furthermore, if you're in ambitious-mode, you can take that entire year to get better at your discipline of choice, paid for by your "ex"-employer.

[brailsafe]

It seems odd to conflate a gapless resume with ambition, desire to work, or even constant work with career advancement or career advancement with generalized ambition. The people I know that manage to maintain long gapless work histories aren't the most ambitious, and they often work harder than the people who've seen more career advancement. The people I think of as the most ambitious might not even have careers, but some do.

But that might be unrelated, and I think you're perhaps referring to people who specifically have the ambition to climb a career ladder and I've definitely found resume gaps to not help in that pursuit, but I don't think people with unsuperficial career ambition care so much about gaps.

[explodingman]

> The people I think of as most ambitious might not even have careers

Could you expand on that?

[brailsafe]

I think career ambition is somewhat mundane, and within the parameters that a given person can control, runs its useful course with limited categorically different positive lifestyle impact. Limited in the sense that often times you end up just working on different products, or moving into a higher level decision making role, or making more money to do more programming or sales or whatever. The parameters that one can control being the stuff outside of getting extremely lucky while more or less doing the stuff you'd be doing anyway. For example, I could set my sights very high and end up at Google working on whatever. I'll make more money, but it'll go right into my bank account or on some fancy product. It's certainly more glamorous I guess, maybe the code is trickier to write, or the outcome more interesting, and that's all great and something that might be worthwhile to shoot for, but it's not really that interesting or that unimaginable or that risky, except to one's personal life balance. I just have to work on particular skills and devote a certain amount of time, and then maybe I get it, or I don't. Same reason people working at Apple's new campus on whatever product probably don't think too much of it, they're just doing work day to day. It's compelling and it's ambitious if you're not already there, and interesting, but it doesn't cross my mind when thinking of the most ambitious people.

The most ambition I see, represents seeking a categorically unlikelihood, usually one that is rewarding in a wildly extreme or different way (which could be career oriented for sure), that is potentially life threatening or otherwise actually risky, in a categorically different discipline or environment, and repeatedly.

Admittedly many of the examples I can think of come out with with the possibility of professional notoriety, but it's not a fundamental component. A popular example would be Alex Honnold, but he'd still be missing horizontal leaps, which may still come. Someone else set their sights on becoming the best BMX rider, then bike company founder, and then quit to become a custom furniture designer; the first being extremely costly and risky in a number of ways, with rewards being ambiguous at best and with no linear trajectory, the second being more obvious but requiring different skills that you'd need to build from scratch, and the third being a fundamentally different thing that's rather unlikely for someone to become successful in starting from zero.

The most ambitious I know though have no clear career at all, and do that sort of stuff even though there's no obvious notoriety, tangible monetary reward, or glamour to be had. That, or the extreme unlikelihood in successfully getting out of extreme poverty with no connections or skills, and then trying to do it again with something unrelated.

I.E become extremely good at skateboarding -> then a pilot -> then a mountaineer, and all the while you're just doing some arbitrary thing for money.

[precompute]

That's a great response.

A career (and life) trajectory of the sorts that you described is ideal for people that don't much care about their social standing in terms of what is "expected" of them. As in you wouldn't expect those people to be head girls, they wouldn't much care about what was expected of them. The primary impetus for most success is ego and envy, and almost never bragging rights. The people who do things BECAUSE those things happen to be the best they could do are vanishingly rare.

Someone like Alex Honnold would fare very poorly in an office environment, and would get chewed up by the sociopaths-in-charge, and the regular office drone monotony would not respond well to someone like him joining a clique / group / "being the [X] guy"

There are many organizational explanations for this, but one that's sort of easy to understand without much background (ie sans MBTI / ways people respond to culture/novel things / esoteric woo / etc) is https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

Most "ambitious" people care about their careers because they aren't properly ambitious in the first place.

[brailsafe]

Yes, I agree with every point you made and I'm glad you liked my extremely long reply :) It was a somewhat tricky thing to articulate while also not dismissing the merit of having career ambitions as their own useful thing.

[22SAS]

If they're going to stick in trading then that doesn't matter because non-competes are standard in the industry, so everyone will understand. Some take it as a way to get some paid downtime. A friend of mine, who joined my firm, went around Europe on his 4-month non-compete. Others do something like that, if it is too long then they just work in tech.

Some firms like Jane Street and Old Mission have no non-competes.

[formercoder]

Plenty go work in Big Tech for a bit to hang out, or try a startup, or fiddle around with trading strategies on their own time.