[ilc]

Maybe quite the opposite. Wall Street and Finance is can be very aggressive and learn it for yourself.

I learned math of finance from a professor I'm pretty sure was quanting on the Street at the time.

When I told him one of the constants in our little trading game was off by a factor of 10x, he said prove it. My final talk was: "How to make 2.3 million dollars in 30 days using options."

The real lesson wasn't about pricing options. It was about being ruthless when the time came.

[tombert]

Fair enough; I wasn't applying for a quant position, just a software job. Looking back, I suspect the real reason that they were even considering me was because I had professional Haskell and Scala experience on my resume, and so I looked appealing, particularly if a dropout was learning it for fun.

What I find amusing is that I'm categorically a much better functional programmer now than I was then, with professional F# experience with a lot of Clojure to boot, but they haven't responded back to any of my applications in the last three years.

[cess11]

They might want to shape developers on the job and bet that it's on average cheaper to do with functional-curious people rather than those that have professional experience in ML-languages.

[tombert]

Yeah fair, I definitely have developed pretty strong opinions on the "right" way to do things in functional languages, and those opinions likely do differ somewhat from theirs, at least in some cases.

I think if I want to work at Jane Street now, I either need to finish my PhD, or get a Masters degree from a sexy school to "cleanse" my WGU degree (despite the fact that I don't think I know much less than the average Ivy League graduate, though obviously I'm a biased audience).

[cess11]

One reason for recruiting from 'high end' unis is the kind of social networks those graduates are more likely to belong to. They are also more likely to have access to more candidates that you would like to evaluate and possibly give an offer, compared to 'lower end' unis.

I'm not saying that I think this order of things is jolly good, but from the perspective of this kind of business sector it makes sense. Personally I avoid finance related sectors, a stint at a casino operator to get some experience on the CV was enough for me.