As someone who did some simulation focused engineering grad school stuff; there is a tendency for some of the best to go become quants. Does the field need it? I don’t know. But for whatever reason the draw of the “print money using math tricks” seems to attract some hardcore folks, haha.
It is really frustrating to see good engineers go to play trading games. We should study how exactly it is China managed to unlock this capacity.
I think so yes. There's very few engineers that can pull out this type of work IME. In a pool of ~30M SEs around the globe I'd say there's no more than ~30K of such engineers. This is 0.001% and it's a very optimistic number I'd say.
Why do you think this would be controversial? This isn't an every day work.
It is really frustrating to see good engineers go to play trading games. We should study how exactly it is China managed to unlock this capacity.