[yesprocrast2]

The answer is obvious and simple to anyone who has worked for "one of Wall Street's most successful entrepreneurs."

These assholes churn through assistants like you wouldn't believe. Most quit, in spite of the high pay, out of basic self-respect. The others are fired during a tantrum.

Most of these jagoffs have a few pending wrongful termination lawsuits at any given time. Just ask them, they'll probably brag about it.

[sillysaurus3]

As someone who has no idea what the working environment is like, I'd love to hear some stories. What's day-to-day life like in that sort of job? I guess I'm just curious what the owners do to make it so unbearable to work there. And why they don't care.

[fleitz]

It's super high risk, super high reward, super high pressure, basically the tech industry except the people don't pretend not to be douches. Hedge funds are the same as startups, 5 guys with 5 billion dollars who opened business two weeks ago.

Like the don't hire an asshole rule would be hire only assholes, and once in a while they'd hire someone who wasn't.

That said if you don't mind working with douches at least you'll be working with douches who aren't trying to pretend their running a 'family' as a company, which is refreshing when you're used to hearing about how the founders aren't really in it for the money but really want to 'change the world'. Financiers want to change the world too, namely, turn it into change and put that change in their pockets.

I worked on the outskirts of the finance industry, it was still pretty insane, but nothing like the guys actually in it.

[bbenzon]

"Financiers want to change the world too, namely, turn it into change and put that change in their pockets."

Bingo!

[ohquu]

After reading these other comments, I Googled David E. Shaw and found this: http://mathbabe.org/2012/04/05/it-sucks-to-be-rich/. (WARNING: Not sure of the validity of these stories, but they're interesting.)

> First example: David hires a Ph.D. in English literature (he has a thing for “geniuses”, even in the mail room) to test mattresses for him. So that person’s job is to sleep on 15 different mattresses, for 8 nights each, and draw up a report to tell him the pros and cons of each mattress. This is to avoid him having an uncomfy night’s sleep. That’s what the risk was that we were avoiding with that.

> Second example: David wants to be sure his trip to California goes smoothly, so he hires a Ph.D. in Something to take the exact same trip – same car service to the NY airport, same flight (same seat on plane!), same car service upon arrival, same hotel, exactly a week before his trip (due to understood seasonality issues of air travel) – to make sure there are no snags, and to draw up the report that presumable explains how much leg room there was in his plane.

As an aside, their research group encouraged me to apply for a position shortly before I graduated college. The application asked for things like SAT/ACT scores and (number of) lines of code written in various languages. I thought my application looked pretty good, but I guess my ACT score was too low for them to consider me (even potentially!) brilliant. I still feel kind of bitter about that.

[benbreen]

I commented earlier that I thought about applying to that classified job in 2007 - as it happens, in 2008 I briefly worked as the personal assistant to a personal assistant at D.E. Shaw. I was working alongside Harvard business school types, but doing the most trivial things. I literally had to run across midtown to deliver a six pack of Diet Dr. Pepper to one of Shaw's executives at one point. Half the people I met there were humanities PhD dropouts. I applied to humanities PhD programs while working there and sort of did the reverse.

[patcon]

Despite the absurdity of the reports, all i can think of is: DUDE, PUBLISH YOUR DATA.

[monort]

The second service can be extremely useful to autistic person.

[lazyant]

sounds like "The devil wears Prada" book/movie

[gwern]

You'd think that if the turnover was so bad that they had to have the ad literally 10 years running, at least one of the burnt assistants would've explained what's going on.

[yesprocrast2]

I'm sure many would talk privately, but not publicly. Not if they're hoping to get paid from their lawsuit or if they got paid to sign something. Or if they want to work for another firm, and have to worry about false rumors being spread.

They also know first hand how litigious and vindictive these guys get. My friend nearly killed himself as a result of being repeatedly dragged through the courts. He was forced to burn his life savings on lawyers, after his two asshole employers predictably turned on each other. And he was just a witness in the cases, a pawn, subject to torture by two of Wall Street's most successful entrepreneurs. They blew millions on lawyers and ruined lives, just to fuck with each other.