I have about 3 rolls of undeveloped film sitting in my drawer.
I think light is slowly leaking in the longer I put off developing them. Then again, I need every last cent in my account to survive.
Things are slowly turning around somewhat, I hope to plow through this new set of notes I printed on multithreading programming to help with work soon.
But how do I explain to an unbeliever that despite the small slivers of fear, I am mostly optimistic?
Monday, November 12
Competition
These past few weeks I have been heavily involved in the recruitment process to hire someone with the aptitude to program algorithms at work. The candidate would be doing exactly what I do. The amount of ideas to work on has increased substantially and it was only after I managed to convince the management that this is the right way to develop this business. While I have not really come up with a lot of systems (mostly due to lack of appropriate skills, which I subsequently built up during my development process), I have a number of projects that I want to work on. Unfortunately, being the only one with the necessary skill set, I find it difficult to discuss or further enhance my ideas. With the new hire, hopefully this will be resolved.
When our recruitment advertisement went out, so many people replied. Competition was stiff - there were people holding onto masters and even PhDs. We included some with only bachelors degrees for the interview, just to widen our nets. However, during the interviews, I was completely awestruck by how good this people looked on paper but couldn't hold a candle to our "ideal candidate". The ones with bachelors were not well qualified enough, the masters had only some idea of what is expected of them (their education did not equip them with enough skills) and the PhDs were just plain weird.
I realized how thankful that I was given the opportunity to do what I do, despite being unqualified on paper but at least I had the necessary market knowledge and experience. I also felt that there was a general lack of passion among the candidates: when they mentioned that they were passionate about the finance market, I asked them what was the last book they have read and none could give me a satisfactory answer.
Sadly, if I ever had to send my CV out again, I know with certainty that I will not receive a reply because on paper, I just cannot beat these guys. Yes, many do not have the years behind them but if they were lucky to land a job somewhere, their CV will probably move ahead of mine.
That said, I also question the need for a masters in financial engineering, seeing how I have picked up most of the syllabus on my own (yes, stochastic calculus, statistical programming, time series analysis etc). Unless I do it in a school that provides a rigorous syllabus and an opportunity to move into a top-notch fund after, it's pretty much pointless.
Which obviously begs the question - does one go for an education to hopefully secure a job after or try and get a job and pick up the skills along the way? I never was much of a stickler for institutionalized education, and with websites like coursera out there, I believe one has no excuse not to improve on one's knowledge.
Anyway, we shortlisted a couple of promising candidates, I tasked them with some data crunching and will have to see their results. Although at times I get frustrated with people (who do not understand, and not putting in effort to understand) rebuking my ideas or simply just don't get it, I must be thankful for the opportunity to develop my ideas because so many people out there really want this. It's like knowing that the environment may not be ideal but I constantly need to remind myself, things could be worse.
When our recruitment advertisement went out, so many people replied. Competition was stiff - there were people holding onto masters and even PhDs. We included some with only bachelors degrees for the interview, just to widen our nets. However, during the interviews, I was completely awestruck by how good this people looked on paper but couldn't hold a candle to our "ideal candidate". The ones with bachelors were not well qualified enough, the masters had only some idea of what is expected of them (their education did not equip them with enough skills) and the PhDs were just plain weird.
I realized how thankful that I was given the opportunity to do what I do, despite being unqualified on paper but at least I had the necessary market knowledge and experience. I also felt that there was a general lack of passion among the candidates: when they mentioned that they were passionate about the finance market, I asked them what was the last book they have read and none could give me a satisfactory answer.
Sadly, if I ever had to send my CV out again, I know with certainty that I will not receive a reply because on paper, I just cannot beat these guys. Yes, many do not have the years behind them but if they were lucky to land a job somewhere, their CV will probably move ahead of mine.
That said, I also question the need for a masters in financial engineering, seeing how I have picked up most of the syllabus on my own (yes, stochastic calculus, statistical programming, time series analysis etc). Unless I do it in a school that provides a rigorous syllabus and an opportunity to move into a top-notch fund after, it's pretty much pointless.
Which obviously begs the question - does one go for an education to hopefully secure a job after or try and get a job and pick up the skills along the way? I never was much of a stickler for institutionalized education, and with websites like coursera out there, I believe one has no excuse not to improve on one's knowledge.
Anyway, we shortlisted a couple of promising candidates, I tasked them with some data crunching and will have to see their results. Although at times I get frustrated with people (who do not understand, and not putting in effort to understand) rebuking my ideas or simply just don't get it, I must be thankful for the opportunity to develop my ideas because so many people out there really want this. It's like knowing that the environment may not be ideal but I constantly need to remind myself, things could be worse.
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