To see this all you have to do is interview at a few "prestigious" financial companies.
A while back I interviewed with one of the top trading firms. It was for a lower level position that I normally wouldn't take but I was excited about the prospect of working with some truly brilliant quants.
Wow was I disappointed. The discussion with the quants quickly relieved that they had absolutely zero interest in their field, and not a particularly deep understanding of the fundamentals of the mathematics they were using. It became clear that their entire course of study was focused on getting in to high paying financial company, and all the things they had to learn on the way there were just boring prereqs.
I've met a lot of really talented and smart applied math people over my career, and this quant team was not in that groups of people.
That said all the engineers I chatted with were great. My takeaway was that these companies do need talented engineers to run these systems but the "brilliant quants" is more or less just, as you say, the illusion of superior competence.
I think it really depends to be honest. I don't think what you are saying is generally true of people at prop trading firms, the ones that I know were generally very into math/physics and got lured by the high pay.
With prop firms, there is little need to schmooze the rich with fancy degrees
A while back I interviewed with one of the top trading firms. It was for a lower level position that I normally wouldn't take but I was excited about the prospect of working with some truly brilliant quants.
Wow was I disappointed. The discussion with the quants quickly relieved that they had absolutely zero interest in their field, and not a particularly deep understanding of the fundamentals of the mathematics they were using. It became clear that their entire course of study was focused on getting in to high paying financial company, and all the things they had to learn on the way there were just boring prereqs.
I've met a lot of really talented and smart applied math people over my career, and this quant team was not in that groups of people.
That said all the engineers I chatted with were great. My takeaway was that these companies do need talented engineers to run these systems but the "brilliant quants" is more or less just, as you say, the illusion of superior competence.