Ask for my spouse. He’ll join Bloomberg as software developer. He’s from CS background and always has huge interest in math and finance, and would possibly develop a future career in quant. however he only has CS master degree. So curious inside Bloomberg is it possible to switch from engineers to quant side? Or generally any recommendation of teams that could better prepare for a future quantitative finance career? We know many teams involves finance domain but mostly still engineer work to build up product. So any teams involve both engineers and analytics/quant/machine learning work? Any advice is appreciated.
Quant devs at Bloomberg mostly work on pricing securities and derivatives. The skills involved are at best somewhat transferable to a quant research role, and should be easily transferable to another quant dev role. If your husband wants to become a quantitative researcher (which is what most people mean by "quant") and can't become one now, he should pursue data science and/or a math/stats/MFE degree from a top school. The quants I've met without a math degree from a top school just join banks, second tier hedge funds and other firms for credit, lending and asset management quant roles, for similar or less comp than a software engineer or data scientist, often with longer hours. If he wants to become a quant at a top hedge fund that pays quants more than tech jobs or the above roles, it's not going to happen without an advanced math degree and some serious math skills. Even an MFE isn't sufficient at most of the top hedge funds. A quick LinkedIn search for quantitative researchers at Citadel, Two Sigma and Jane Street confirms the above. Most of them have also published research and/or won math competitions. TL;DR: there is a significant pay difference between quant and quant dev. Generally, the hourly rate for the devs is better at large tech companies than in hedge funds, and the comp is more stable with better WLB.
Thanks! Yes my husband definitely will pursue some part-time MFE degree, but for now, he needs to secure a team that fits this long-term career goal. So for the derivatives pricing team, what exactly the devs work on? I guess still c++ to build the product rather than running modelling?
Also what about portfolio and equity teams? Do they also have quant dev positions?
Bloomberg supplies financial data to traders (funds / companies). They don't trade themselves. So you can't move to quant roles "within Bloomberg"
But inside the Bloomberg, they do have quant teams.
Quant is a somewhat overloaded term. There are more quantitative teams within Bloomberg, but as Microsoft’s said you’ll never be an actual “quant”.