I am L4 but with a PhD(in harmonic analysis) from no name state school. 2yoe in tech. I was teaching previously at a 4-yr private college for 8 years prior. My previous manager(also has math PhD) liked me and always gave glowing reviews. Honestly I have been doing exact same thing work wise except I often had interesting academic type discussions with my previous manager. With the current manager he just want things done ASAP. I like to take things slow but gain deep understanding. So my curiosity is viewed as a negative by the current manager. I honestly find the project I work on very uninspiring(of course I didn't say these at work.) if all I do is rushing it and move on. It's like just using/memorizing central limit theorem statement without going through the proof, which is actually the joy of it. My current manager thinks I don't have anything to offer. He is promoting another L4 with BS in CS who is a better presenter and communicator than me. Should I just go work for some hedge fund, despite the higher overall stress? At least I might be more valued there. I just don't like wolf of Wall Street culture but I think they need some combo of statistics and C++ skills which I have some.
You haven't mentioned what you are currently doing. What skills/experience do you have that are useful to your targeted companies? I would think hedge funds would want more than knowing some "statistics and Cpp". "Harmonic analysis" sounds like it could land you a job in signal processing, maybe in defense/Apple/Broadcom/Qualcomm/etc. that makes radio stuffs, but unsure if they pay well.
I solely program in C++ professionally and used to teach linear algebra, pde, probability, mathematical statistics classes. I feel like the research I did in harmonic analysis itself is not that useful outside of academia.
Go to hedge fund and make 500k-1M TC
Go for higher TC
Should I feel guilty for selling out my soul to evil hedge funds? My current company has an ethical mission statement, it's just that I am not valued here.
What makes you think hedge funds are evil?