But that's the problem. Bonuses are awarded based on who can argue politically. It's similar to creating Dutch books. Managers will work hard to set a up a situation such that, no matter what the actual performance outcome really is, they have ready-made, plausible-seeming arguments for why it wasn't their fault and why they did what was asked and it was impossible to avoid the particular outcome. Then they push the burden of blame for a failed outcome somewhere down the hierarchy. It's not a perfect science, and yes, sometimes managers do get dinged badly for failing to be objective enough, but most often even what that does happen the incentive scheme doesn't cause them to become more open-minded with regard to modeling techniques, rather more cynical and aggressive with political techniques.

I thought the exact same thing going into finance. If real money is on the line, surely they care about which techniques are most rigorously justified in a given model context, right?

Absolutely not. The incentive schemes from clients (who often don't actually fire bad investment managers when they should, and who also engage in chasing returns momentum despite the long and, by now, boring and uncontroversial history of that not paying off) don't actually punish inefficiency. It's a big political mess.

Really the best you can hope for is that they'll hire you for marketing purposes. Hey look, we brought in a shiny new expert in deep learning -- we're cutting edge, we swear! They won't actually let you do any real work with deep learning, of course. It will all be Excel jockey bullshit on factor models in which you'll do obviously fallacious things like directly compare the t-stats of two different model fits as a means for model selection. Maybe you'll write an ineffectual white paper on something slightly more advanced from time to time. But the big reason you're hired is to look good on paper and smoke cigars and drink brandy with the right person who wants you as a political darling in order to win arguments from authority about how you definitely should not migrate away from Excel/VBA.

This is not hyperbole, sadly.