Hacker News Reader

Comment by fdgsdfogijq | Hacker News Reader

I interviewed at a quant hedge fund. They hire some of the top programmers in the world at 1-2M+ comp. The head of recruiting told me that even if someone passes all of the coding interviews, if he is too slick and social in the behavioral they will reject him. They specifically wanted aspergers/slightly autistic personality types, and believed that a disheveled look with poor behavioral interviewing was a legitimate signal to hiring the best.

View on HN

Worked in HFT and we had a “SpergBoard” - new hires were encouraged but not required to undertake an ASD diagnostic exam and put their score on the leaderboard.

The heavyweights at the firm all scored in the “definitely see a clinician” range.

My personal opinion of it was the “pretty boys” were in it for the dough and the prestige and not the love of the game. Personally, I joined for wanting to work and hone my skills. I could see it being a viable recruiting strategy.

Yeah i think this is accurate, this was actually an HFT firm, and was a prop shop not a hedge fund. They need to weed out people who are there purely for the money. He was kind of describing how the CTO's brain never stops thinking about coding, and when hes in bed at night, hes imagining how to apply a design pattern to a problem at hand. In some ways, they wanted people who would not stop working and were obsessed with the problem space

As an autistic person who has spent their whole life trying to overcome it and be slick and social, this really winds me up.

In a hedge fund, that probably reflects management fear that if someone is both a good quant and has social skills, they will take over, or start their own fund.

Why do they not advertise this? Autistic people are starving for employment despite being extremely skilled. Plus a great PR opportunity.

yeah I always figured the "we hire autistic people" PR thing I see some companies do was more cynical than altruistic

with the right engineering managers and technical problems it can work, I think big companies need more cog like employees

I think they give money to charities for autism/aspbergers. But they really dont hire many people and are pretty under the radar as it is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com