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Comment by LeonardoTolstoy | Hacker News Reader

If you are in the UK Deepmind seemed to be that way to me when I applied. A lot of research groups doing hard research in a wide array of fields, cutting edge AI stuff, a core team of SEs developing in house programs for researchers, and research engineers for productionization. And no, I didn't get the job lol.

I've heard mixed things about it as a company but GResearch (also UK) seemed like an interesting R&D software / math mix in the vein of investment banking. I applied there over ten years ago so YMMV at this point, who knows.

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I work at a very successful HFT. It’s a special place, but we’re not advancing the state of the art in fundamental science like the Bell Labs/Microsoft Researches of the world.

Sorry, what's HFT?

High-frequency trading, I'd assume. Exploiting the stock market for profit.

A huge black hole of mental energy spent slicing pennies and seconds, creating nothing.

Or providing liquidity to reduce transaction costs for everyone.

How high are the costs and how much can you reduce them before you reach diminishing returns? Will it reach zero?

It is pretty close to zero. Has anyone thought about how much a trade of a broadly traded security will cost them in recent times, or ever thought it would not happen near instantly?

How frequently do you think most people make such transactions?

I don’t know about individuals, but there are quite a few people exposed to transactions costs via 401k/IRA/taxpayer funded pensions/etc.

I haven't incurred a trade in a 401k in a decade. Sub-milli liquidity is absolutely unnecessary for me.

Even making deposits into the account incurs transactions. Sure, speed doesn't matter here, but overhead does.

Citadel or Jump?

What are you advancing?

The number of digits in their bank account.

Thanks for your suggestions! I'm currently in The Netherlands but I'll keep these in mind (though they sound more "math-ey" than engineering-ey but that's fine).

>though they sound more "math-ey" than engineering-ey

Isn't math necessary for most real-world engineering, and even in CS research? And what were you expecting? You asked for a cutting edge Bell-Labs type of R&D place, and that's what research is all about, even in CS.

You'll work with a lot of new yet-unproven theoretical concepts for which you need a lot of math to prove they have a high chance of working in practice and being better than existing solutions, before someone approves budget for the costly development and implementation of an actual product.

It really depends on what you're looking at. Disclaimer, I'm a mechanical engineer and not a CS guy. A lot of the stuff if you're doing say quantum computing is understandably math heavy. But if you're say designing a flying kite-like generator, it's more "engineering math", if you know what I mean? (Which is what I'm comfortable with)

Any serious place will only be looking for folks that are bonafide math geniuses in addition to their actual specialty.

In the case of mechanical engineers, maybe 1 in 50 bonafide geniuses in mechanical engineering are also simultaneously math geniuses. Just my personal hunch.

There's really not that many positions, so it's unrealistic to expect recruiting standards to be much lower.

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