Quant Hiring and Friendly Tippers

Quants.

I went to work at a derivatives desk at a big investment bank almost 10 years ago, and at the time there was sort of a standard model for how banks and trading firms acquired quants. (To be clear, I was not a quant.) Basically you'd go to a physics Ph.D. student and say: Look, if you stay in physics, you will work for years on some abstract problem, making only slow progress to some vague impractical goal, and also you will be poor. If you come to a bank, you will solve real problems every day, and you will be rich. And the physicists would scoot off to the banks, where they'd immediately stop doing physics. They'd do a different thing, called "quantitative finance." (Derivatives pricing, quantitative risk modeling, that sort of thing.) It uses some of the mathematical techniques and Brownian-motion intuitions of physics, but the problems and equations are different.