WorldQuant Quantitative Developer reviews

1. With more people joining the firm and people not really doing anything new, ideas are crowded and compensation growth prospects are diminished. 2. Since the focus is on quantity of ideas rather than quality, people are not incentivized to perform deeper research. Although there are policies to promote quality, most people are better off just getting by with quantity. 3. There is little feedback on your work other than your ranking against other researchers. By feedback, I don't mean feedback from management but from portfolio managers. This makes it difficult to know if we are on the right track when it comes to making individual strategies. 4. The system does not motivate researchers to bring out their best ideas because they will be fired and their ideas taken from them if they stop producing new ideas even though their old ideas work amazingly. This also assumes that these great strategies are not used for some unknown reasons. Otherwise, you get a small cut of profit. This again makes it much easier to get by with mediocrity. 5. Bonuses are deferred, so you have to make sure not to get fired before then. Given that the turnover is quite high, it is a risk factor. 6. Salaries, just like opportunities, are not equally distributed in the world. It may be harder to negotiate a salary for a position in bigger cities with higher pay just because of that. If you want to earn big, it might be better to work in the US or other big cities. It only makes sense to be in your local country if you want to be close to home. 7. Researchers are insulated from trading, so they do not have a real track record. This makes it much harder to get a trading job after given that most people do not get promoted to trading. 8. Entrepreneurial researchers are not compensated well enough. For some ideas, it is much easier to create a startup outside.

Ridiculous policy on firing employees. Their policy is to group researchers by their on-board days, and evaluate their performance. People who join WQ 3mths -- 1yr ago are grouped together, people who join WQ 1yr ago -- 2yrs ago are grouped together. Then the company will cut the "bottom" in each group. Apparently, researchers who has slightly more than 3mths or 1yr experience will have the least disadvantage; researchers who has slightly less than 1yr or 2yrs experience will have the most disadvantage. It is pretty likely that if the evaluation took place 1 or 2 weeks later, the people who got fired could be totally changed, since their groupings are changed. Thus this system is not robust at all. Also, it happened now and then that even researchers with less than 3mths experience got fired. Another fact of the policy: no matter how close researchers’ performance are to each other, there must be some people get fired: e.g., there are 10 people in the same group, 7 of them got performance 100, and the other 3 got 99. Then the bottom 3 will get cut. (It is not only an imaginary example, 30% turnover rate is quite common in this place). The reason they do this is to maintain their turnover rate, it is somehow like an objective of the management to create this fearing culture, so that they think their researchers can run faster and faster. Apart from these, the policy itself is not right from the beginning: performance is represented by numbers, and numbers can always be manipulated, and affected by a lot of random factors. Thus the policy leads to a lot of cheatings (WQ researchers would know what this means)