WorldQuant reviews

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)