Reddit reviews My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance

Well, the article is true, in so far as it states what the nature of quantitative analysts might do, but it's also very fair to say that the marketplace really doesn't suffer from a shortage of talent.

What happens is that in roughly 4-5 year cycles, quantitative analysis falls in and out of favor resulting in a bloodletting of talent and staff. My last go around was in roughly 2006-2007 and I left for a less soul-wrenching experience in another similar field - earning substantially less but also with a 20 minute commute and a trivial amount of commuting costs (as opposed to the ludicrous rent or high commuting costs into NYC).

The last gig I had was "interesting" in that it was a kind of "skunk works" small consulting firm, and while they hired some OBSCENELY smart people, they were more than happy to absolutely burn staff out as hard and fast as they could usually in the span of 6-8 months.

Bottom line, quantitative analysis "back in the day" (say the 1970's and 80's) was absolutely and literally being taken over by notable academics mostly from high-energy physics and some aspects of machine-learning/artificial intelligence.

In that way Dr. Emanuel Derman's "My Life as a Quant" gives you a good - if somewhat skewed perspective on the field from way back in the day but WAY before HFT and flash crashes he points out that the market - while very much engaged in an arms-race between major firms, should also heed no small amount of caution on the area of relying too much on computer models and automation which can fall outside of the envelope of how they were designed.

More specifically (if not recently) there has been huge focus put on being the "faster pussycat" in terms of trading in HFT and what have you, but this too has had it's day, Haim Bodek was very deeply involved in this world, Dark Pools (a book into which he contributed) by Patterson covers very adequately, the various major pitfalls and promise of this area.

Chris Steiners' "Automate This" is another good primer for how the advent of serious machine intelligence efforts have absolutely altered markets - likely permanently.

I haven't read this, but it may be of interest to you.

There's this person: My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance, though his story is from another generation to some extent (I think he started out in finance in the 80's).