Same tired, cliche replies as usual ... you're probably also assuming that my opinions aren't based on job experience, yet they are based on several years of experience in many positions, where I did the 40-hour grind, delivered business solutions for months-long and years-long projects, etc.
I'm not talking about academic overqualification. I'm talking about someone hiring you, talking at length about how you are being hired specifically to do X because it matters to the company's bottom line, and then after you're hired they switch it and say actually you're going to do Y but you're going to be a political mouthpiece for X.
One common set of values is
Y = statistically invalid model fitting that actively causes the business to lose money but which is easier to reduce to pliable metrics for political jockeying
X = (deep) machine learning and/or Bayesian stats
It's not at all about academic overqualification. The actual business need, for reals, can benefit from the pragmatic and cost-effective use of the tools, and the person is actually skilled in using to do exactly that.
Yet, they are prevented politically.
As for starting a company, I think I would guess that's one of the least plausible ways of doing important or useful work. You'll only get funding if it is a trite variation on consumer bullshit -- even though consumers themselves don't want that and would rather that your labor is allocated to solving more fundamentally important social problems that there just isn't money for solving. Plus, you'll be so burnt out over all the auxiliary stuff like HR, marketing, sales, that you won't actually do any of the underlying quant work that was the whole reason for starting the company in the first place.
It kills me how people here seem to think that "start your own company" is some kind of "put up or shut up" gauntlet to throw down to challenge someone who is lamenting the shitty state that things are in.
"Start your own company" is not some venerated challenge-call for those brave few who want to change the world. Starting your own company is just a different format of the same bullshit phenomenon.
Fixing what's broken inside of companies and organizations that already have huge leverage and capital to positively impact fundamentally important problems -- that is perhaps worthwhile, if you can manage to deal with the political fighting without getting too burned out.
You seem to be missing the parent's point. He's saying that it's very common to be told that you are hired to do X and made to do Y (for the record, it happened to me once, for X being stochastic calculus for derivatives pricing and Y being excel jockeying), and if the reason for that are the politics caused by a big structure, then move to a smaller structure. You can create a company that does consulting in a quantitative field, so you don't have to seek funding to hire a team to build product.
I disagree. I think the parent is trying to say that businesses hired overqualified people and then give them less engaging work for valid business reasons.
What I'm trying to say is that you're told you'll be hired for X, and, crucially, that it's easily verifiable that X actually would help solve the business problem better than Y. Failing to do X actively hurts the business.
Yet you're still forced to do Y. It's not because in the real world you only needed simple, trustworthy Y to get the job done. No, you're failing to get the job done, need X to get it done, are told you're the one to bring X to the table, and then you're made to do Y for destructive political reasons.
The point I'm trying to make is that there's no defensible "real world" pragmatism to support the focus on Y nor the bait-and-switch to hire someone who knows X. Whatever the reasons for that, they are not about improving the firm nor making money for the firm. They are about optimizing a bonus or promotion or whatever for a single individual or some small faction, even at the expense of the organization's overall progress.
I'm not talking about academic overqualification. I'm talking about someone hiring you, talking at length about how you are being hired specifically to do X because it matters to the company's bottom line, and then after you're hired they switch it and say actually you're going to do Y but you're going to be a political mouthpiece for X.
One common set of values is
Y = statistically invalid model fitting that actively causes the business to lose money but which is easier to reduce to pliable metrics for political jockeying
X = (deep) machine learning and/or Bayesian stats
It's not at all about academic overqualification. The actual business need, for reals, can benefit from the pragmatic and cost-effective use of the tools, and the person is actually skilled in using to do exactly that.
Yet, they are prevented politically.
As for starting a company, I think I would guess that's one of the least plausible ways of doing important or useful work. You'll only get funding if it is a trite variation on consumer bullshit -- even though consumers themselves don't want that and would rather that your labor is allocated to solving more fundamentally important social problems that there just isn't money for solving. Plus, you'll be so burnt out over all the auxiliary stuff like HR, marketing, sales, that you won't actually do any of the underlying quant work that was the whole reason for starting the company in the first place.
It kills me how people here seem to think that "start your own company" is some kind of "put up or shut up" gauntlet to throw down to challenge someone who is lamenting the shitty state that things are in.
"Start your own company" is not some venerated challenge-call for those brave few who want to change the world. Starting your own company is just a different format of the same bullshit phenomenon.
Fixing what's broken inside of companies and organizations that already have huge leverage and capital to positively impact fundamentally important problems -- that is perhaps worthwhile, if you can manage to deal with the political fighting without getting too burned out.