Lars Bergstrom

Goldman Sachs recruiters must be incredibly busy people.

Functional programming (FP) has become the New Big Thing in finance over the last 5 years or so. This shift means that I get a lot of spam from recruiters, as somebody working on a compiler for a FP language. Most of these e-mails are tailored or at least have my name in them and a basic acknowledgement that I’m probably going to finish my Ph.D. before I do anything else. Which seems like a reasonable amount of effort from the recruiters, given that these are 250k+ jobs and they take a sizeable chunk in commission.

But GS? Well, nothing says, “we’re interested in you as a person” like a To: line of undisclosed-recipients. And a body completely devoid of any mention of interesting work, just that the Stats desk is hiring and they are looking for people who work on compilers for functional programming languages.

Especially since then I realized: that’s maybe 5-10 people in the US (there are ~10 semi-active FP compiler projects, but most are just a single faculty member and no NSF funding or grad students. Europe and the Pacific region are much higher, naturally.).

Seriously? You could customize mail for that many people in about four hours, tops. The Stats recruiting team is probably larger than the entire set of in-training talent. As somebody who has spent a lot of time on the hiring manager/recruiting side of things, I was sort of shocked. Given their size and position in the market, I was expecting them to compete with the aggressive, personalized recruiting I’ve been seeing from Credit Suisse, JP Morgan, and just about every HFT shop. Not that I need any more recruiter spam!

Unless, of course, it’s for research universities that are looking to hire someone to teach and do research on compilers. I’ll take as much of that as is going around — the academic (particularly state school) job market is  brutal here in the US.