In 1985, when I joined Goldman Sachs, there were scores of places to work and you needed no education in quantitative finance. You could look for a position at Goldman, Salomon, First Boston, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Prudential, Drexel, Shearson, Lehman, EF Hutton, DLJ, Smith Barney, Paine Webber, Bankers Trust, Chase Manhattan, JP Morgan, Chemical, Citibank and Manufacturers Hanover, to name only a few among the large respectable trading firms. All of them needed people adept at bond maths or options pricing. In those days, not only couldn’t you get a degree in financial engineering, but there was actually no such field. Being a quant was amateur heaven. You learned options theory yourself and made up your own models to fit new products. No-one expected you to know Black- Scholes or CapM; being reasonably smart and flexible was enough. Now, 20 years later, it’s a different landscape.
