From a 'tech culture' standpoint, if anything this is a reminder that there are many more computer programmers and companies (wealthy and profitable ones, even) who operate outside of Silicon Valley bubble and the 'tech industry.' Though it sounds like Mercer and Renaissance Technologies operate in the Wall Street bubble.
(Bubble meaning enclosed monocultural environment, not necessarily economic bubble.)
Yes. The type of person RenTec hires are people like Peter Weinberger or Leonard E. Baum, names I'm sure people here know. Mercer has a doctorate in computer science and is an expert in speech recognition and machine translation. Aside from CS types, it hires a lot of mathematicians, as well as scientists with the normal scientific experience of drawing conclusions from data.
Wall Street is very different. IT is considered to be barely a step up from the people who clear out the garbage pails, even if you are a Java programmer that is making $175k a year (which is considered nothing). There are many signs of this. One is that in IT, a managing director might have hundreds of IT personnel working for him (on Wall Street, titles like partner, managing director etc. have some
importance). In an important, major profit center division or group, it seems like every other person is a managing director.
Hedge funds like RenTec, DE Shaw, Two Sigma, PDT should not have to exist. Investment banks should have been able to spin out groups that do what they do and keep those tens of billions under management. The Wall Street culture and corporate politicsmis such that this can't happen, so these quant/ML hedge funds pop up and get tens of billions of dollars to manage. Which then pay their top quants hundreds of millions to billions of dollars. This can not happen in investment banks. Investment banks have seen these tens and, collectively hundreds, of billions go out the door, but they are big bureaucracies with office politics and inertia, they're taking steps to try to reclaim some of it, but the genie has already left the bottle to some extent.
(Bubble meaning enclosed monocultural environment, not necessarily economic bubble.)