I overshot myself a bit with "without having any skill at all". I meant "without skill that they must had to get comparable salary from engineering type of job".
Also I didn't mean CRUD jobs because they are probably same as everywhere else. Smart person with a bit of social aptitude can pass them fairly fast.
I don't think that during work you would be using skills that you were tested for during interviews. Any highly profitable branch that does not require skill has to have high barrier on entry. Because if not, soon all people would d it, and that would make it less profitable.
If job actually requires skill then barrier of entry need not to be so high because lack of skill will quickly become apparent anyway. For example barrier of entry to my college was fairly low (it was technical and not many people actually wanted to get in because math is hard so the college set their barriers fairly low to not put people off, this also probably had to do with the way the school was financed). Semester later one third of the students were gone. After first semester only half remained.
According to the people I've spoken to working in finance, they routinely use moderately advanced math. By advanced math, I mean PDEs, numerical problems requiring cleverness and more probability than most engineers learn [1].
They also do it at a speed and level of distraction that many good techies can't handle. By this I mean a trader has the absolute right to yell at you at any time and make you drop everything debug the program he is using.
As for "barriers of entry need not be so high", college is different than a job. Your college still collected tuition from the students up until they dropped out. Goldman Sachs has to pay the bad techies they recruit until they fire them (and this may also be legally problematic [2]).
[1] It's usually not as deep as, e.g., a PhD in math or theoretical physics.
[2] If they did as you suggest, and women or minorities disproportionately couldn't handle the job, they are inviting a disparate impact lawsuit.
I have a friend who studied econometrics. They learned quite cunning math during their courses. Trouble is that they didn't understand it. They didn't know where it came from or why it works. It was black box to them. What is more this math allowed to calculate things according to one of many competing economical models which none of have been proven in any way to be actually true. It's all fine at the university when you research models, but later on the job it's completely useless. These people perform calculations on daily basis that they do not understand as a form of cargo cult.
Later I had a pleasure to work for econometrics professor and his PhD employee. Even they didn't understand all the math they were using.
I wouldn't dispute this - I'm sure that many finance people are pretty brilliant and have very strong math backgrounds.
That said, I met a lot of folks who work in finance who make a lot of money and absolutely do not have a strong math background.
Of all the folks who make substantial salaries (let's say above $250K/year) on wall street, what percentage do you think could, on the spot (or within a few minutes of consulting a book or web site), solve a simple differential equation, the kind that you encounter in an upper division undergraduate math class?
To clarify, my claim isn't that everyone in finance (or even above a certain pay scale) has a strong math background. My claim is that many of the engineer cum quants are doing technical work (not simply paper pushing) in a difficult environment.
I agree with you that "engineer cum quants" do hard math work, but you're not really comparing similar groups anymore (your original claim was that a "typical financial job is more technical than the typical engineering job"). My impression was that quants almost always have an academic background in math or physics, but I don't think this level of math is typical for most of the folks in finance, including many who make gobs and gobs of money.
> I overshot myself a bit with "without having any skill at all". I meant "without skill that they must had to get comparable salary from engineering type of job".
I'm sorry but I am not proper researcher so instead of pieces of evidence I have only experiences and thoughts most of the time. But I still want to share them with anybody interested.
Also I didn't mean CRUD jobs because they are probably same as everywhere else. Smart person with a bit of social aptitude can pass them fairly fast.
I don't think that during work you would be using skills that you were tested for during interviews. Any highly profitable branch that does not require skill has to have high barrier on entry. Because if not, soon all people would d it, and that would make it less profitable.
If job actually requires skill then barrier of entry need not to be so high because lack of skill will quickly become apparent anyway. For example barrier of entry to my college was fairly low (it was technical and not many people actually wanted to get in because math is hard so the college set their barriers fairly low to not put people off, this also probably had to do with the way the school was financed). Semester later one third of the students were gone. After first semester only half remained.