Graduating from a SUNY school, Jane Street gave me an interview and a fair shake. I didn't get the sense of elitism there. There does happen to be a lot of really smart engineers, mathematicians and scientists going to Harvard, MIT, etc.

There are places that without that Ivy League or Target School degree you don't hear back, I don't think Jane Street is one of them.

JS absolutely does filter on school though.

There are some firms that are very elitist in terms of their resume review requirements. You should note that for a place like Jane Street, "Harvard" helps, but it won't get you an interview. Someone who has done well at USAMO or IMO or has meaningful open-source contributions and goes to SUNY or a community college will generally have a better chance than a run-of-the-mill Harvard student. The median Harvard Math/CS student isn't getting an interview at Jane Street.

I don't really see a lot of elitism in these circles - there's a chunk of such engineers that did not in fact go to Exeter and Harvard - but what they have in common is they are all to a fault very bright technical people that can produce complicated things quite quickly, and can communicate effectively with people around them - to make sure that what they produce is in fact useful :)

I genuinely don't think people that went to Exeter and Harvard (or MIT or Stanford or Penn or other JS feeder schools) see the rest of us as human unless there's another common factor like being employed by Jane Street and having those quirky hobbies the rest of them do - and then they rationalize it away by saying that the exceptions didn't apply to top schools, or were admitted but didn't attend for "financial reasons".

People like me are "NPCs" in their parlance.

You're putting words in their mouth

And yet, am I wrong? This is basically how they think

Yes, you are.

Yeah I don’t think so. They think the rest of us are insects.

I interact with those people regularly without having the same background as them and this has basically never been the case. I think you've just been talking to horrible people.

ever meet any such engineers from the bottom 20% of the world population? just some food for thought :)

You can levy plenty of criticism at finance. But they certainly take smart kids from wherever they can get them (for certain jobs; for others you need certain polish).

Personally know of 1 from Ghana and 1 from Nigeria - both engineers in HFT - both emigrated to the US post-college - so not that rare. Is it proportional to population? Of course not. Clearly there's going to be an english-speaking bias and an education availability bias and whatever bias du jour one wants to bake in. I don't think it is controversial to say that being born into poverty hurts - as naively as just accounting for malnutrition, for example, and going from there...

Seconding another commenter. I went to a state-school (maybe in the top 5 US state schools) and got an offer without any elite background.

I went to an "elite" school, but I worked at one HFT where the local team of 5 people had only me with a background from a similar school, and another HFT where I was one of three on my immediate team of ~12 engineers. At one point, one of my colleagues at the second firm asked me why I was there as opposed to the alternatives of (1) a company with more of a focus on the elite and cultivating power or (2) being an artist supported by my well-off parents.

Obviously Michigan, UCB, UDub aren’t in the same category, especially with prior trading firm experience.

And it was none of the mentioned schools!

Would be surprised if it was not a union of the above schools and {GTech, UT, UCLA, UIUC}.