Don't feel dissapointed. This guy https://plus.google.com/109762091029894640831/posts
writes about financial theory. It seems to me that his places is either a PhD program or a circus.
How can a Finance PhD be this stupid?
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didn't read whole thread, but that's what happens when you hire the worst person from the best school. You still get a bottom of the barrel ****tard, but then you have to compound it by them thinking they're smart because they did nothing and learned nothing for 5 years at a prestigious university.
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You got a lemmon. If he was any good and from top 5 Fin program, He can easily get a well paid academic job in any of the top 10 schools, unless you were offering much higher salary. He is proabbaly so bad that no one gave him a job till you came. Well, you should have done better at your job too -- I mean the screening process.
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PhD's of any area are highly specialized, and at times people who are "very good" in their areas and are highly mentioned by schools are serious workaholics who don't have enough time to pay attention to other skills (or gain work experience). Or they don't want to bother to know about other areas. Sad but true, even if we phd's are researchers people in academia say "if its not in my area then I don't know about it". So yes there's a chance this guy had inflated views of himself whilst not having the knowledge and skills that your job required... Perhaps check his CV first as what working or volunteering experiences he had had before and during his PHD studies...
Also some check of the basic concepts would have been good through the interview process (not sure if straight forward hiring someone because he came from a top school was the best thing to do?).
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PhD's of any area are highly specialized, and at times people who are "very good" in their areas and are highly mentioned by schools are serious workaholics who don't have enough time to pay attention to other skills (or gain work experience). Or they don't want to bother to know about other areas. Sad but true, even if we phd's are researchers people in academia say "if its not in my area then I don't know about it". So yes there's a chance this guy had inflated views of himself whilst not having the knowledge and skills that your job required... Perhaps check his CV first as what working or volunteering experiences he had had before and during his PHD studies...
Also some check of the basic concepts would have been good through the interview process (not sure if straight forward hiring someone because he came from a top school was the best thing to do?). Good luck!
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Ok, I have 5 min to kill before attending a presentation, so I'll assume you're not a troll...
I have an Econ PhD, with a specialty in finance. I'm from a top-20 or so place, and I worked as a quant on a trading desk for a little while in FI. My first couple of months were rough - the terminology of the private sector is quite different than academia in some cases. Academics and private sector folks do care about different things (the way physicists and engineers care about different things) That said, once I had the "lay of the land," there really wasn't anything incomprehensible about the modeling. If you hired someone from a top place, your experience was an anomaly.
There were 2 huge errors in the labor market process here. 1) you assumed he was an untouchable genius, and 2) he assumed he was an untouchable genius. One thing I have noticed about candidates from the top few places, especially the weaker candidates from the top places, is that they often think they know dramatically more than they do. They may know a lot, but once the adviser stops demanding they learn new things, they do. They seem to not have the inner insecurity about failure that we all have somewhere, and it gets them.
However, if you hired a guy that didn't know undergrad level stuff about the area in which you wanted him to work, you should look in the mirror a bit as well.
BTW, he constantly made fun of corporate finance people, the folks in our company's corporate finance did not understand why he was making fun of them. He said similar things like the other poster here, CEO comp, board governance etc.
But that is not our corporate finance dept does, they sell to large multi national corp treasurers, so he not only did not know what our dept did, he was making fun of other depts without knowing what they did.
Overall we are very confused. It is as if we needed a translator to understand what he was saying. We also tried that, thinking he was a genius and we did not understand him.
But slowly we realized that he was an idiot. But we could never expect a PhD in finance to be that much of an idiot from a top business school.
Honestly we are shocked at his level of ignorance. -
Use the dissertation as a guide to the candidate's qualifications. Read the thing and ask him questions about the details. Does it appear he or his advisor is responsible for the content.
Don't be so stupid to assume the brand name of the diploma is equivalent to the quality of the candidate.
Don't expect PhDs from elite programs not to have ego issues.
Sounds like you were building him up from the moment you interviewed the guy. You likely added to the problem.
I know people in lower PhD programs who are very adept in fixed income and derivatives. They come without self worship syndrome too.
You didn't do your homework. You picked a guy based on pedigree and failed to adequately evaluate the candidate.
You wasted your time, his(her) time and likely hurt your work environment.
Don't hold it against the field of Finance or Econ PhDs who do their dissertations in Finance. Hold it against yourself.
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Without being specific can tell us if he was originally from a foreign country?
Recently our company, which has some PhDs (mostly math), but mostly Masters level employees, hired a finance PhD from a top 5 institute because we did not have any finance PhD. Everyone told us to get a finance PhD in the research department because they know lot more than the Math PhDs.
You won't believe it, it has been 6 months of hell and finally we got rid him, I am so traumatized with this episode that I have asked a friend of mine to post this to suitable audience and he referred me here.
To begin with he was from a top 5 institute, we paid top dollars to get him on board. From day one he acted as if we were a second rate place for him and we all should collectively be thankful that we got an opportunity to spend time with this genius. He offended practically everyone at work. The height was when the evening Janitor refused to go alone to his desk because it smelled awful and this guy was practically eating rotten food, cooked a week ago. Our office secretary complained to the HR director that this guy had no manners at all. We all thought he was a genius and tolerated his disgusting behavior.
I was shocked a month into hiring this guy that he had no sense of how investments worked. He was supposed to be researching high yield sector with long duration and he had no clue what that meant and we gave him all the books that we would give to a new undergrad hire, he was unable to comprehend the information. Then we put him through our training program and this guy insulted the instructor who is known as a wizard in our company, because he had "only a masters" degree and unfit to teach this guy.
After couple of incidents, we read the riot act to him and he did not know what was happening. He kept asking us for work that could be published, yet he had the lowest IQ in our whole company. Our secretary honestly knew more about finance than this guy.
Nobody in our company has ever worked with a Finance PhD and I don't think we ever will. What a moronic idiot he was.
The question is, what do they teach in these programs? Could somebody provide a link of subjects/topics/classes that are taught in a finance phd program? Now we are really curious to know if we hired a deranged individual or finance PhD is a joke. The guy in the exit interview told us that most of what we do (which is a standard thing in the bond market) is new to him and he had never heard of some of the basic terms. Is that possible or he was making fun of us?