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?