₦airaland Forum

tanimola22: Interesting! Are you a quant in naija?

T22

I was editting my post when u replied

No am not doing quant work in Nigeria, but i was into quant development in the uk (worked in UBS,RBS and Morgan Stanley) .

Right now am just concentrating on chopping oyel money

tobbi1310: Hi all,

Thanks T22, yea I have a back-up plan of doing a CFA, self studied for the level 1 last year and just fell short so I'm confident that if I take it again I should pass it. But it's the complex math (stochastic calculus and PDEs) that attracted me to this line. I've just finished a premasters diploma in mathematics and I'm meant to start the MSc in october. Was really hoping to move back to Nigeria after my MSc, but at this rate I might have to wait a while (grow confidence in the application of the skills but Lord knows I'm tired of not being in Lagos...but if it has to be done). I'm hoping to come to Nigeria for a brief spell from July to September, would like to gain some work experience as well, mehn finding job in the diaspora no easy at all especially in this field, competition is mental. I should make use of some of the links provided in this thread, if there's any extra assistance it would be much appreciated as well.

Start with CFA. Pass all the 3 levels and you will have all the skills you need to perform at an acceptable level in the Nigerian financial sector.

Quant is generally a dying field thanks to the recession. Banks in the UK n US are no longer doing the complex and silly credit derivatives that nearly ran the whole world bankrupt.

The really cool stuff you will learn or do as a quant is in interest rate modelling and probably structuring credit products.

Nigeria is no way near ready for credit derivatives of the complexity of things like CDS . .

Also there is no point modelling interest rates since interest rates in nigeria are usually very stable.

So my friend. i don't wanna discourage you about the msc but it will be useless in nigeria now and for many years to come.

violent: I think many people are learning not to construct portfolios using Covariances, standard deviations or correlations as a measure of risk. This is mostly because those risk measures aren't stable over time. For instance, correlation in equity classes will increase during high volatility regimes before eventually reverting to their long run mean over time. Many people learnt that bitter lesson in 2008!

The Sharpe ratio is there for a reason. And one of the variables in the equation is sigma

Seun: I've never been able to value Unit Testing, even though a lot of people swear by it. I believe in reducing the number of lines of code in a project but Unit Testing creates more code that must be debugged and updated. I also feel Unit Testing probably doesn't catch bugs that span across units. I find that writing code carefully eliminates most errors, and for a web application, you can catch the remaining bugs by simply watching the error log. Writing code carefully involves using straightforward algorithms and writing them elegantly. It means understanding exactly what your code is doing instead of randomly changing things until it seems to work. However, a lot of smart people swear by Unit Testing so there's must be some value to it; perhaps it's more important in large teams.

I understand your angle seun. However i believe every app requires some level of unit testing.

The questions is if these tests should be written first or when u encounter bugs like u do when u check your error logs . . Or when u have the spare time to write them !

harryobas: Test driven development (TDD) which is an important XP discipline (extreme programming) advocates writing test before any line of production code is written. I must admit TDD is a difficult discipline to follow and master and writing unit tests can be daunting and time consuming at first but that should not deter you from unit testing your code.

TDD is a waste of time and terribly difficult to do right in d purist form.

Why should i write my test first or test->develop->refactor

How about testing last or testing whenever i feel like.
sometimes due to time pressures i just want to get something out there prove that it is valuable to the users and then afterwards invest time in writing tests. Why should i waste my time writing fancy tests for a feature that users might not like ?

I personally value testing based on users feedback more than testing based on regression feedback

which one be all these grammar debo

debosky: - working with JV partners on cash flow and production issues
- modelling of PSC/PSA to consider impacts of oil prices and other factors.
- creation and evaluation of business plans for CAPEX projects
- economic modelling e.g. NPV, IRR, Return on average capital employed (ROACE) - I'm not sure which of these economic measures Total uses, but if you understand them and their advantages/limitations, you'll be well placed.
- commercial evaluation of opportunities - what would you look out for? How would you assess them in terms of the company's current portfolio.

debosky: Bad boys earning mad money dey use code for here sha. . . .no matter, I don figure am out.

No wahala. . .I go continue manufacturing my Tura products - oil go finish one day, but bleaching is forever.

tura ko tira ni

flexyonline: Yes, it's NMA SBU

so u don dey chop all these money for d past 7 yrs .

is this in NMA SBU

flexyonline: Just to answer a few questions here abt Nigerian IOCs.

1) It is my personal opinion that connections can get you in maybe 5% of the time. I do not want to say it's impossible which is why I'm going for 5%. Some of the brightest guys you all knew in school (those guys u call Efiko, who were dirt poor then) work for these companies now. When I joined joined about 7 years ago, I had the best engr grads from Ife, Uniport, Uniben in my set. So it is a fallacy in my opinion when we talk about knowing somebody to get in. These companies have the strictest internal checks even for recruitment.

2) A lot of people actually do not know what goes on in IOCs in Nigeria regarding pay and benefits. I'll give a rule of thumb though: if you know anybody that tells you his monthly basic salary is 1 million, know that it is about 55% of his total pay. He still has a lot of benefits some of them bothering on the absurd. For example, you get rent allowance which is more than 2.5 million for entry level where I work, safety allowance (0.5 monthly salary), furniture allowance, generative purchase allowance, generator fueling allowance, car allowance, car fueling allowance, security allowance, children education allowance, 13th month, success sharing, home ownership, end of negotiation pay, car refurbishment, field allowance, shift allowance. They even pay you if your child, spouse or parent dies. All these though are due to the unions. No management loves you that much to want to give all that. If you then factor in your typical yearly increase, you are not doing badly at all. Personally, my basic salary is five times what it was when I joined 6/7 years ago.

3) on NYSC, the company has a policy to absorb whoever NYSC sends to them until the quota is filled up. The advice is, get yourself posted there and report early. I'm not ruling out influence in this also.

4) on stock options, we typically don't do this. It was broached at one point but the opinion amongst employees is that they do not want to transact business with management in that way I.e. give me my money and I'll go do what I want with it.

I also do not agree with the sentiment that spending years abroad in the industry gives you certain competitive advantages when you come home. It is a global industry and the technology is the same so I fail to see the competitive edge. In the instances I've seen, you are benchmarked against employees of similar years of experience and hired on that grade. We do not hire managers from abroad, we promote from within or bring an expatriate to do the job. Note that anybody of Nigerian heritage is not an expatriate by the company definitions even if you have a foreign passport. You come as a Nigerian, simples. Good thing is people don't mind because nairaland payroll is fantastic anyways.

This is all I can think of right now.

P.S. I'm posting with someone else's ID.

oil company good o. See as these heavy things dey hit my account. UK is becoming a distant memory these days

i cant seem to get Dr Sid's Chocolate out of my head. banging tune right there.

"no need to dey speculate .. that thing wey dey circulate ... its true that am sweet like chocolate .. now u want to dey chopulate . . and i go dey make u dey modulate .."

Ok lets do a 5 whys to determine the root cause of Africa's problem

may his soul rest in peace

fatezy: Surprised I haven't seen Visual Studio mentioned here. Is it because there are not that many Microsoft programmers on here?
I'm here thinking VS is the best gift to man since sliced bread

My problem with VS is that u have be pay $$ to get any decent functionally that comes out of the box with IDEs like Eclipse and Netbeans.

for example to refactor code in VS i need to drop $ to buy resharper whereas the same refactoring tool is built into eclipse for free. .

nice one

Seun: I used to love Netbeans because it supported multiple languages and it didn't impose any structure on projects, but since netbeans 7 dropped support for Python, I've been stuck with Netbeans 6.9.2.

I'm trying to pick up Eclipse because it supports most Open Source languages and tools (e.g. git) very well, but I find it to be far less responsive than Eclipse and much less flexible (for example, you can't include source directories outside your project directory)

Seun why will you want to include source directories outside the project directory.

You can easily create a seperate project for this right ??

git is the best thing since slice bread seriously

eclipse all d way

all his kids are born in the US. They are US citizens so at least if the going gets tough they can fall on welfare

Maleeq: That ain't the point. The price and not getting those peripherals is the point!

and u can get a windows box wit same spec plus all d perpherals for same price huh

Maleeq: At that price, it comes with a monitor or mouse or keyboard, yes? (By the time you add around $900 to the mini's $500 tag for an apple monitor, need I say more)

Well, I can get an equivalent spec PC for same or less and it would come with these "basic" peripherals.

No u do not need to buy any other peripherals specifically for the mac. You can connect ur existing ones to the mini and it works fine.

olisa has said it all.

I hate it when people just bash Mac OSX and call people that use it fanboys.

I was once an exclusive windows user until i did Vista and i nearly went mad, i tried a mac and i have never looked back since.

Some people also complain that Macs are expensive. Well go get a Mac Mini with 2GB memory 500GB HDD Core i5 2.3Mkz. It costs just around £500 / $500 . If you can't afford $500 then u have a different problem

SimonAndal: Only Apple makes mac devices. But Samsung, HP, Dell, Lenovo, Acer, in fact, every hardware maker "Recommend Windows 7". Apple's all alone!

You can Install Mac on a PC too or a Virtual machine on a PC

SimonAndal: I've used a Mac. Didn't like it. In Nigeria, you'd be hard-pressed to find anybody that uses Mac.

What didn't you like about the Mac be more specific

People don't use Mac in Nigeria because they can't afford it. not because of functionality.

SimonAndal: Mac: flashy, more windows than Windows, limited hardware carriers, over-hyped.

You obviously have not used a mac before

ok