I started my career in derivatives. Mostly vanilla, but I did have a look in the exotics.

Intellectually, it's interesting when you start. There's all these weird payoffs that you are introduced to, and it feels like a game.

The thing is, there's a limit to how exotic things can get. People have already figured out how to price most of the things you can imagine, including all the things that customers normally ask for. Most of the day goes on looking after your hedges, basically implementing the model.

It's like a zoo. When you arrive there's a bunch of different, interesting animals. After a while, you've met them all. There's no new animals, just variations of existing ones.

However the thing that is really an issue is how the business works. Over time I came to the conclusion that the quants in the derivs space are really secondary to the salespeople. How important is the quant who can get the price right to within 1%, when the sales guy can talk the customer into overpaying by 5%? Sometimes it feels like the customer is not even shopping the structure around at all, he just feels comfortable with his sales guy and is willing to hand over a few million bucks of customer money with barely any thought.