But housekeeping is important! I've seen supposed quants who didn't know how version control worked. It caused productivity to plummet when people just did what they thought quants do.

If anything it's knowing the plumbing that makes you productive as a dev, of any kind. You just can't get around understanding how branching works, or having some unit tests.

Very little of the work ends up being the bit you think you're there for. I suspect it's the same in many industries. My parents ran a restaurant, and there's a lot of cooking, but there's also a lot of driving to the wholesaler, picking out vegetables, cleaning surfaces before and after a day, doing the plates, accounts, and so forth.

> it's knowing the plumbing that makes you productive as a dev, of any kind

Is this true of quant devs? Seems the focus is different - regular devs aren't as rare, so maybe the most important thing is producing a viable POC?

As for quants not knowing VC - did they come from a dev background?

> As for quants not knowing VC - did they come from a dev background?

No, and that was the problem. The more you venture into this field, the more you realise how much of it is coding. New idea about how price series X relates to Y? No use unless you can pull the data, do the transformations yourself.

Another critical problem is that when you're unproductive, you make contortions to make your results "real". You make rationalizations that don't hold up, because OMG it's a lot of work to test some more ideas.

I think the last point is very important. Can a failing Quant easily bluff. Yikes.