Renaissance Technologies' founder Jim Simons had a radical hiring philosophy: finance backgrounds were actually liabilities, not assets. He believed traditional finance training bred conventional thinking and predictable biases. So he went the opposite direction entirely—recruiting PhDs in physics, mathematics, and computer science instead. The logic was simple: fresh minds from hard sciences brought no preconceived notions about how markets "should" work. They approached problems like mathematicians and engineers, not like traders. This unconventional talent strategy became the backbone of one of finance's most legendary quant operations.