How to avoid the quant/developer black hole (2011) (quantjob.blogspot.com)

> If your first interview is with HR then it's a crap job with 95% certainty

That holds for non-quant jobs as well, of course.

For something like algo quants the distinction is a bit harder since there is a lot of programming involved for algos. I think a good question to ask is about R, Matlab and Python. They aren't really used in IT but they are used more by quants so would be a pretty good indicator.