If you can get best quants, programmers, engineers, and traders under same roof, how will you set their mission? You may assign small task as well as extraordinary difficult tasks. Build up next Google or Microsoft.
Think of this scenario. You are part of such a team, tasked with developing the Holy Grail of trading programs... so one day you are sitting and thinking and you invent it... do you go to the next meeting and share it with everybody or do you go home and start learning the Openquant environment so you can trade it on your IB account?
Don't reinvent the wheel. RSJ already has the killer app and trades 20,000,000+ lots a month with it. Read it and weep. http://www.rsj.com/en/
IMHO Quants are usually too busy trying to improve on what currently doesn't work or marginally works to think outside the box. Programmers are great at logic and thinking outside the box but usually can't put the two pieces of trading and logic together. Engineers for the most part just can't leave well enough alone and are always tinkering even with what already works. They see the parts of the box but can't put them together. Traders traditionally don't have the patience needed to see a system, method or what will come out of the box through to the end. Then as the next poster put it . . . trust. If you could get "the best" quants, programmers, engineers and traders in a room, if they didn't kill each other, one would steal from the rest. I contemplated the exact same question over 16 years ago. I became the trader, the quant and the engineer. Once I solved the problem, which was the single hardest thing I ever accomplished, I found the best and most honest programmer I could that wanted to share the information with me and learn to program it. Good luck on your journey.
You're a good man, ProfLogic. But this post is totally off. Every year I am in this business, some new kid comes out and just amazes me with more quant skills, more programming skills, and more emotionally put together. They are getting smarter and more mentally/skillset integrated, in my opinion. The "not-so-smart" (still genius level, just not as well put together) ones go work at Google. Then the average ones just go write code at the regular software companies.
The problems is . . . kids It takes more maturity than most possess to complete the task. I agree that there are some wildly brilliant people out there.
Google started off as groundbreaking idea that was turned into a ground breaking algorithm. The page rank algo changed search. To built a quant firm like google, you need a groundbreaking algo that can be leveraged and tweaked across markets. If you just got 50 quants in a room, I don't think you could build a successful trading business. You need something more.