I don’t really know. I know payers have enough exposure that one basis point is however many tens of millions of dollars, so they have actuaries who sit around and do a lot of IBNR work.
I worked with someone briefly who was at a blues plan, and he had an IBNR related nickname because he said it was pretty much all he worked on.
Yeppers. I got lucky and joined an office with zero dress code in 2006, outside of client meetings and what not, I have pretty much worn a t shirt to work for almost 20 years.
That t-shirt is probably well-worn. It might be time to try another.
And I hope he’s wearing pants tooooo!!! 
One step at a time, let me get that new shirt and THEN we can talk about wearing pants.
My eight suits are currently picking up dust in our wardrobe.
Nobody bothers anymore unless its a formal occasion or you are meeting clients.
Hmm, from the job description, it looks like the primary responsibilities would be calculating IBNR and rate adequacy studies…
When I worked in reserving previously, I personally found the work quite dull.
Some of the most interesting work I’ve done has been p&c reserving. It’s always bad news, so if you didn’t like being the bearer of bad news, you should do something else. But i found it plenty interesting. Always something weird to understand.
Well, I did reserving at a health plan, which I assume is more similar to p&c than life. The 3 or 4 days a month of actually setting the reserves was pretty fun, but the rest of the time was pretty dull. I think building the excel model that we used would have been way more fun than just plugging in the numbers and running the macro.
I really enjoy writing SQL code, so if I moved to another job, actuarial or otherwise, I’d want that to be a part of the job. Writing code and a kick ass manager is why I’ve stayed in this position for so long.
My work in health reserving was a slog. The only interesting part was building a reserving model for a new product.
I probably did 40 hours of actual work a month, and that might be an overstatement.
had a job interview (25 plus years ago)
described my skills and excitement with pricing
the interviewer looks at me and asks, would you really be happy doing valuation?
i answered, probably not, do i still get lunch?
That is fairly consistent with my experience.
Overachiever.
We call it valuation and reserving here
But yeah I literally work the week we close the books for the prior month. Then nothing the next three weeks. (I used to just study all the time while working, this helped me rack up close to $10k in first time pass bonuses)
Pre-pandemic we would go into the office for the week of close. Now we don’t
Team culture has definitely suffered, but workwise - there has been zero drop in productivity/performance
Eh, the IBNR part isn’t so bad.
Explaining it to non-actuaries and other non-math people is worse.
Moving for only that much more? Forget it.
Yep, no drop in productivity.
Team culture is vague anyway, and isn’t that hard to replace. We IIM all day long, and video call frequently. Get caught up on weekends and family once or twice a week. Once in a while we go out for lunch, and I make lunch and traveltime paid working time. plus I pay mileage to the restaurant. Any 'team culture’s beyond that is either not necessary or starts getting creepy. I don’t need to be friends with coworkers or staff.
Way back when, maybe mid 90’s I asked why i couldn’t login in from home the boss said “it’s for your protection” meaning work life balance.
same shirt, different day
