I've never worked at hedge fund companies and don't have friends who work there. I want a simple idea of their TC and stability (wlb, lay offs) in comparison with FANG for the same level. Like senior levels at FANG get about 400-500 TC and their wlb is not terrible in general (of course it depends on the team), and the position is pretty stable (no often lay off, not too much competition, etc.) How is it at hedge fund companies? (All for software engineer role)
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Does Morgan Stanley count as one ?
No clue
Can share insight wrt to investment banks like Goldman Sachs etc. I used to work at Morgan Stanley.
Goldman can pay as much if not more than FANG. Morgan pays peanuts so don't even bother. JP Morgan also pays well. Across, IBs layoffs happen every year so you get used to seeing people getting fired. But it happens only if you're an underperformer. WLB is good at Morgan but you're not getting paid much so yeah. Horrible WLB in Goldman. No idea about JP. But you'll feel like a second class citizen since they're not a tech company. Only go there if you're okay with it.
Do you need strong finance background..?
Not really. I was hired as grad. So I had a proper finance training once I joined. But in general they do not look for finance background but it helps if you do have it.
Iām at a hedge fund now, but not with the usual suspects here (Blinders think that Two Sigma, Jane Street, Citadel, DE Shaw (Arcesium?), Renaissance are the only players). You need to realize there are 2 broad categories of SWE roles with HFs: quantitative analysis for math/stats/C++ wunderkinds, and the rest of us. Those in the former group know who they are, so forget about those roles. A decade ago you probably would have made a little more in HF over FANG (especially if you turned your cash bonuses into FANG shares and held them). Now FANG senior roles might have an edge. But you have to consider that the FANG roles are more west coast, and HF are east. You need to live where you want to. Iāve mostly done east coast (consulting, startups, HFs), but Iāve also had a west coast stint with Amazon. The work is roughly the same, but the pressure of career management at FANG is greater (there itās not just about you doing the work, you have to be an asset). FANG is not for everyone and some will fail and be relegated to the other jobs. Iām not making any real point here other than you should get as much variety as you can in life. Because these are just jobs and you are only as good as your previous dayās work. And once you leave you are an anecdote at best to the trenchmates left standing (āoh Joey did that, he was a real characterā). Donāt sit around thinking that you can control anything including your own future. If youāre curious about HFs (as you obviously are) then you should try for that someday. Even if you make $5m in shares at Amazon, after 20 years of that youāre going to have a pretty sad career story to tell.
Top 5% are better at hedge. 5-20% are matching 20-100% are better at hedge. Basically if you are really good, they FANG will match for Hedge but not for the outliers. This is only for TC. TC/Hr I'll say FANG is better 90% of the time
Entire thread has ZERO number of TC in HF.
Iām a contractor in an HF and make $300K cash corp-to-corp. That means I pay less in income tax than a W2 employee, but I also have zero benefits and donāt get paid on days off. In a few months Iāll try to get a rate bump to get to 325K, since Iāve demonstrated that my skills and output are way above average for this team. By comparison, my SDE 2 TC at Amazon would have been around 250K if I had stayed. So 300K now in a taxable state (but C2C affords me tax breaks), or 250K in WA but with benefits. The paid time off at Amazon would equate to 25K as a contractor, so in a way I could say that my current C2C comp is more like 275K if I want to take the 4 weeks off. The only way Iāll blow past this TC in an HF is to get an executive title, which Iāll probably never achieve.
@amazon What about medical insurance benefits as a contractor, does that not eat even more into your $50k increase as a contractor versus employee, or maybe you are on spouseās plan?
Hedge funds recruit much lesser than FANG, and pay slightly more to the creme candidates.
Where is the TC? Iāve been following this thread since it was posted. TC hedge fund guys please
HF lots of monies. Your whale cum.
My hedge fund buddy quit because of increasing unpredictability of hedge funds. They are not making money hand over fist like they used to due to electronic trading and globalization.