Who pays Software Engineers more: Tech or Finance?
https://blog.salaryproject.com/does-finance-pay-software-engineers-more-than-tech-does/ What are your experiences?
Depends on the location. In Bay Area -> Tech In London -> Finance
Finance doesn’t hire as many SDEs as Tech. It’s also a lot harder to find SDEs who can do algorithmic trading
Not all finance tech jobs are related to trading. most of them are about building and maintenance of systems and not all those jobs are high paying.
There are dozens of us who can do algo trading, dozens!.
If you take the average across all the software engineers in USA then I'm pretty sure 'Tech' pays much higher than 'Finance'. source: I'm a software engineer in Finance P.S. - not discounting the fact that a bunch of hedge funds pay equal to tech companies (or even more) but the number of such positions are very few in Financial Tech (it's called FinTech too).
Compare Two Sigma with Netflix instead. Google is a behemoth.
How is the compensation structure in finance? In tech we get tons of stock (except Netflix) and predictable bonus (at least at Google)
At hedge funds it's mostly base + (50-100%) bonus. Maybe 200% bonus if you're working with quants
Read the article: basically they try to do a comparison with only a handful of self-reported data, hard to take seriously. Also the location is likely important in such comparison...
I think to a large extent Google and Two Sigma are in the same ballpark. I talked to a Google recruiter about moving there from Two Sigma and it seemed like my first year would be lower comp then if I stayed at Two Sigma, but I know people that have moved and felt like their TC went up, and also people that went to Two Sigma from Google and felt their TC went up. There are some differences in comp structure that are hard to price in. For example, Two Sigma comp is all cash (base + bonus). Google gives you RSUs that vest over 4 years. If you assume Google stock isn’t going to appreciate in value, and you also assume that cash in hand is better then stock in the future, then Two Sigma is going to be more attractive. But if you assume that your Google RSUs are going to go up 20% a year, then you may view Google as better.
It's _much_ easier to get promoted at two sigma.
Same as Dropbox on levels.fyi
If you compare comp per hour, fin rarely beats tech
Even in finance, there is a huge gap between bank and hedge fund/HFT.
Tech historically paid more and finance is following. Just an individual opinion.