I have been a faang engineer for 10 years. Wondering if I should try something new. Can someone give a high level view of life as a quant engineer (?) / trader? Not finding good articles on my own.
As an example, here's a summary of my software engineering role: I mostly develop new infra products in a product focused area. My day to day involves leading multiple medium sized projects; collaboration with wide variety of engineers. Pay is decent at 500k+. Work life balance is also pretty good (9-5 for the most part).
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1. Straight out of undergrad/ PhD
2. A well respected industry research lab
3. From a competing firms quants
Not an impossible transition, but probably more difficult than you’re imagining
I would assume the reverse also holds true for FAANG. Would Uber pay 700k for a senior QR who is very good at math/stats but can't code or LC? Maybe they could grind out enough LCs to pass an interview, but it's far more difficult to grind out enough stats to get hired into a quant role. And the senior engineering roles that pay well are not about LC but focus on domain specific knowledge.
Those companies have different roles which require knowledge, and you can't expect max salary when you join.
Also, generally speaking those who implement trading algos come from hard science PhD backgrounds.
@AgeOfAdz people who are in researchy roles now may not be happy being in a support role. I think the advice is more for e.g. ML SWEs at FANG who are pursuing their own modeling and ideas, that they may not be happy in quant dev. For people working on infra or product infra, quant dev might be fine. The one snag I often hear about is in some companies, the quant devs are looked down on and treated as second class citizens. It's not like that everywhere but that's what people are talking about.