I was wondering, can a "normal" SWE get into these types of companies? Hedge funds, HFT firms, etc I.e: is knowing C++, algorithms, data structures and experience enough, or do you need maths and finance? #citadel #twosigma #janestreet #hedgefund #swe
Yes. Just need to be a good developer. Two sigma and citadel don’t need any math experience for dev roles
Nice, thanks
Did Jane street interview and got rejected after onsite. Didnt prepare at all. I guess I could make it if I put more effort. So the answer is most likely yes
No prior knowledge required but you would inevitably learn more about finance on the job.
Ye, that's what I had in mind, thanks bro
@cita, why are you such a hardcore Citadel fan?
Lol the dude works at Citadel
I know that. But other Citadel folks don’t seems to have such strong views. Cita is deep into the company.
Used to work at one as a quant developer, halfway between a quantitative researcher (analogous to data scientist who does time series analysis) and a software engineer. Most prop shops have researchers, developers, traders (basically developers looking for alpha and doing risk management and report writing too), software engineers, and FPGA/ASIC teams. The plurality of these are SWEs, and there are a few different focuses, the most common being internal tooling for the quant roles and performance engineering. Even for the quantitative developer role, there were leetcode-like questions (this back in 2010/11), which I truly believe is where the trend started. Allocate memory without malloc(), look at data and write a sort that will sort it in O(n) or ([n] log n) time... I half expected them to ask for a sort in constant time. It's like Facebook, but you're less likely to get away with O(n²) solutions that you can later optimize. The question is, why would you want to work at one when the WLB is generally worse than Amazon, at some SWEs are looked down upon by traders (CTC, DRW, Shaw), and the pay for a SWE is on average only slightly better than FAANG? Jane Street isn't that good, but apparently their advertising and salaries are. Citadel, Rentech, Tradebot, Jump, Optiver are better firms. SIG is okay too. Despite how they're portrayed prop shops are finance, not technology companies, and as in any company the closer you are to revenue generation the more respected you are. In prop shops the quants who find alpha are closer to the revenue and SWEs are basically seen as back-office support. At a tech company your software is revenue generating. The only ones I can think of that really buck this trend are Jump and Citadel.
Knowing LeetCode is different than knowing data structures. For all good companies you need the first.
Yes. The question is "should you"?
And why not?
If you're not in finance already and doing it just for the money, then maybe faang would be a better option.