Which is better for overall career growth, compensation, etc? Fintechs like Block, Robinhood, Coinbase, Plaid vs. Hedge funds like Citadel, Two Sigma, HRT How does Bloomberg compare to these? Or banks like Goldman Sachs
FinTech — you’re building a product and scaling it to million of customers. It’s still a tech company. The emphasis is scaling and UX and availability. There’s usually more layers of middle management and excessive empire building. Hedge funds — The emphasis is on software speed, not scale. You’ll work with quants so you have to understand math models, ML, and data mining. Monetary upside is from the PnL generated by the quants / portfolio managers whom you work with. The work is more high-stress. Team is super lean, no useless middle managers, no bloat. Values IC a lot more than people manager. Fire people ruthlessly Not all hedge funds are the same. Some fundamental investing teams hire tech people to do IT support. If you don’t join the right fund / right team, you learn zero useful skill. Goldman — 95% of tech teams are crappy and 5% are elite. Elite teams have higher quality than FAANG and on-par with the hedge funds. The 5% elite teams are mostly in revenue divisions ( Global market and asset management ), and some in core AI /ML / research team. The crappy teams are worse than IBM. And these crappy teams are frequently hiring people to build empire. The elite teams aren’t hiring for most of time. So if you get an offer from Goldman, 99% chance that it’s for a crappy team. Bloomberg — it’s a FinTech company but it’s a very old FinTech company. Most of the products were built 15 years ago and are in maintenance mode. The trading system teams are decent and open doors to HFT / hedge funds. The non-trading system teams are total crap as I heard.
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At fintechs youll learn general skills similar to other big tech companies. Distributed systems, databases, client-server stuff. At hedge funds youre technical skillset is going to be a but different - backend work will be similar but the focus will not be on scaling horizontally to serve hundreds of millions of users. Itll be on vertical scaling and working with data. At least IME. The more transferable skillset is fintechs since you can go into big tech, and hedge funds both as an industry and individual companies are generally lower growth than hyperscalers or trillion+, but they compensate you better at the equivalent level (eg an E5 would be making upper end of staff in TC). Also, hedge funds are primarily east coast or chicago so if geography is important youll be working out of those locales