How is life when you move to hedge funds?
Hi folks, Through my whole career I worked in tech startups of different sizes. Previously at Meta and then Twitter. With our new king I started looking around and passed the interviews for Citadel and Two sigma. But I am bit worried about this new environment. Never worked in finance before. I could also return back to startups but dont really want to work for peanuts while making the founders rich. I think with this market its also highly unlikely to have a proper IPO within a few years. If I don’t want to reduce my salary while changing jobs hedge funds etc seems to be the best call. As other FAANG either slowed or in freeze. A few things that worries me, we are going to be 3 people in London office, this means I will have follow the sun on-call week at least once every month. The manager I talked put together a rosy picture but I am still doubtful how terrible it’s going to be. Especially Citadel seems to be quite clear on RTO and after Twitter’s come to office if you like approach it’s a bit meh. They said they could be more flexible over time with earned trust but not sure on that. Also on the weeks you are not on-call how strict they are for you to be at your desk 9 Am straight? We have quite a lot of flexibility when it comes to that and moving to a place with really strict rules could be hard. So folks who made a similar change from FAANG -> Citadel, Js, Hrt, Two sigma etc how is your experience? Have you regretted your decision? Current tc: $450k Yoe: 9 Offers: $500k, havent got the exact numbers yet. Converted to USD. #meta #twitter #citadel #twosigma
Two Sigma seems pretty chill with reasonable hours. RTO is only one week per month and people are quite nice. Had an offer from them few months ago but went with Dropbox for remote and ML work.
Wonder what it's like now.
2S is reasonably chill. CitSec is not. I don’t have much exposure to their London office, but imagine the culture is similar to US
What's your tech stack? Are your offers for sde or quant?
I’ve worked at both cit and 2s. 2s has better culture and WLB but they haven’t been performing that well recently and they have a very political leveling system modeled after Google. Cit is team dependent and usually bad WLB but if you’re good you’ll get payed a ton. No levels and things seem less political.
i just signed with them. what do you mean not performing well? like, their investments? any reason to be concerned?
As someone who has worked at Citadel, I'm pretty sure you will be much more stressed and unhappy if you join that firm. But there will be much more money too, if you can survive the environment
2S is going to be a lot more like big tech for you. Citadel can be pretty strict but it’s team dependent
Which has better exit ops for firms like jump, js, and hrt?
You’ll definitely get interviews either way. Even having the offers is enough to leverage interviews.
My team at Cit worked more than 996. 3 month ramp up but 50% new-hired failed at 3-month goal and let go. 24/7 oncall for everyone with no rotation and direct escalation to Head and if escalated, today is the last day. We did get payed a ton, avg 200-300% bonus will bump your 500k offer to actual 1mm+ (many will be hold in UIM and subject to vesting schedule)
When was this? They claim they have changed 😂
Amazon seems way better 😂
TC for offers? Went from startup to virtu now making ~300k and work is easier, shorter hours but just started YOE: 1.5
Nice TC
Haven’t heard much about Virtu, what do you guys do? And does TC have stock component?