Is HFT interesting? Or is it just comp?
I know HFT is lucrative but is it actually interesting? What's it like working as a SWE for Citadel/JS/HRT/etc. vs Meta/Google/Amz etc. In terms of skillets, technologies, culture, etc. TC: 177K + rand * 125k YEO: 3
👀 also interested more generally in what types of problems are solved by HFT SWEs!
“problems”… “solve”… LOL
Curing cancer or making humans a multi-plantary species is interesting. Gaming the market by getting a tiny speed advantage is most definitely not interesting.
Agree. But also, end goals and technical challenges are different things.
End goals are not what makes work interesting or not. It’s the work itself. Everyone thinks making humans a multi-planetary species is interesting, not everyone would find the work to do that interesting.
It appeals to me more than working for big tech. But that's just me and I've never worked in big tech
Relax, we’re not talking about Goldman.
Neither was I lol 😂 fuck GS
Depending on the team definitely. Architecting and implementing trading systems can be fun because trading is quite a good problem space to apply lots of computer science fundamentals. performance is also usually a big deal and you spend some more time seeing how your systems scale etc I think the extra comp is usually for the implicit extra hours (on weekdays and weekends), and to attract talent. That said, culture can be quite toxic as a lot of large egos and extremely top down culture where you are seen as a monetary cost rather than a valuable asset (at least until you make a name for yourself within the firm)
I find it interesting, because it’s so much easier to get feedback and see the impact of your work. You hear immediately from FO whether they like/dislike your trading tool, and can track almost exactly how much PnL your algo made. It’s a sort of symbiosis, where FO knows more about finance/business, while you know more about coding, and together you’re trying to make something great. Compare to big tech where 95% of the time you’re just 1 cog of hundreds, and feedback is all based on internal rubrics/ladders and not whether the thing you made was actually cool/useful.
That sounds awesome would you be willing to mentor me into transitioning into that space?
You don’t need mentoring. Just either 1) get a grad degree or 2) do a lot of leetcode, then feel free to DM for a referral
I would much rather work on building low latency trading systems than better ways to sell ads
That's like me saying I would rather work on building planet-scale distributed systems than gaming the stock market.
I personally have no interest in building planet scale distributed systems. If that's your thing, I would stay in big tech.
I think it's very team dependent. There are probably teams at Google that suck and there are definitely teams at Citadel that suck. But there is also a great deal of really cool stuff going on at G just like there's a lot of really cool stuff going on at Citadel. The comp serves two disparate purposes: For the teams that suck, it's to ensure that smart people work on things they probably wouldn't otherwise want to work on. For the teams that are really cool (generally the ones very closely tied to the business), it's to ensure the best possible talent is on those teams.
How so?
is selling ads interesting?
Yes. I don't work on an ads team but I genuinely find the products (IG, YouTube, etc) and tech (distributed systems) interesting. Everyone shits on big tech (mostly Meta/Amazon) but building planet-scale apps/technologies/services is fascinating.