Is SWE at trading firm bad long term move?
I heard SWEs, even front office, are second class citizens and just build tools for quants. Is joining firms like citadel and two sigma bad choice for long term career? What if you want to stay in that industry? Considering positions at a few places, including smaller ones.
The difference would mostly be in terms of domain knowledge. As a sweeping generalization, you'd gain 80% tech and 20% market knowledge at a quant shop. But then again you'd likely be paid 20% higher than Tech and work as much extra so it evens out
20% higher is probably a massive understatement for 2s or Citadel, it's more like 2x for new grad
If you want to stay in that industry, it’s a great choice. The domain knowledge gets you paid a ton of money. Otherwise, it’s team dependent. If you land in an ops heavy team, your skills are pretty much wasted.
Be very careful with decimal places, it could ruin your whole company and career.
Be careful with team and company. I was in one quant shop that used swes mostly as ops.
This is true at another example I know well. The software release / change management / config tools are so bad that you really want to write new ones (like you knew / took for granted in FAANG), but have zero actually time / support to do so you just have to swim in the river of shit that comes with that lack of tooling.
Pretty team dependent I would say. In general it all boils down to honestly questioning what you’re learning and spending your time on. Plenty of people I know in tech coast hard and learn little. But generally the nature of problems you tackle here is fundamentally different to internet and ML companies.
What kind of work do citadel front off swes do for example at equities/commodities desks? Do you actually get to work with quants, like transforming data into features for them to use, or are you just building GUIs/toolings?
There are *a lot* of different roles within the tech org at citadel. Even of the front office ones, some of them are exactly as you describe and I wouldn't recommend them over faang. But others are legitimately amazing in terms of the projects, business impact, and technologies you work with and arguably better than anything you could find in pure tech.