I'm interviewing with a few trading firms or otherwise speaking to recruiters for several places (Two Sigma, Citadel, DE Shaw etc) Curious on a comparison on working culture/career progression/enjoyment between Big Tech (Meta, Google) and trading, both for SWE. Any regrets on the switch? For myself, overall I'm liking my work, but things can move slowly and the caliber of engineering at Meta frankly isn't super topnotch on average. Of course, everything has its pros and cons. YOE: 2.5 (E5) TC: ~$300K
Sorry this isn’t an answer to your question, but how did you prepare for the quant part?
Those are top HFT firms, how are you getting interviews in this market ? A top 10 MSCS?
Nah just a BS but from a pretty good school
Not to bother you a lot but would you say Georgia Tech is a target school for these HFTs? Looking into the MSCS program at GAtech.
Interned at Goog + Cit. At a different firm now in the HFT space. I liked Cit and my current firm better than tech. But others have the opposite view. Also 300k for e5? I have a few friends making >500k at e5 with the latest refreshers and stock rally.
What are the odds of getting interviews If MsCs is from a mediocre school but 4+ yoe from a good team and great work ex in msft
School matters less and less as you progress at FAANG and adjacent, but still matters a bit at 4+ yoe. Can't hurt to ask though. I'd say the sweet spot is right after your second MSFT promo.
Thats for other tech companies, are you specifically referring to these quant firms?
Came from quant to Google as SWE. Had more fun and got paid more at quant but is heavily dependent on firm. Cit. top pay, bad wlb, shitty tech. Know several swe making over 1m Ts hrt js jump. All good places. Would pick over cit
why didn't choose to move laterally inside cit? might be able to fix that shitty tech part
Overall tech in cit is much worse than any of those other tier1 firms (js ts hrt etc). But you get paid a lot and learn a ton.
I’ve had absolutely zero regrets. I really like the non-SV culture. I had an idea that anything other than SV-tech was not chill. Not so. Job security, intelligent coworkers, get treated very well. Only ‘downside’ is that sometimes the stuff you work with is not what the rest of the industry uses. Not a big deal imo
As an MLE E6, I grew and learned more in 6 months at Meta than in 2 years at Citadel. The interviews are 10x broader and more difficult than the job. If you really want to become an expert on regression stats or C go there. Deep learning stays in big tech
My interviews for Citadel are for general SWE mostly because they told me MLE positions were very limited I'm more interested in ML and figured interviewing wouldn't hurt How was your experience at Citadel and what prevented your technical growth? Is Meta more enjoyable for you?
Yeah more enjoyable since its proper deep learning / AI. There's no end to end investment or trading decisions that are 100% done by software (or ML). Unsure if there ever will be. If you're interested in building infra, you'll work a lot at Cit. Often jts equivalent to startup work due to lack of tooling, which can be good for skills. Plus you'll be getting paid better than at a startup. I'd compare their work to Ads org the most
Hi I am preparing as well. Can I DM you?
I moved the other way. Pros of trading: -performance is easily measurable, comp and promos pretty closely linked to performance -faster moving -basically 0 risk of true layoff Cons of trading: -easy to get sucked into roles further from the money, which are more like trad tech -worse WLB, more facetime culture -much quicker to cut for performance. Assume you’ll *work* 50h a week If you want to max TC, trading is the way to go. If you want to max WLB, big tech is far better. I’m thankful to have done both and happy with the order I did the two in. Fwiw I had to take a ~50% paycut to join tech.
Why is performance more measurable? Do you work as a team a lot?
Each team has pnl attached to it. You can also directly measure pnl impact of a given initiative, e.g. “this improvement to ARCA order logic saves us 700k per year.” Depending on the role you may have an individual revenue number attached to your head. Revenue smaller than your base? You’re gone. Make 40mm for the firm? You’re probably taking home close to 10 that year (buyside). It’s a mix. Actual trading is relatively individual. QD/SWE is usually small teams - remember, whoever does the work gets the revenue attached to their head (directly or indirectly), so no benefit in having a large team working (or not working) to split the “pot” with.