Netflix vs Quant vs Meta
New grad (masters) debating three offers. One is in trading for a research role and the others are in tech for research engineering and data science respectively. Any advice? 1. Netflix seems to have good talent and the team I’m on is fairly research-y and aligns well with my interests. That being said I’m not sure I love the culture or the Bay Area. 2. I am a fan of Meta research and think they are doing some of the best cutting edge vision work, but its kinda unclear how close I’d be to action. In MPK so same bay area stuff. 3. The trading firm has really good people—like IMO winners and all that shit. It also seems like a great place to learn the industry and seems like a more chill firm. This one is in NY which I like, but is a bit more expensive. I’ve anonymized the numbers a bit.
Are you really going to turn down that quant money? C'mon bro
Im mainly concerned about secrecy—quant doesnt let you publish anything and the research is very classical. I’m worried about my modern ml skills getting rusty. The money is nice, though Id imagine it comes with considerable expectations to produce (even though it doesnt seem like the firm has high turnover)
With a MS you’ll probably not be publishing stuff at meta. More chance for better work at quant imo
WTF almost 500K for a new grad? I call bullshit.
Top quant firms do give out these kind of offers. Extremely rare though.
This was the standard offer for my intern class (for MS/BS). Phds got a bit more
What’s the confusion here? Are you really saying you don’t need like 2X money for the same shit
Research engineer offer seems super low. Is that considered SWE job family internally like research scientist is?
I tried to negotiate more, and they said it near top of band and that they dont compete with quant offers because different industry.
How did you land such high numbers? Anything that made you stand out?
Besides quant i think it was connections. Meta had sponsored my research and I knew some people at netflix who referred.
Which university is it?
No brainer - take the quant role Source - trying to break into quant from tech (ML) but unable to
Why leave FAIR? It seems like theyre doing awesome stuff (llama, DINO, JEPA, etc)
lol nvda is probably better than FAIR
Quant all the way. If you're ever longing for a bit more balance you can always go to a FAANG or other top tech companies.
what's your masters into op? Computer science? or something else?
CS (specifically ML) with some healthy diversion into classical statistics
Quant all day everyday
Nice offers. You must have stood out somehow. IMHO, you can always jump to tech from quant finance but the reverse seems more difficult.