Either PhD: Computer Science @ Berkeley, Stanford, or Harvard Finance: SWE @ Jane Street, Two Sigma, Citadel Securities would appreciate insight from people who made similar decisions - I'm not just factoring in TC, but also personal growth
One of my biggest regrets in life is choosing your option 2 over option 1 :)
Did you get into those schools?
Depends on the specifics IMO. Big gap between Berkeley/Stanford vs Harvard for CS. Big gap between JS vs Two Sigma/Citadel in terms of desirability IMO.
Which school is best/worst?
You can defer enrollment and collect the fat signing bonus from JS so you can be the grad student who isn't starving maybe?
after getting your PhD in machine learning at Stanford, you might be able to get a quant offer at these top hedge funds... more interesting than swe imo
I eventually dropped out of my PhD to become a dev at a hedge fund. Don't regret it for a second. A PhD is tough work, incredibly long hours, low pay, and the financial pay off at the end doesn't really balance with the opportunity cost of being out of the labor force. But this partially depends on what you want to do. A PhD will enable you to take on research type positions and data science positions that I wouldn't qualify for. Even though I published a lot of work, I absolutely hated going through the review and edit process. I liked building software more than doing research and modeling, so I bailed. My wife is much happier that I'm not as stressed too. But your interests may not align with my own. Do you have any experience doing research?
I have a LOT of Ph.D. colleagues. I dropped out of my Ph.D. None of us feel a Ph.D. is worth it and we all regret spending our years there. I strongly recommend not doing a Ph.D. unless you are very unsatisfied with your current offers and feel being a specialist can get you to the offers you want. Honestly, even then, it's not really worth it. The only reason to go for Ph.D. is if you want to go into academia.
Aren't PhDs highly desired at firms like Jane Street/Citadel for Quant research positions ?
Not worth 4 years of your life...
PhD in ML would get you the trading/modeling roles. Those are much higher upside than SWE.
That's not even true, there's tons of undergrads on the best teams at Jump.
All true. But OP's offers are for SWE in finance.
Stanford cs phd... by the way which track at Stanford?