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Just go for the industry you feel the most excited to work in. Meta and Finance are 2 very different businesses: you'll work on very different problems.
I'm genuinely equally interested in both and love them - but if I had to absolutely choose, I'm a tech person first. My firm being very tech forward is a major reason I enjoy it. Could you give more insights into the types of problems? I still exploring these areas deeply as a new grad, so I'm open to the taking the risk of trying something and then something else later :)
I'd say: if you feel more attracted by tech itself and are a bit of a geek, I'd go Meta: you'll learn better ways to architecture large scale systems there. If you are interested in financial markets and trading, then go for HF. A HF is about making money in the markets, that's it, so better be interested in the field because you're gonna need to go deep in understanding financial products and markets, especially as a quant.
Tier 1 HF has as much (if not more) resume value as Meta so that shouldn’t be a consideration.
So you are comparing an internship to a full time offer?
Your current role sounds much better than Meta IMO. PSC culture is a huge disadvantage, it only promotes unnecessary stress and fake impact. Also transferrable skills are hard to find in Meta teams, C++ and Python experience would be more transferable for future opportunities. Usually the main reason to join Meta is brand recognition and compensation, and you seem to be doing very well already.
I think this is pretty much a personal decision. If you want to be a SWE just pick what you enjoy working on, since I think trading and tech sort of even out in the long term as far as comp is concerned. If you are trying to be more on the QR side, stick with finance if you want to maximize comp. I will say if you want to be a founding eng or found your own tech startup, you will have a much better chance being from Meta if you want funding/be a first hire. Plus the Meta role sounds more product-y which is a valuable skill to have for startups nowadays. Ultimately i think its up to you to sort of decide if you want try going down the QR track or continuing to be more SWE/founder product focused.
I work at an HFT with reputation and performance somewhere between HRT and Akuna. Yes, it's deliberately a relatively wide range. Big tech and quant dev are two very different paths. In most cases, I feel that IC experience is transferable up to L5 generalist level, and management probably no more than M1, (L6) due to the lack of scale. But that is fine. For L6 or even L5 or above, Blind makes it sound easy to move jobs randomly, but the truth is it's not easy to lateral at higher levels without specializing in a good domain. With this in mind, you may find that moving between front office teams in HFT / quant firms isn't really harder than moving between companies big tech, even though the industry is small, because the pool of teams who would target your specific big tech experience isn't that large either. So big tech vs quant dev isn't really the right comparison. It's better to compare quant dev against specific domains such as VR, MLE, SDN, Ads, and perhaps specific teams as well. If you apply to big tech and find there's no role in a desirable domain (e.g. you could only get into IS&T at Apple), then maybe quant dev at a good firm is a better choice. If you could get MLE at OpenAI, and you're only in a middling desk at Tower, maybe OpenAI is better.
Great take. What do you think are some good domains to specialize in as you grow as an IC? I’d like it to be such that I could have good enough experience at meta to lateral into HFT.
Would you mind if I PMed you? I’m looking to potentially do HFT after 2 yrs at Meta, after I get E5 promo. I feel it’d be very valuable to get the low down from someone who started it as new grad and am happy to answer any Meta questions I can.
For sure, I'll answer what I can.