Hello, Over the past few years I gained a lot of experience interviewing with Quant firms, initially for internships and then for a full time position. I did over a hundred hour of interview with all sorts of firms: HRT, Citadel, D.E Shaw, Jump, Two Sigma, Jane Street, SIG, Five Rings, Voleon, Radix, Point 72 and many others. I also got full time offers from almost all of these firms. I'm thinking of starting a side hustle where I help people prepare for Quant interviews and land high paying jobs. Quant interviews can be very intimidating initially but after doing all of these interviews I can tell you that at some point it becomes very predictable and repetitive. Anyone can get anywhere with the right preparation and I have a big database with all the recent questions that these companies ask. One of my friends used these questions to practice for a couple of months and got a full-time offer from one of the top quant firms despite being unsuccessful at landing any quant internship in the past couple of years. Would anyone be interested in that? (DM me if you are). I'm still thinking about all this and I have a lot of flexibility. Also curious to hear what kind of structure people would be interested in? Some companies offer mock interviews where you pay for each interview, others take a small percentage on your first year TC, other offer online lessons or bootcamps. Range of 1st year TCs : 350K - 750K Pre-negotiation most offers were around 500K. #interview #finance #citadel #twosigma #deshaw #hrt #janestreet #jumptrading #startup #sig
I am very curious about whether you are still at SIG or not? Especially after the claim you got offers from most of those firms, does SIG pay similar to those?
I'm not at SIG anymore and it is true that the SIG offer that I got was on the lower end of the range that I indicated.
Regarding new grads, I think doing well on interviews for these firms does not guarantee an offer. Actually interviews are the easiest part of the process. You also need something special (like target school, or IMO medal or tons of papers on top journals if you are a phd).
The things that you have listed can definitely help you pass the resume screening but they are in no mean necessary. To land an offer you need to do a good interview. It is true however that a few companies like PDT, D.E. Shaw or Rentec care a lot about your research but most companies don't really. I don't have an IMO medal myself nor a ton of papers in top journals. I initially thought that I was an outlier but that feeling quickly disappeared after a couple of internships where I got to meet many people in this industry as well as my fellow interns.
> Range of 1st year TCs : 350K - 750K What's the YoE required for those comps? I think you can definitely bring value to candidates, especially those new to finance or experienced hires who haven't done interviewing for a while. What did you use to prepare for the interviews yourself?
I have zero YoE, unless you want to count internships. I would also like to mention that these amounts are post negociations, especially for the upper bound. I started with quant interview books. Some of these books have great content, especially when it comes to brainteasers but they lack in other areas like statistics, machine learning and programming. Fortunately I had a good background and research experience in these topics. I also benefited from reading what other people posted online as well as talking with friends and colleagues who went through these interviews. The best preparation however was just doing many interviews over the years. I just got better over time by gaining experience, getting a better sense of what to expect and what is expected which definitely helped me focus my preparation efforts. You can read a whole book on statistics but the reality is that the questions that will get asked are not that exhaustive or diverse at the end of the day.
The person (or rather, demographic) who would sign up for your service would most likely be fired after their first year
Why would you say that?
This guy is probably thinking that interviews do reflect ones ability and you are giving an artificial boost which will not hold after employment. Can't say I never had a flash of thought like that when asking insider/experienced friends for help in my prep of interviews, but it shouldn't take more than a few seconds to realize how many flaws the argument has.
Can we connect on this? Maybe you can start with me
Yes send me DM
hi op, i am wondering is it hard to get the chance of quant interview as a software engineer? thanks for the reply!
I have seen that happen, not sure how common it is. I guess it depends on the company you're working in, what kind of work you do and your educational background. Maybe a search on LinkedIn could give you a better idea.
Which one is better as a career? An ML SWE at Google or SWE (not QR) at tier 1 HFT/HF? Currently deciding between the two.
It depends on the firm, at least from my point of view.
Let's say Citadel Securities / PDT / DESCO level.
Are you coming out of undergrad or PhD?
PhD.
Do you have any idea how possible it is to switch to QR or Trading as a SWE without a PhD? The money here is good, but QR/T just seems more interesting/dynamic of a job.
I am interested, I have been applying to SWE roles in HFTs but never pass their resume screening stage :( Shall I DM you?
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I am starting to think Chinese interviewers currently fail non-Chinese candidates on purpose.
I'd be interested in a model where you take some percentage of the edge you provide over our current offers. E.g. I have an offer for 300k but after your prep I get an offer for 450k, you get 0.05 * 150k = 7.5k. I think that's fair for like 5-10 hours of work.
That makes sense and it does align incentives. But unless you have let's say a return offer from a quant internship, it's hard to know how much you would have gotten without the prep program. Interestingly, there is a company (teamrora) that helps people negotiate their salary and takes a 20% cut on the difference between the post negotiation and the pre negotiation salary, sometimes in addition to a 2.5K fixed initial fee. That being said taking the person's current salary or some average/median salary for 1st year quants as a baseline could make sense as well. For instance taking a cut of anything above 250K regardless of whether you currently have a job, an offer or anything. I think a good prep would also take more than 5-10h because of the nature of the interview. There are many topics to cover probability, statistics, machine learning, programming and a bit of brain teaser.
That's true. I was only talking for myself in particular because I'll be interning at a trading firm this summer but am still interested in recruiting for other firms full-time. Could I DM you?