Given you could take your pick where would you go? Comment your reasons below, if you have any!
What’s hrt?
Hudson River Trading. http://www.hudson-trading.com/ Good company and their NY office is *gorgeous*.
More gorgeous than bbg?
As of 2020 I would rank these PDT HRT JS Citadel TS. PDT is the most secretive and hardest to get into. The rumors have it that they are making crazy money and no one ever quits. My heart was crushed when the recruiter said no :( HRT has great perks and is chilled out by HFT standards, but some people don't like that top performers don't get paid as much relative to Jump. More selective than JS as far as I can tell. JS bumped up their pay by a lot this year from what people are saying on Blind, but it's a much larger company which to me is a negative, and having wasted a bunch of time on Slang at GS I feel like OCaml doesn't sound very appealing. Citadel pay is really good, but sounds like it has a lot of unpleasant features (still hoping I get an offer though lol, I'm poor as f). TS pay is not very impressive compared to the rest, and is also a huge company now.
Thanks for the details!
You seem to know about the industry. How would you rank these purely on a work-life balance scale? Citadel would probably be last, what about the other ones?
On the one hand, it's a silly question -- even ignoring that it's highly subjective, you might as well have a poll to choose which supermodel you'd like to date. Fun to dream about, but most people would be lucky to get even one or two of those opportunities and nobody ever gets to choose from all five. (FWIW, I'm currently employed by one of those companies, and I used to work at a different one, so I guess that proves I'm smart; but two of the other companies each rejected me twice.) On the other hand -- I actually 100% agree with fake_engineer's ranking: the winner is PDT then HRT then Jane Street then Citadel then Two Sigma. Obviously it's subjective depending on which team you're on and how much you value TC vs WLB vs culture, etc; but that seems to be a good overall ranking. If you only care about TC, then move Citadel to the top of the list and push Jane Street above HRT.
Really? I mean their track record is rumored to be better... Did you get an offer?
h1b salary info tells you *nothing* about a hedge fund cause that doesn't include bonus or returns on the money invested in the fund, and those are a very significant part of your comp. (For most mid-to-senior level people, the salary is less than half of the TC). Also, h1b openings are frequently back-office roles that typically don't pay as well as front office work, so that's a skewed sample. It's difficult to say one company pays more than another because it's dependent on the specific role and level and person, so even if company X gave me a higher offer than company Y, your experience might be the opposite. But FWIW, I've seen offers from both PDT and Two Sigma and the PDT offer was significantly better.
What about Citadel Securities?
Culture here is better than the asset manager side. I’m still quite new, but not many people are leaving or getting fired. Pay is very good. Everyone here works very hard - expect longer hours than TS/JS/HRT.
Thanks! How many hours do you work on average? Do you have weekend time to spend with your significant other? And, have you noticed people being particularly talented? I am worried of not being good enough to perform. They are likely going to bring me onsite in a few days, I talked to the hiring manager and he said everyone is incredibly talented and in general better than FAANG and that FB people have it much easier compared to Citadel Securities. I understand he is partially just trying to entice me, but it’s also scary. I have just been in tier 2-3 companies so far and I wonder if the performance expectation would be too much of a shock?
Two Sigma it is.
Uber
I knew a lot of people who left Citadel. It’s not a good place to be. In finance, for developers, two sigma is probably the best place. However the big tech companies are much more fun than finance.
Do you have an opinion on Citadel securities for infra swe?
Tech debt is really bad, even for finance
What’s pdt?
PDT Partners. A quant fund that was part of Morgan Stanley for 20 years but spun out into a standalone firm a few years ago. They've famously never had a down year in their history. They used to be incredibly secretive and small enough that not many people knew about them, but they've been increasing headcount lately and getting more exposure. https://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanvardi/2016/01/04/the-new-quant-hedge-fund-master/#a2dbc1a318e2
Jane Street because from blind their comp policy is fair. HRT was paying some fresh grads more than people staying their for more than 2 years and whenever you do that morale takes a hit.
Don’t think this is true at all... I know what post you’re talking about and it turned out the HRT guy was a back office ops developer so it makes sense they were getting paid less
Why is it fair for back office ops developers to be paid less? Maybe hiring is different there, but I'd expect pretty much anyone in that role at JS to be able to perform just as well in a front-office role, so we pay them about the same.