Tech Vs Quant

Go

Bruh take the 2x TC and leave after a year since you’ll essentially have a whole year of income left to focus on your business

You made the right choice. You already had a long term goal, the quant position doesn’t align. Care to share YOE with that 450k TC?

Where? Dm me. I was in a similar situation last year.

Your NW is pretty low for your TC. If your offer is really in the 1M range, just take it for a year. You can always return to Google

> - Sky is the limit: If you build a semi-successful company you can cash out more than Quant and get a top position paying more than 1-2M (that seems to be the top for Quant). I recommend crunching the numbers before any conclusions. In my view, there's three broad end results for startups: failure, semi-successful, and home-run (i.e. unicorn). 1. Based on your background, estimate the probability each case happens to you. As a baseline, the first Google result for "what percent of startups fail" says 90%. For a random person in tech, I'd say 90% failure, 9% semi-successful, 1% home-run. You're definitely better than a random person and you should quantify how much better. 2. Estimate what percent of the company you'll own and how much you'll sell your company for - or its valuation at IPO. (e.g. $1 million for failure - you walk away with salary, $100 million for semi-successful, $1 billion for unicorn). Also note that in IPO, you cannot liquidate, say, your 10% stake in the company all at the IPO price without tanking it. 3. Calculate your expected payout and note the number of years, X, that you expect to work before selling or IPOing. 4. Finally, compare that to working X years at the trading firm making an average of $1M per year. If your $1M comp package is truthful (it's definitely believable), excludes sign-on, and it's at an established HFT, then your comp shouldn't ever drop much from $1M. Do your work well, don't antagonize your coworkers, etc. and you should at least have a stable experience. Maybe it falls a little if they have a record-horrible year, but right now the industry is doing great and firms aren't going to risk losing talent over a few $100ks. Plus, there are bigger fish who make many millions and would take the bigger hit. I don't believe the comment "1-2M (that seems to be the top for Quant)" is accurate. People don't usually share their bonuses, but word on the street is that some do end up higher than 1-2M. Overall, my expectation is you'll find the HFT numbers come out higher than your startup numbers, but let your calculations speak for themselves. Shameless plug time... If your current offer is from Jump Trading, then I recommend you accept it. But if your offer is not from Jump, and you are worried about WLB/culture, then I encourage you to apply here. The WLB and culture here is excellent, and I believe it's better than most if not all other firms in our industry. If your experiences are aligned, if you pass the interviews, and if your offer is from a legitimate competitor, I expect you can get a match, but no guarantees. And, for the other shorter parts... > - You can build transferable skills, e.g., leadership skills HFTs need leaders too and what you learn at one HFT firm transfers to other HFT firms. > - Work is more interesting I can't dispute what you do/don't find interesting. But make sure you factor in how important that is compared to doubling your TC and FIREing. > - WLB is much better (You can survive with 2hr/day if you like and work on your side projects) 2hr/day is possible at Google, but I don't think you can work on your side-company, because Google would have a legal claim to your company. Furthermore, you're not going to have good WLB if you quit and start your own company. > I believe 2X TC is a great boost but does not upgrade my quality of life (in long run) If you have a goal of FIREing at $Y net worth, a 2X TC boost gets you there faster. Suppose Y = 5 million and you net 50% of your TC after taxes, expenses, etc. At $1M/year, you'll FIRE in 10 years. At $500k/year at Google, it's 20 years. So 10 years of your life is on the table. Hope some of this was helpful

Question bc I want to become a quant researcher: are you a swe or research scientist at Google? What experience got you considered for this?

Are you MLE at Google?

Why tf would you turn down a quant role for code monkeying?