Earlier this year I got really worried about the upcoming layoffs and started to interview around. Trading firms were pretty much the only ones who were actively recruiting SWEs at that time, so I interviewed with a number of them. To my surprise I got no offers. As we are approaching EOY I wanted to share my experience, maybe it’s gonna be useful for others. For context I’m currently a senior IC at a FAANG firm, I have multiple FAANGs on my resume. I have around 15 YoE and TC in the 700-800Ks. The trading firms below are the ones I had weird experience with. I had a few other rejections not listed here that I felt totally legitimate. - Jane Street: full onsite loop, I think I performed really well, but got a rejection with no explanation. - Optiver: full onsite loop, rejection, got a feedback that criticized my body posture during the interview and that I didn’t have Zoom whiteboard set up, that signals lack of interest for them. - WorldQuant: got to offer stage, then got an email that the role I was interviewing for doesn’t exist anymore. - IMC: was scheduled for the onsites, then instead of my interviewers the recruiter entered the meeting and told me it will not be possible to match my current comp, so he canceled the interview. - Kraken: several rounds of interviews, after the last one with a few VPs and Ds I’m being ghosted. - Jump Trading: hackerrank then phone screen that both went pretty well, then got a rejection with false feedback, describing things that didn’t happen during the interview. - Unnamed UAE crypto trading firm: several long interview sessions with senior staff from the company, sustained positive feedback. Then being ghosted. - Unnamed FX trading firm: very cocky interviewers telling me several times during the interviews how selective they are. Rejection, feedback was “I did reasonably well, but failed to impress”. Anyone else in the same boots? An independent recruiter told me at some point that many of these cases probably boil down to comp concerns. Maybe the urban legends about cosmic trading salaries aren’t true afterall. I’m thinking it’s a combination of high comp expectations, a surplus of talent available on the job market, and small firms having more subjective factors in their decisionmaking. I also think that the tech industry developed an anti-FAANG sentiment, during the interviews I even heard thing like “we know many people are there for the free lunch”. Anyways, let’s hope 2024 will be better!
Your pay is crazy high for SWE. Trading firms generally only pay that for a real competitive advantage. Prestige of previous employers only gets you a call, not high tc.
That’s a fair point, and this is what I was implying when I wrote there is a surplus of talent. Very solid engineers can be hired from the gaming/audio/semiconductor industry for a lot more reasonable salaries for high ROI.
It's high but not crazy high, for top firms it's achievable for an actual senior role, but the bar is high and they assess a lot of non-technical aspects. If the technical interviews went well but there's no feedback, then one possibility is culture fit, which is hard to tell candidates for various reasons. It's also a bit harder than you think to hire people from gaming for the right fit in all aspects.
how does an undisclosed firm interview you? undisclosed to you or to us?
To you. They are small shops. I would like to avoid doxxing myself.
How would you possibly doxx yourself? It’s not like we can find out the firm’s interviewees, and even if they’re lurking in here and find your post, also unlikely they can single you out of N applicants.
I interviewed for IMC and Optiver a few years ago and also found the whole thing pretty weird. IMC in particular, everything was pathetic and unprofessional.
At 800k, you aren’t getting a comp increase anywhere unless you have something special that they absolutely need and they somehow can’t find that internally. If you were a trader or quant instead it would have been easy to do multiples of that.
By trader, do you mean a manual trader ?
both that and algorithmic trading with supervision and manual intervention when necessary
If only you sat straighter in your chair, Optiver might have given you an offer 😂
cool story ‘undisclosed’ bro 😂
sure bro, you can doxx yourself as you wish, I will rather not
no problem bro
Your comp was much more than they offer. Don't believe the selectivity bs. They need ppl but your comp was probably more than most there. When they can't comprehend tech comp they come up with BS
For Kraken, did they ask you to do a take home 8 hour assignment? You must be LC guru. I can;t believe you almost cracked all the interviews. Or exceptionally lucky?
Thanks for sharing your experience!
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Sounds about right tbh, trading firms pay the actual traders the big money. SWEs are second class to them. IME, tech / software pays better when accounting for wlb and other perks than trading anyway. I have friends at js and sig and they say its pretty gruelling.