Specifically talking about Jane Street, Two Sigma, Citadel, HRT, Jump and other similar firms Is everything as good as advertised? Are the back office people looked down upon like traditional finance? How is the talent compared to regular FAANG firms? What about the career progression and opportunities to management? What about the WLB (I know citadel has bad WLB) #Quant #back office #swe
Tagging along: what about quant dev roles and research eng roles?
Although the smartest people at FAANG are probably same talent as the smartest people at a hedge fund like citadel/JS/HRT, the median talent is much higher at the hedge funds. This makes it a great place to be, especially for someone earlier in their career, but also makes it a bit more stressful
I think even at big banks and crappy asset managers like AQR you find a lot of people who are shockingly smart considering how low their TC is. Finance just tends to draw certain people out of a certain appeal to intellectual curiosity. However, tooling is s*** compared to big tech, and rest and vest is harder to do. Would wholeheartedly recommend one of the high paying shops for a new grad, because it gets you on a great financial head start.
Would it be recommended for E5+?
Much worse tooling and infra investment than FAANG. Select teams can be stronger but some are weaker. Pays more for entry level and then levels off once you hit L5/L6 territory. Essentially pays L4 TC for new grad. WLB at CitSec makes fb look like a joke
I think it's a little more generous than "L4", as 400k first year comp is pretty common at a few places now (I didn't get that much for e4...). Also it seems that it's easier to be an IC hitting 1m+ in finance. However in terms of dollars per hour, L5/6 at google is pretty competitive, and I think a lot of people at higher levels don't want the bad wlb.
@xoogler93 Were you at CitSec previously?
I think it’s great. Was at FANG before, would say the talent is better but as others have pointed out the tooling is worse. Career progression is a lot better in the sense that there is less rigid perf process, it’s all about impact, but this also means what career progression means is less clear and a lot of the people you hear saying TC comp flattens out are people that don’t know how to grow their impact anymore. At FANG if you get to L5/L6/L7 you know there’s a next level and can read about how to get there. Most don’t get there. At Citadel if your impact is equivalent to those levels you’ll make a lot more, but again most don’t get there and many don’t even know if it’s possible. Regarding WLB, mine is same as when I was in FANG.
Can I DM you? I have some questions about interviewing there.
Sure
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