Why do so many top students end up at niche financial firms and under the radar startups?
It feels like you don’t see all that many people from Stanford/MIT at FB/G anymore. Relative to their size of the companies you see many more going to more secretive and niche financial firms like HRT, Five Rings, Ansatz Capital, etc or other startups that I’ve either never heard of or are moderately big like Quora. Do they know something that most people don’t? Are these sort of firms much more lucrative or better career wise somehow? Why does this happen? It seems people like they could easily work in FAANG but choose not to
I on a personal level feel the same. I would any day work at these stealth startups if not for Visa issues. As it has been mentioned previously, the biggest reason a lot of people work these fang companies is job security in case of visa problems for international people. In a hypothetical world where Visa wasn't a issue, why would you work in a big environment where you are just a cog and not at a place where you are valued so much, has much better scope to learn and grow, and hell even get that sweet sweet payout if your startup goes public!
There are quite a lot of students from Stanford, MIT, CMU etc at G at least. I dunno about F. IIRC some 100+ students join Google from CMU every year
Of that 100+ group, how many are international students coming for a masters program? Don’t get me wrong, MS in Stanford and CMU is still amazing but it’s not what it used to be. They have now become cash cows with huge class sizes and inflated grades. I feel truly gifted computer science folks from quality universities chase opportunities where they can make a big impact or they can do what they truly want to do. Sometimes they find it in fang companies but most often don’t. I interviewed at google about 3 years ago and while I didn’t hired, I didn’t feel too bad about it. Most of the interviewers were boring. Their interviews were like a script. Don’t get me wrong - they may have been great at their jobs otherwise these companies wouldn’t keep them. I just found them boring. For some of the interviewers (including the lunch one), I had a question - what was their favorite technical journal, their favorite computer science subject and the answers I got were vague. In one of the interviews, I stated that the complexity was small-o and the interviewer didn’t know the difference between big-o and small-o. I thought it was kind of ironical because google stresses on the word - “academic” in the interview process. I think small things like these put off certain people. Specially when TC and brand are not the deciding factor. Of course my views might be colored and/or things changed in last 2 years but I don’t write code anymore and wouldn’t know.
...and then you went to work at Oath?
In my friend circle, the people who do that either hate big companies, or want a lot of money. When people excel at school, they tend to have some sort of bubble that is formed thinking that they will succeed at anything they do. This results in them going for riskier jobs in terms of payoff and personal sacrifice, thinking it will still be a walk in the park like academia was. And on the FAANG front, I’ve done a lot of interviewing and people from elite schools are not nearly as good as you might think
Didn't F have a hiring freeze for non-senior SWEs late this year? Soinds like you are just seeing the effects of that policy.
Yes I believe this happened but I think it’s been a general trend and not isolated to this year
Outside of our nice little tech bubble, financial firms pay a shitload of money to senior IBankers and traders. Especially once you get promoted into the VP level and beyond. Comp is in the million dollar range and higher for directors/managing directors at top banks and hedge funds. My sister works in this industry and one of her bosses once owned a vineyard in Europe. On the flipside, it’s a highly competitive industry (must earn money for the firm, it’s quantifiable and there are targets) and she thinks half of her incoming class at her first bank are gone.
One thing to note is that most people in computer science don’t even work on the banking/trading side, they usually just work on the tech side with much less pay
This is nothing new, roughly starting back at the beginning of time - people are different and choose different career paths. "Any more brain busters?"
HRT pays their new grads 300-400k so it makes sense
Quora, Asana, Addepar MemSql, and a couple of others have strong competitive programming communities so they recruit a lot of competitive programmers straight out of school because of network effect (friends of friends). The HFT prop shops and quantitative hedge funds all recruit heavily out of Ivies, Chicago, MIT , and a bit from Stanford/Berkeley. Some of them also have many math and programming competition people, so network effect also kicks in. Some young but big startups like Robinhood, Flexport, Doordash have strong connections to Stanford and Berkeley and recruit heavily on campus. Young American citizens from top schools and well off families, in many cases Silicon Valley based families, don't care much about TC, wlb, Visa sponsorship, ladder climbing, stability, etc they care more about having fun with like minded friends and tackling hard problems with small teams.
Working in corporate America blows and the small startups spend more per employee on food and trips than Microsoft or Google. I don’t see Facebook flying engineering teams out to Cancun or Thailand
You’re not looking at the right teams ;) I’ve traveled to 3 continents this year on FB dime
Which teams? 😂 Joining fb next yr