That's cool. I came from the hedge fund side and left 12 years ago, but many of my peers stayed on. In the last 4 years virtually 100% of them have left due to meager bonuses (we're talking about the systems/infrastructure side of the business, including in HFT) and have all gone on to work at FAANGs (average comp I'd say between & 400k-600k).
Another advantage of working in Tech is that you can trade on the side. Working in banks or hedge funds usually comes with rules that make it impossible to do any interesting trading. Initially this sounds fair, after a while it becomes a real opportunity cost. Its one reason I moved to Tech from Capital markets.
In banks it wasn't so much the rules in my experience (although they do make it very difficult to express a negative view on a sector or stock and the minimum hold periods can make life a bit more difficult) as the fact that as soon as you want to make an interesting trade in a single stock and ask for permission, very often you find out the bank has a conflict of interest issue (at least, that's what I assumed it was - obviously they wouldn't tell you why you didn't get permission) which means you aren't permitted to do so. From this perspective, funds are much much better.
Yes, that 30-day lock up on stocks is killah. I still remember the days of DBL, before the insider trading scandals, where they had these private partnerships that were offered to everybody--from the ceo to the mail room guys--like getting a monthly bonus. Of course, mbs and junk bonds were big and making big $ during the mid-80s. What a time that was.
Currently working in asset management and the trading rules are a killer. I used to trade options on equity indexes and commodities. These were the only derivative products I could trade short term (less than 30 days w/ profit). It would have been very beneficial to not have to deal with tons of overhead of talking with compliance every week about what each security was because it wasn't in the database.
Even when buying individual equities I would get emails indicating my trades were flagged for further analysis. It isn't enjoyable to be good at managing money but unable to do so without fear of punishment.
Even though I follow the rules, the process made it too difficult to manage. It is a real opportunity cost because in order to invest aggressively I would have to quit.
Maybe I should work in finance.. I'm locked out of making apps/games because of my day job, but my investing hobby is going as badly as the average WallStreetBets user
My counter anecdote is that I left an asset manager about 5 years ago, and the firm I left has grown twofold, mostly hiring quants, has low turnover, excellent work life balance, and bonus payouts have gone up. I kick myself for thinking FAANG was greener pastures because I make less money as a senior engineer in FAANG than a two years out of school quant, while also having a more stressful job.
Quants are still in demand and getting paid a fortune. It's the thing that makes me think of going back. An averagely-competent C++ developer can make much more in this industry than elsewhere right now.
As for the stress and greener pastures bit, really you aren't wrong.
Everything I hear from friends at all these companies is that for stress, Amazon > Apple > Netflix > Facebook > Google. Netflix seems far less stressful than Apple from everything I've heard from employees that have worked at both.
Think it really depends on where you land. I think everyone agrees that Google is easy-mode; beyond that, it depends on which group you're in.
Two friends at Apple illustrate: one says he does basically nothing but surf the web, the other last I heard is is nearly sleeping under his desk in a crunch.
The impression I got was that Netflix was a very cut-throat environment due to their propensity to fire people quickly. I can't speak for all roles at either company, but Apple doesn't seem to have that reputation.
Most of them are. Quant jobs are often highly academic. Basically the same project structure as FAANG but never any deadlines.
Banks are where the arbitrary high stress jobs reside, and then certain specific companies that choose to enforce stress culture, like GSAM and Citadel.
But most have normal 9-5 hours, few deadlines, autonomy, project self-selection.
Maybe I don't really understand what a quant does, but I imagine it would be stressful because if you make a mistake I imagine it could have huge financial consequences. That's true at FAANG, too, but maybe just cause I know how things work there it doesn't seem like something I need to worry about very much.
Like most software, quant investing models are usually separated from production systems when being created and undergo integration testing, back testing, etc., and have all sorts of automatic and manual revert capabilities in the deploy systems.
Not much different than shipping something broken to millions of users and needing to triage a rollback.
Of course there are outlier firms that play fast and loose and can have risk of huge sudden losses that can’t be stemmed, but most firms do risk management as a core part of their purpose for existing, and this applies to risk of bad code / bad model just like anything else.
Yeah, but even with integration & unit tests, people regularly miss some corner case.
Again, maybe I just don't know enough about how it works, or maybe I just know enough about what I do -- but every once in a while you make some catastrophic mistake that takes done Google or Facebook for a few minutes -- the only cost you incur is opportunity. The same mistake at Knight Capital cost them like $500M in 15 minutes or something crazy.
So, taken a step further, the little bugs that regularly make it into Google that cause 1% of requests to 500 on some service is a big deal, the opportunity cost can exceed your salary for years. I imagine the same thing is true in trading, except it's not opportunity -- it's real money. That just seems way more stressful to me, but maybe it just doesn't happen very often, or the test coverage is taken much more seriously, and it's better.
It depends on how much you're bringing to the table and how well you interview, but $400-600k/yr "total compensation (considering 4yr cliffs, etc)" packages happen with regularity and I know two people who have negotiated a 1m/yr total comp at Facebook(on the IG team). Neither were "senior devs" as I'd normally call them but extreme ICs who have deep understanding of Linux and can scale big infrastructure and sling code.
Don't know about London though. All values in USD.
