Wait a second, am I missing out right now? I have an opportunity at Jane Street, but I haven't been exposed to any of the other small name firms. Where do I look to find the higher paying jobs?
If you're early in your career, then you should probably just take the Jane St opportunity. They are very well respected and it looks very good on your resume.
If you're later in your career, you should have enough contacts and know enough people to get in the door at a small firm. If you don't know their name, you'll have a hard time getting in. These kinds of places don't post job openings on indeed. You kind of have to know someone.
One of the first things you might notice in some of the job ads for those firms: instead of "Compensation: competitive salary, 0.0x% equity," you'll start seeing phrases like "extremely high compensation." Then you'll start really feeling like you're not in Kansas.
In this vein, the tech industry screws its employees as far as their share of revenue-per-employee goes. Apple makes 10x per employee what Jane St. does, and I doubt the small firms achieve the difference.
the joke goes that finance firms are employee run co-ops. And for the most part it's true: you end up keeping quite a high percentage of the money you earn for the firm. Profits are paid out to everyone, not just a few at the top.
These numbers are easy to find, but sure, let's break out our calculators. By recent generic numbers, Jane street does $171MM revenues across 900 employees. Apple has $274B revenues across 137,000 heads.
$190,000 vs. $2,000,000. Netflix is even higher: $2.4MM. What numbers do you have?
Your Jane Street numbers are not even close. They're required to report this stuff in the UK, which shows revenues of $229MM (see https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...). And that's just the UK revenue - most of the business is in the US. I would estimate closer to $1MM/head.
Depends on the company. For example most of Walmart's revenue goes to buying goods to sell. Apple sells physical products and hence will spend a lot of money acquiring the physical parts etc, you can't really compare their revenue to for examples Facebooks revenue.
If you're later in your career, you should have enough contacts and know enough people to get in the door at a small firm. If you don't know their name, you'll have a hard time getting in. These kinds of places don't post job openings on indeed. You kind of have to know someone.