[nvarsj]

Unless it changed dramatically in recent years, when I was in Chicago prop trading firms were paying mid 200 to 300 after a few years. 500k was definitely not normal comp for most engineers at any trading firm, although obviously there are exceptions.

[exdsq]

Thank you. This is really my point. People share these rumors of a small minority making huge sums and normalize it as what anyone can do, which just does harm to the industry and to individuals. People actually in the sector/area know it’s not true yet there are those just sharing things they heard like facts.

[comp_throw7]

Entry-level SWE comp for top-end finance shops in Chicago & NY is 400k+, so, ah, no. See levels.fyi.

[nvarsj]

While I think salaries have gone up in recent years, I'm also going to call BS on 400k for entry level. I just looked at levels.fyi, and I'm not seeing that all. A couple unverified outliers for Citadel doesn't represent the majority of devs. I'm mostly seeing in the 100-200 region for the firms I checked, with Citadel at the top in the 200-300 region.

Also keep in mind bonuses are rarely guaranteed or part of packages, so they are completely speculative for new grads.

[comp_throw7]

It's not a "couple" of unverified outliers for Citadel, it's like half of their offers in the last few months.

It's also baseline entry-level comp at Jane Street, and Hudson River Trading goes even higher.

First-year bonuses are generally guaranteed, and after that are "speculative" in the same way that stock compensation is speculative - largely dependent on firm performance (though personal performance can actually pull it them significantly in finance, unlike with stock).

I didn't say this was the majority of devs, I said this was entry-level comp for "top-end finance shops", which is true. It is also true that there are competitors in that space which pay much less, just like there are tech companies which pay much less FAANG & Co, but does not mean that FAANG & Co don't exist or shouldn't be relevant to people's decision-making.

[exdsq]

We're going from "It's easy to earn $500k" to "Top-end financial shops in Chicago and New York". And if someone gets a good offer they'll be more likely to put it up on Levels.

SBF earned what... $22B in the last three years in crypto by the age of 29? If he posted his earnings on Levels.fyi at Alameda Research can I start suggesting people can earn $1B by 30 by moving to Hong Kong and working for top crypto trading firms because out of the massive amount of people trying to do that, it happens to people from time to time?

[comp_throw7]

The original claim you were attempting to rebut:

> If you are in your 20's, it is totally worth moving to the US where you can get paid 500K+ per year if you navigate your career efficiently.

I don't want to say that it's "easy" to hit numbers in this ballpark as a senior engineer in the US, but the way to do it is relatively straightforward and doesn't require any particularly unusual skills, connections, knowledge, etc.

1) There is a set of companies which pay that kind of money

2) Those companies employ a non-trivial percentage of the software engineers in the country

3) Those companies are _always hiring_ more software engineers at those levels

4) The interview processes for those companies are public and quite similar

Obviously nobody is guaranteed to get a job paying that well at one of those companies. Some people simply won't be able to clear the bar (either technically or socially). But the bar is not "one in a thousand". These companies already employ something like 8-10% of the software engineers in the country, so "one in ten" is a hard _upper bound" on how strict they are (and obviously, since their selection process isn't perfect and they don't in fact have every single 10%ile engineer or better locked up, the bar is lower, probably much lower).