They do pay extremely well, but are also very selective. The kind of talent they are looking for can earn similar salaries at large tech companies like Google ($400K-500K TC is pretty common at staff+ levels).
They do a lot of hiring out of school though, so they are selective but if you make the cut you'd definitely be earning more at the start of your career. Plus if you perform well you can make well over 500K TC by the time you would have been promoted to staff at FAANG, because of bonuses.
Not many at Google receive that much in their offer letter, but with the stock appreciation over the last decade and stacked refresher grants, I'd be willing to wager there were thousands making >$1M as of Nov 2021 (many fewer since the stock has fallen though).
If Google is offering an initial total cash equivalents of $300k (say $140k salary, $480k/4 stock, 15% annual bonus on each), that's roughly the same deal as somebody else getting a base salary of $300k. The fact that a particular investment decision (GOOG) can accidentally push the individual's yearly increase in net worth past $1M isn't a good way to judge what Google is actually offering:
Anyone with a base salary of $300k can obtain a similar payoff structure by taking out a $550k loan to invest in GOOG, and taking out additional smaller loans at each stock refresh. The tax benefits from capital gains/losses and time-value-of-money benefits from getting your bonus sooner should handily outweigh the cost of servicing the loan, but even in a worst-case scenario where you pay interest for no benefit, that example Google offer would be a lot more comparable to a $315k-$330k salary, not a $1M+ salary.
Well first of all, my point was that over the last decade Google has likely paid more individuals 7 figures than JS or Citadel has. Obviously this is subject to the risk of stock performance, and if your point is that cash is better than stock, I agree with you 100% (especially today when tech stocks are still arguably over-valued).
On the other hand, this, my friend, is absolute nonsense:
> Anyone with a base salary of $300k can obtain a similar payoff structure by taking out a $550k loan to invest in GOOG, and taking out additional smaller loans at each stock refresh.
This is only equivalent if you ignore downside risk, which in the case of an average young professional with no significant assets could ruin you. The RSUs give you significant upside over 4 years with absolutely zero risk.
Also you said this:
> The fact that a particular investment decision (GOOG) can accidentally push the individual's yearly increase in net worth past $1M
This makes me think you might not understand how RSUs work. They are W-2 income at the valuation at the time of vest. What we're talking about is 7 figure annual income. Not investment gains over time.
> Well first of all, my point was that over the last decade Google has likely paid more individuals 7 figures than JS or Citadel has
No, they granted stock initially and set aside those shares for the employee. The market paid the employees the gain between the initial grant price and the sell.
> This is only equivalent if you ignore downside risk, which in the case of an average young professional with no significant assets could ruin you. The RSUs give you significant upside over 4 years with absolutely zero risk.
You didn’t understand the example. The person taking the loan gets $300k/year cash and the Googler gets $180k/year. Setting aside $120k/year for the loan makes the risk the same so you won’t be “ruined”. Google failing in either scenario means they each have $180k in annual cash leftover.
Anyone with a base salary of $300k can obtain a similar payoff structure by taking out a $550k loan to invest in GOOG
I'm curious how someone could obtain such a large, unsecured loan of $550k?
Even secured against a home with a mortgage cash-out Refi, that's a large sum. You'd have to have built up a lot of equity in your home value.
GoKapital advertises up to $500k personal loans on an unsecured basis, with a higher chance of success if you're partially secured (admittedly, putting $50k down instead of investing it elsewhere is an additional cost to servicing the loan, but even 6-12 months into a tech career you should've had $50k saved up, so that shouldn't be a barrier to entry at least).
Also, ordinary banks might not advertise outrageous personal loans, but when your base salary starts at $300k and has a history of increasing (i.e., you don't _need_ the money and just want it to power a particular total comp over time profile, especially when you keep at least 50% of your total comp in cash rather than leveraged investments), most mainstream banks are more than happy to furnish somebody to personally service your account and make a loan like that happen.
Separately, if you live in parts of the country (US-specific) where salaries like that are common, you probably have a down payment of $200k+ if you have a mortgage and would have little problem grabbing a partially secured loan against your current equity.
Where is Google doing layoffs? The latest news I have is that people are very worried about layoffs, but so far they've only started putting people on rebranded PIPs.
The other FAANGs are definitely laying people off, though. I personally think the recession is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but regardless of my take on the fundamentals, it is certainly fulfilling itself and everyone in tech should be pretty worried right now. This is not the year when you're going to increase your salary by jumping to a cool startup as employee #3.
> This is not the year when you're going to increase your salary by jumping to a cool startup as employee #3.
Agreed, you won't get a big salary out of the gate because unproven startups paying huge salaries are dropping like flies as the easy capital dries up. On the other hand, the likelihood of getting in on the ground floor of the next FAANG is increasing as staffing costs decrease and behavioral changes increase during a recession. EV obviously still higher at established top-of-market companies, but when has that ever not been the case?
I spent 9 years there, left a decade ago. Turnover is high, but this is a gross exaggeration. It is stressful, and not everyone can hack it. I was there during and after the '05 layoff when roughly 2/3s of IT was cut. That's still the worst I've heard of from what I hear from friends that are still there.
Ken G definitely does the "Good to Great" getting the right people on the bus thing, which typically means the bottom 5-10% are cut, but even that was slowing before I left.
The turnover for engineers tends to be lower than for traders at citadel and at a lot of quant firms.
Additionally, the turnover for citadel is not evenly distributed across teams. Certain teams and orgs have a lot more turnover than others. Some teams are made up of people with <=2 YOE at company while others are made up of people with >=15 YOE at company.
Smaller companies do layoffs as well. They just aren't as highly publicized as those at tech giants. Severance packages are usually worse/nonexistent as well.
HFT companies also have much higher performance bars and rates of overwork/burnout. I'm willing to bet that people are leaving Jane Street, Citadel etc. (whether voluntarily or not) at much higher rates than large tech companies like Google.
Jane Street does much better at retention than Citadel and probably many other quant firms. The performance bar is definitely higher than the average at Google but it's not like there is no WLB either.
Because they are more selective about fit to begin with I wouldn't be surprised if JS has better yearly retention than most FAANGs. People seem to hop between different big tech cos quite a bit (pre hiring freezes anyway).
I do not see a way to compare big tech companies and Jane Street or Citadel, seeing as how the big tech companies employ many tens of thousands of very qualified people and Jane Street and Citadel are a couple thousand max.
Yeah there are a lot of differences, I wouldn't normally bring up the comparison. My point was just that the turnover is not as bad as the other commenter was implying.
True of Citadel, but Jane Street is supposed to have a solid wlb, and because of the high pay and the few companies willing to pay at that level, people generally stick around there. These kind of finance companies also do better in volatility so they're definitely not laying off right now.
Jane Street definitely does not have a non-compete. Citadel does though.
Deferred compensation is probably not relevant to any of the major quant firms, payment is almost entirely cash. If you're high enough up to start receiving stake in a prop firm directly as part of your bonus you are an order of magnitude above the TC cited by the original comment.
Of course, the amount of comp you can get is a big reason people stick around. For that level of earning potential JS is really good on the WLB front. But it's not going to be as good as big tech is (or at least has been), since QT/QR just has different requirements as a field.
First, i dont consider Citadel, JS, etc "fintech" because they are not in the same line of work.
"
Fintech, a portmanteau of "financial technology", refers to firms using new technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services.
"
This is NOT what people like CIT, JS, etc. do.
So maybe FinTech is being hit very hard, but from what i hear Cit, JS are doing just fine (no real layoffs).
I agree that Two Sigma, Jane Street, Renaissance, etc. are NOT Fintech. Fintech is a really large umbrella which seems to includes people like Paypal or Bloomberg and things like robotraders or companies that deal with some financial product. Hedge Funds / HFT / Algo traders can be really sophisticated with their technology, but I wouldn't call them "Fintech".
That’s true, in much the sense that doctors make money off people being sick. In times of high volatility, it’s HFTs that provide liquidity and keep spreads narrower than they’d otherwise be. It is extremely illegal to purposefully make markets more volatile; good trading firms are not going to do that.
Jane Street is responsible for the Signals and Threads podcast[1], which I always enjoy. They also contribute a lot to the OCaml language, standard libraries, and do a great job of explaining why OCaml is a great language and paradigm. I've learned a lot because of Jane Street's sharings.
I have no connection or interest in Jane Street but this sure gives me a positive impression of the company.
For anyone that did competition math in HS one of the two authors of the main Art of Problem Solving books is also high up at Jane Street, on the trading side. JS sponsors stuff like math prize for girls now.
Obviously there's a potential recruiting benefit to funding contests and posting monthly puzzles and whatnot, but I still think it's a cool vibe that not a lot of other companies have.
I mean, not really. This is personal knowledge. You can't really look up salaries because the base is like $175k but even in mediocre years they're getting high six-figures in bonus.
Take a peek at what Wolverine, Radix, or Jump are paying new grads though. It's generally like $500k+. Even Jane Street, which is a larger place that hires people who aren't published mathematicians (see: Sam Bankman-Fried) pays $750k
Yeah the numbers he posted were also base from JS and Citadel websites, so they're not reflective of how much one could (or even guaranteed will with the early career bonus floors) actually make at those places.
This is for traders and researchers though. You can get pretty similar early career salary + bonus as a SWE at JS or Citadel, which is probably what more people on HN would be considering. Do you know what kind of pay the smaller shops offer for pure SWE?
You get to live in New York City which is unparalleled in the US in terms of urban amenities. The weather can be brutal though.
Or you live in Chicago which is like, still a solid city, but the weather is even worse.
I would disagree that trading firms are more boring than big tech. They are typically much smaller and leaner (even HRT and JS are like sub 2k?), and generally employees have massively more impact and ownership as opposed to being a cog in a 20k developer machine.
I'm quite salty about HFTs. I'm a final-year undergraduate with a bunch of close friends who all love C++ (yes, we're masochistic that way). They're all really smart, too (me, not so much—my GPA is 3.00/5). However, after a while, it got really dull and frankly, a bit exasperating when all the rest of them could discuss were HFTs, their ridiculous, outrageous salaries, matching engines, order books, and low-latency trading. Heck, one of our assignments last year was to write such an engine in C++. It seems C++ developers are particularly in demand at most HFTs.
Some of these companies I have never even heard of before having entered CS—Jane Street, Citadel, HRT, DRW, Ansatz, Two Sigma... Their names and websites are cryptic, and their job position listings are even more so, unless one knows that they're mostly proprietary traders—in other words, making money for money's own sake.
It feels dirty and excessively capitalist—these companies don't even have products to show for all their effort. Any clients they do have probably already make millions to billions, too.
My friends defend themselves by saying 'HFTs make money by keeping the market liquid', 'there's nothing wrong with arbitrage', etc. That's fair, but I still feel that's just sugar-coating what I said.
At the same time, I don't really say anything in person to my friends, because, well, they're friends, and secondly, my lousy grades make me feel thoroughly unqualified to make any sort of criticism.
I personally would rather do embedded, automotive, avionics, or game engine development. I just wish I had someone to discuss this with. Hardly anyone I know wants to do these instead, because the salary is lousy to above average, the hours are as bad, and especially game development is considered a mostly rubbish job to have. It really sucks, because I've gamed all my life and always found video games pretty damn amazing, both technically and just in general. It was a pretty bad bubble-bursting moment when I discovered just how bad the game dev situation was—overwork, crunch, sexual abuse and sexism, bean-counter-led design and marketing decisions.
I'm not looking for 100% job satisfaction (I accept even the most exciting work will have its dull periods), but it would be nice if the thing I spent 8-10 hours a day doing for a salary was something that remotely excited me and others, instead of just mindlessly piping money from X to Y and back just because it paid half a million a year.
If you want a good salary with impact and embedded/high performance C++ look into the self driving field. Check companies like “Cruise” and “Waymo” and see levels.fyi. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but it is making the future vs simply manipulating the finical system.
Thanks for the recommendations. I've applied to more traditional auto firms (BMW, VW, Mercedes, Volvo), and hadn't really considered the newer ones. Cruise looks particularly interesting.
Ironically they only really keep the market liquid when the sun in shining. When there is a big crash and you really need liquidity most HFTs disappear.
They have put a lot of highly paid human traders out of business though which is something. The C++ devs might be earning a lot but its less than their predecessors.
Do you have any evidence for this, empirically? I mean yes, HFTs aren't going to let their orders sit stale when FOMC announces a giant rate hike, they aren't going to lose a bunch of money to keep the market healthy. But generally when vol is high, liquidity is at a premium, so I would imagine HFTs become a higher percentage of the market (though spreads are still going to be wider).
Yeah these HFTs aren't big companies, they buy and sell stocks quickly. After the 87 crash big banks could buy billions of dollars of stocks and bonds because banks are huge and could do this to both protect the market, their customers and make money.
Most people I've met that actually got jobs at top HFTs were quite curious about a lot of topics in school (and still are with extra time they have). I'm surprised your friends are so fixated on HFTs while there are so many interesting and/or fun other things to spend time on when undergrad on campus.
A lot of HFTs have their own training programs anyway for the job specific knowledge, so it is more important to build up the right base math and/or dev background than to hyper fixate on HFTs all of undergrad, even if your end career goal is to make bank.
>Most people I've met that actually got jobs at top HFTs were quite curious about a lot of topics in school (and still are with extra time they have).
yeah and that's the worst part, they take the brightest minds of the generation and have them working on moving money around instead of building fusion rockets
Tbf many of them were pretty jaded/burnt out by trying to do academic research before fully taking the plunge. I'm sure there are smart people drawn by the money right out of the gate, but other fields have also done a really good job of driving people away.
> I'm surprised your friends are so fixated on HFTs while there are so many interesting and/or fun other things to spend time on when undergrad on campus
Many of them were or are interested in other things like compilers, home-labbing; a couple of them game, too. It's just that because we're about to graduate, job offers dominate the conversation, and HFT jobs dominate that conversation.