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Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

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Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#11

Post by naturalgradient »

corporateslave6 wrote: post #9
naturalgradient wrote: post #3

Can anyone comment on how competitive salaries are there actually? Right now, for top tier PhD graduates in machine learning, it's about 300-400k at big tech companies starting out, and ~200k for master's degrees. From what I read and heard, banks are not really willing to pay up competitively for software?

Yeah not really, many HFs will match that 400k, but many will not. I have received a few offers from these quant funds, the offers have been good, but nothing I couldnt get working in tech. My understanding is that the average finance professional makes less than or equal to tech, but the top 1 - 5% of finance easily make 7 figures.

Ah that matches what I have heard. HFT/HF is paying up but overall, as someone who is coming up on making the decision, it's hard to see the upsides of finance.

Losing all visibility/ability to publish/being a first class contributor and not second class dev..

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#12

Post by rch »

naturalgradient wrote: post #3

Can anyone comment on how competitive salaries are there actually? Right now, for top tier PhD graduates in machine learning, it's about 300-400k at big tech companies starting out, and ~200k for master's degrees. From what I read and heard, banks are not really willing to pay up competitively for software?

I've seen claims of $1M base salaries in NYC, and seven figure bonuses are certainly possible (in HFT). $300K+ (incl. bonus) is no problem, but ML is less of a factor than FPGA and C++ experience.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#13

Post by vasilipupkin »

zjaffee wrote: post #10
corporateslave6 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah not really, many HFs will match that 400k, but many will not. I have received a few offers from these quant funds, the offers have been good, but nothing I couldnt get working in tech. My understanding is that the average finance professional makes less than or equal to tech, but the top 1 - 5% of finance easily make 7 figures.

How large do you think that population of people in finance making 6 figures is in raw numbers? When you compare that to the tech industry, there are certainly high level engineers and managers that make 7 figure salaries all things included (especially given the growth in stock price at certain companies).

"How large do you think that population of people in finance making 6 figures is in raw numbers?" you mean 7 figures? if you are a top engineer in finance with many years of experience, you are likely making close to 7 figures.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#14

Post by vostok »

corporateslave6 wrote: post #9
naturalgradient wrote: post #3

Can anyone comment on how competitive salaries are there actually? Right now, for top tier PhD graduates in machine learning, it's about 300-400k at big tech companies starting out, and ~200k for master's degrees. From what I read and heard, banks are not really willing to pay up competitively for software?

Yeah not really, many HFs will match that 400k, but many will not. I have received a few offers from these quant funds, the offers have been good, but nothing I couldnt get working in tech. My understanding is that the average finance professional makes less than or equal to tech, but the top 1 - 5% of finance easily make 7 figures.

> My understanding is that the average finance professional makes less than or equal to tech, but the top 1 - 5% of finance easily make 7 figures.

This is more or less true, but an interesting thing to think about is that the number of people (with technical backgrounds) making 7 figures in financial firms is smaller than the number of people making 7 figures in technology firms. This is probably obvious to you if you work in finance, but I think most outsiders don't realize that.

If you include people with sales backgrounds like investment bankers then the numbers might shift in favor of finance.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#15

Post by ryandrake »

jaymzcampbell wrote: post #5

I wonder if this will see an ability to more easily switch into fintech/banking as a developer working in various other industries. I worked with GS via a mobile agency for a while and really respected the developers and what they were doing from an engineering PoV. I had always viewed that industry as essentially closed unless you got in straight after graduating. Has anyone ever made the switch into an engineering…

+1 for an answer to this question. Fintech seems to me to be as walled off to outsiders as game companies are, only tending to hire amongst their own. The job descriptions seem to require more specialized "arcane wizardry" skills than the normal above-average C++ or mobile developer. If you're a commoner who broke into the biz, I'd be interested in learning your story.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#16

Post by vostok »

rch wrote: post #12
naturalgradient wrote: post #3

Can anyone comment on how competitive salaries are there actually? Right now, for top tier PhD graduates in machine learning, it's about 300-400k at big tech companies starting out, and ~200k for master's degrees. From what I read and heard, banks are not really willing to pay up competitively for software?

I've seen claims of $1M base salaries in NYC, and seven figure bonuses are certainly possible (in HFT). $300K+ (incl. bonus) is no problem, but ML is less of a factor than FPGA and C++ experience.

Perusing the financial statements of publicly traded trading firms might be an interesting experience for anyone who's not familiar with the industry.

1. How many people work at your chosen company? How big is the entire tech heavy trading industry?

2. What is the average total compensation?

3. Which way have revenues been trending? Revenues per employee?

For anyone who's interested in comparing it to the glory days, look at the historical numbers in the GETCO/Knight S-4.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#17

Post by corporateslave6 »

naturalgradient wrote: post #11
corporateslave6 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah not really, many HFs will match that 400k, but many will not. I have received a few offers from these quant funds, the offers have been good, but nothing I couldnt get working in tech. My understanding is that the average finance professional makes less than or equal to tech, but the top 1 - 5% of finance easily make 7 figures.

Ah that matches what I have heard. HFT/HF is paying up but overall, as someone who is coming up on making the decision, it's hard to see the upsides of finance. Losing all visibility/ability to publish/being a first class contributor and not second class dev..

I wouldnt get into HFT, its commoditized. The future of finance is in processing huge volume (internet scale) unstructured data and analyzing it in real time. HFT of website data if you will, right now we are in the infancy

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#19

Post by vostok »

dogruck wrote: post #6

This is a native recruitment piece for Goldman and other banks. It was probably orchestrated between GS and BBG. That said, I think it’s genuine. Computer Scientists who work on Wall Street should not view their role as simply “a person who can write code.” Lastly, this is from October.

Not only is it a native recruitment piece, but it's telling that they didn't talk about total compensation.

Re: Coders who trade: Wall Street designs its staff for the future

#20

Post by southphillyman »

jaymzcampbell wrote: post #5

I wonder if this will see an ability to more easily switch into fintech/banking as a developer working in various other industries. I worked with GS via a mobile agency for a while and really respected the developers and what they were doing from an engineering PoV. I had always viewed that industry as essentially closed unless you got in straight after graduating. Has anyone ever made the switch into an engineering…

There are plenty of CRUD positions on Wall Street. If one wanted to get into a "strats" type role maybe it would be easier to just join as a regular Sr. Engineer. Get paid above avg salary to write web services or whatever, learn domain knowledge in a less stressful manner, and figure out a way to get into the group you really want internally.
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