I liked this article because the roll of the programmer on wall street has been going down recently from my perspective. Programmers used to work along side quants and were well respected. This was generally because practicing quants didn't used to be able to program. This was especially true in the 80s and 90's where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happ…
Additionally, financial institutions are getting geared up for major participation in the cryptocurrency markets. Will be interesting to see how that changes the landscape.
Are there any automated trading firms that are specifically focused on exploiting the unintended combined behavior of multiple systems operating in an environment where they modify both their own and each others environment (the stock market being that environment)? While it might be tractable for an organization to construct their system such that it can project its own consequences to its own sphere of interest, once you mix in other systems operating in the same area all bets are off. And once you have the majority of trades being performed by automated or rules-based systems, you ought to detect their parameters through assuming reasonable things about those systems (processors which are limited to a certain number of operations, bounding the latency on their response to change, limitations on the complexity of the systems or rules being used due to needing to be comprehensible to human analysis in its source form, etc) and looking for predictable patterns created primarily by the interactions between those automated systems. Everything I have read about automated trading systems (which of course is always very light on details due to everything being extremely valuable and proprietary) seems to indicate that most automated systems are designed as if they are operating in an environment where the other traders are primarily humans. If anyone has come across indication that they are treating the movements of the market as the output of deterministic software systems rather than 'natural' trading, I'd be appreciative of a link!
A few questions, if you don't mind answering: > 400-450k Where is that in the pay distribution? Near median? Realistically, where, comp-wise, would the average SWE plateau? How many hours are you guys putting in a week? What was the interview like? Did they go deep into stats/stochastic-calc/derivates-pricing/etc ? --- I'm currently in tech, making near the low end of your range. Getting promoted to the next pay scal…
What does it take to make 7 figures at your tech company ?
I liked this article because the roll of the programmer on wall street has been going down recently from my perspective. Programmers used to work along side quants and were well respected. This was generally because practicing quants didn't used to be able to program. This was especially true in the 80s and 90's where programmers and quants where almost valued identically as one required the other to make things happ…
Has offshoring ever been a significant factor in this arena? Given the profoundly proprietary nature of the systems being built, I would think that unlikely. Offshoring development is a good way to find your custom software reskinned and sold to a competitor without much legal recourse.
Also, is 'mainstream' programming that common of a need? I had read (here on a HN comment thread) awhile ago that many organizations use commercial languages that simply aren't available outside of the financial services sector (I forget the name, it was 1 or 2 letters... KQ or something like that, an array programming language whose code looks like APL). I wondered how people broke into such a market. It's always seemed like an environment with interesting challenges which would have pretty objective goals and practices out of need.
> 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 yo…
are you sure? how likely is it that an engineer in a technology firm makes 7 figures? I mean what sort of position do you need to have to get there?
If literally an engineer, not an executive that used to be an engineer or a famous engineer, this is accomplished by winning the stock options lottery.
It seems plausible to me at least that there are more ordinary engineers that have won the stock options lottery across all of tech than the total that are earning equivalent amounts in finance.
I'm in the range of 3-5 years out of undergrad, working at a quant firm. My total gross comp for this year will be about 400-450k, majority of that is bonus. By quant firm I mean either a proprietary trading firm (no outside investors) or a hedge fund (takes outside money), but not a bank. I have a CS background but have self-studied in stats, and received mentorship from people with strong math backgrounds. Main adv…
> compensation paid purely in cash, no stock options/RSUs Hands down my favorite part of working in finance. Better salary, no bullshit.
Regardless of what industry you are in, the closer you are to money, the more honestly you will be paid. This is why in many companies some of the best paid people (sometimes more than executives) are in sales. It is quite difficult to tell an employee that you can only manage a small raise if they can say "I brought in $15 million in business this year." If they have no discernible way to determine what they have earned for the company, they can be had for a song.
are you sure? how likely is it that an engineer in a technology firm makes 7 figures? I mean what sort of position do you need to have to get there?
If literally an engineer, not an executive that used to be an engineer or a famous engineer, this is accomplished by winning the stock options lottery. It seems plausible to me at least that there are more ordinary engineers that have won the stock options lottery across all of tech than the total that are earning equivalent amounts in finance.
Well, there are more engineers working in tech than in finance. The relevant question is the odds of a particular engineer winning the options lottery than 7 figures in finance
I'm in the range of 3-5 years out of undergrad, working at a quant firm. My total gross comp for this year will be about 400-450k, majority of that is bonus. By quant firm I mean either a proprietary trading firm (no outside investors) or a hedge fund (takes outside money), but not a bank. I have a CS background but have self-studied in stats, and received mentorship from people with strong math backgrounds. Main adv…
I wish we had more salary threads for quants. I started 4 years ago at a quant shop fresh out of college and expect to make around 250k.
quant at a quant shop, first year made 200-250; expect to be at least 50% higher this year.