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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

#21

Post by vasilipupkin »

vostok wrote: post #14
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.

> 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?

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

#22

Post by vostok »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #21
vostok wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I'm not sure how to answer the question. How would you answer the equivalent question about finance? It's not like working in finance guarantees you 7 figures. I know plenty of people on both the engineering side and the trading side who never made more than 2-300k.

If you want specific examples from tech then the Waymo article from a while back is helpful, but that doesn't mean that you need to work at Waymo or Google to get there, although a large portion of those roles are at Google-tier companies.

Your average agency will not be hiring pure developers and paying them 7 figures, although they might to someone who is generating revenue and bringing in enough business to justify it.

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

#23

Post by lordnacho »

vostok wrote: post #19
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.

I would think it's pretty good. I get recruiters calling me all the time, a lot of them are quoting £150-200k total comp. That's for a guy with over a decade's experience in financial coding. By contrast on StackOverflow the salaries that you can see tend to be much lower for the non-finance things.

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

#24

Post by vostok »

lordnacho wrote: post #23
vostok wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would think it's pretty good. I get recruiters calling me all the time, a lot of them are quoting £150-200k total comp. That's for a guy with over a decade's experience in financial coding. By contrast on StackOverflow the salaries that you can see tend to be much lower for the non-finance things.

It's not surprising that it's higher than the average job on stackoverlfow. That's about what I would expect. I'm not saying it's horrible, but it's not exactly higher than top paying tech companies.

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

#25

Post by vasilipupkin »

vostok wrote: post #22
vasilipupkin wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not sure how to answer the question. How would you answer the equivalent question about finance? It's not like working in finance guarantees you 7 figures. I know plenty of people on both the engineering side and the trading side who never made more than 2-300k. If you want specific examples from tech then the Waymo article from a while back is helpful, but that doesn't mean that you need to work at Waymo or Goog…

the op made a claim so I am assuming the op knows how to answer this question. The claim is that many more engineers make 7 figures in tech than in finance. My question, specifically, is, what fraction of engineers in tech make 7 figures, let's say what fraction of engineers with 10 years experience and what are the types of positions at those google tier companies that pay this much. I think this is pretty specific

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

#26

Post by vostok »

vasilipupkin wrote: post #25
vostok wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how to answer the question. How would you answer the equivalent question about finance? It's not like working in finance guarantees you 7 figures. I know plenty of people on both the engineering side and the trading side who never made more than 2-300k. If you want specific examples from tech then the Waymo article from a while back is helpful, but that doesn't mean that you need to work at Waymo or Goog…

the op made a claim so I am assuming the op knows how to answer this question. The claim is that many more engineers make 7 figures in tech than in finance. My question, specifically, is, what fraction of engineers in tech make 7 figures, let's say what fraction of engineers with 10 years experience and what are the types of positions at those google tier companies that pay this much. I think this is pretty specific

My comment was specifically about the "I mean what sort of position do you need to have to get there?" part of your question.

> My question, specifically, is, what fraction of engineers in tech make 7 figures

I doubt that OP meant that they literally have data showing that it's 1-5%. That's a wide enough range that it's meaningless. I suspect the meaning was more "way above average, but reasonably possible".

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

#27

Post by vasilipupkin »

vostok wrote: post #26
vasilipupkin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the op made a claim so I am assuming the op knows how to answer this question. The claim is that many more engineers make 7 figures in tech than in finance. My question, specifically, is, what fraction of engineers in tech make 7 figures, let's say what fraction of engineers with 10 years experience and what are the types of positions at those google tier companies that pay this much. I think this is pretty specific

My comment was specifically about the "I mean what sort of position do you need to have to get there?" part of your question. > My question, specifically, is, what fraction of engineers in tech make 7 figures I doubt that OP meant that they literally have data showing that it's 1-5%. That's a wide enough range that it's meaningless. I suspect the meaning was more "way above average, but reasonably possible".

I appreciate the insights but you are not in any way answering my very specific question

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

#28

Post by dsacco »

rb808 wrote: post #7

> Eighteen are now enrolled in the program, including Korn. GS has 34k employees. Thousands of traders and probably >10k in IT. 18 people isn't really a revolution. Devs still are second class citizens in banks - the highest earning ones switched to become traders and just do some python/R/VBA on the desk. There are a few hedge funds (Millennium, Two Sigma) where devs are nearly treated as well as traders - would be…

> There are a few hedge funds (Millennium, Two Sigma) where devs are nearly treated as well as traders - would be interested to hear of any place else.

Software engineers are treated very well, if not as well as research scientists, at essentially any large or successful quantitative hedge fund. This includes firms like DRW, Optiver, Tower Research, Two Sigma, RenTec, Citadel, etc.

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

#30

Post by meesterdude »

dookahku wrote: post #18

So how does a mid-level software engineer get into trading? I do paper trading on my own for fun but I'd like to make it a career.

Personally, i am working on building a cryptocurrency trading platform, because the API's are easily accessible - but the markets entirely different in behavior. Still, rolling my own implementations of technical indicators has been pretty insightful, and backtesting has shown whats worked and what hasn't in given market conditions.

but i realize you're probably talking about more traditional markets like FOREX

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