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Comment by retube | Hacker News Reader

You've probably got the technical skills to work for one of these firms - but have you thought about in what capacity? When you interview you'll need to be pretty clued-up about what you want to do. Trading? Quant? Research? Strategy? And in what asset class(es)? To be a successful applicant you'll need to demonstrate a genuine enthusiasm and knowledge for trading/markets/pricing/modelling/risk (delete as appropriate).

Getting in to these places is not easy, and working for them is harder. You can do well, but those that do spectacularly well really make a lot of money for their employer. You don't get paid a million bucks just for putting in your 60 hours a week. You need to make 10 or 20 times this for your employee - and it's not easy. In fact it's very, very hard.

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To be honest, I don't think I have the right background to do any of the things you mentioned. I have a math degree, but it's just undergrad and I have barely used it for the past decade. However, both Jane Street and Two Sigma (moreso) advertise a number of purely development related positions. This is the sort of thing I think I'd be applying for.

Sadly, this is probably classified as "IT work", as derided by Wilmott.com forum users. I don't really care, it's the same sort of thing I do now. I just wonder if I could get paid more doing it for a prop firm vs. an "internet" company. I'd love to learn more and move into another role, but I would have to start with what I know.

yeah you'll probably get paid better as a developer for hedge fund or bank than for an internet firm. But make sure you know what kind of developer position you'll be signing up for. Front Office is where you want to be, as you'll work closely with the "business" and it's generally a lot more exciting - plus you'll get to learn a lot about the markets. Typically this could involve building automated or algorithmic trading platforms (e.g HFT). Back Office could involve a lot of drudgerly and generally thankless toil - e.g accounting or settlements systems.

P.S Fuck what Wilmott.com users say. Needless to say, there are a lot of wankers and over-sized egos on trading desks.

It seems reasonable that the people optimizing code and writing the most efficient infrastructure are not the same folks who actually write trading algorithms. Now, supposedly a big part of trading firm's success is that its algorithms are faster than the competition's. So are the low-level infrastructure people paid as well as the algorithm folks?

No is the basic answer. Low-level optimization while a valuable skill is more of a commodity, algorithm development tends to require a combination of skills in maths, finance, programming and creativity which is a much rarer combination.

Saying that people who are good at low-level optimizations are still pretty well paid.

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