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?
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 advantages of quant shops (doesn't apply to banks) over working at Google/FB/Netflix etc:
- small company size, startup style working environment, but big corp pay (or more)
- more varied/interesting work, e.g. mix of distributed data processing, high performance numerics, or performance optimization in latency sensitive code
- compensation paid purely in cash, no stock options/RSUs
Hands down my favorite part of working in finance. Better salary, no bullshit.
> 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 scale (Staff SWE) is a lot more difficult. I'd seriously consider jumping to fintech if 400-450 was below median.
I started 4 years ago at a quant shop fresh out of college and expect to make around 250k.
What kinds of skills do you need to get into this area?
The offers are about the same at about 200-250k depending on bonus and stock performance -- the big tech company upped their stock grant to meet the expected bonus at the trading company. It's not obvious to me which one will be more in a few years, and it seems like hours in tech are better. Can anyone weigh in?
Doesn't mean it's a bad place to work. I have a ton of respect for the business they've built. Their discipline on costs is saving their asses in historically slow market conditions while many competitors are merging or shutting down.
Another factor you may wanna consider is the opportunity cost -- how hard would it be for you to work at GOOG/FB if the trading firm job doesn't work out? And vice versa?
Most engineers here are paid a small fraction of the numbers you cite, even though we are decidedly a first-world country. I guess good ML people will probably get over 100k here, but I haven't heard of anyone near 200k. Any thoughts as to what causes the massive difference?
So the biggest price difference is in the rents, or the housing prices. I would probably increase my savings by a factor of five or more if I had a salary like the ones cited in this thread :)
Obviously it's supply and demand, I just wonder which side of the equation is skewed and why.
You could probably attribute a 14% difference through the "employer tax" which the US doesn't have (which is taken out of your paycheck before the gross salary number is cited), and arguably another 4% due to mandatory retirement savings. But it doesn't make up for it when the difference is 50%-75%.
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.
I'm head of a small team running high frequency strategies. I control parameters/portfolio/risk, design/fit predictive models, code C++ for simulation and live trading, and spec out designs for our FPGA developers. I make around 200 base with average bonus in the high 6 figures, good years over a million. At firms with uncapped contractural payouts, bonuses can be far higher for very profitable traders.
But if you come into the industry expecting that, prepare for disappointment. The markets are super efficient so it's hard to make profits. A lot of good ideas are done to death already. You might be stuck on a bad team or not get the opportunity to advance. Making mid 6 figures all-in on a consistently profitable team at a profitable diversified firm is a very good outcome. Modal outcome is making low 6 figures for a couple years and being pushed out.
Also while some enlightened firms realize that infrastructure is a competitive edge and pay big bonuses to engineers, there are many where they're second-class citizens. Only take front-office roles at such firms, not just because of the money, but because you won't be respected. IMO they should be avoided entirely because they'll eventually fall behind and lose.
Losing all visibility/ability to publish/being a first class contributor and not second class dev..
But, I agree, finding alpha through alternative means at internet scale has been around for at least a decade, but things are getting more interesting now.
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.
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.
> 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".
However, I bet most principal engineers and up who have been here 3+ years are hitting that lately with how good our stock is doing and that amazon pays higher ups mostly in RSU's.
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.