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Comment by flunhat | Hacker News Reader

Slight tangent (sort of) - has anyone else noticed that a lot of these high speed trading firms are hiring a lot more FPGA engineers lately? Hudson River Trading and Jane Street just to name a few. I regularly checked their job postings over the last year because I was looking for an internship, so that's why I noticed the change. Any thoughts?

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There is barely any software in the hot path of competitive equity HFTs these days. Even the most finely tuned C++ is probably on the order of single digit micros tick to trade, but the goal is sub-micro.

State of the Art trade system performance from a couple of years ago: https://meanderful.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/trade-system-perf...

Good source. I’m in the industry but not at an HFT, so my comment is more of a well-informed guess.

There's a huge amount of software trading in the 1-10us range, probably more than pure hardware. Fpgas often play a role in these stacks as market data parsing/disseminating and order entry however.

Sorry yeah, I didn’t mean there isn’t a lot of software that qualifies as HFT, but the very quickest seems pretty light on software.

The quickest in terms of tick-to-trade (MD received to trade) are certainly all hardware, but having better connectivity changes the game by a lot. Latency arb trades generally aren't that great, the most competitive in terms of PnL don't depend on (but usually utilize) tick-to-trade style speed.

From a handful of conversations I had with people in HFT, researchers develop models in more conventional languages like java or python. The decision boundaries of these models are then translated into FPGA instructions for speed.

Time to skill up on FPGAs.

Do FPGA engineers at trading firms get paid the same as quants or are they like sysadmins?

Good ones get paid like devs in my experience which, depending on your mental model, is likely somewhere between a sysadmin and a quant. However successful trading firms tend to pay well, especially those who contribute to their bottom line. Good devs are usually not the highest paid, but could well be in the second highest paid tier.

From my understanding the pay night be very good but the quality of life is awful. If you last more than two to three years, that is impressive

It very much depends on the company you're working for. I've always been fairly keen on work/life balance and haven't found it that hard to find finance firms that respect (and even embrace) that way of thinking.

Finance firms have increasingly had to compete with tech firms for tech talent and many have moved to offer similar benefits.

Some do this because they believe it's inherently healthy, others because they feel they have to compete and it's a purely utilitarian matter. Others just offer more money instead. Interestingly, it's not always that much more in the long run.

Is it true that in finance you don't get RSUs but just get the money straight away in bonus?

It’s common to receive an annual bonus in cash, with some percentage deferred for a few years in some form. The form can vary: hedge funds often put the money into their fund(s) and you can withdraw it after a couple of years, publically traded companies tend to offer restricted stock units. The more you earn, that larger the percentage that is deferred too usually. The fraction can be anywhere from 5% to 50%.

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