Comment by throwawaymath | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaymath | Hacker News Reader

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Important note: the person you're responding to is talking about the buy side. It's not uncommon to find a work life balance resembling tech in the buy side. For example, it's a popular meme that Citadel has a horrible work life balance. But I know two devs there who earn in excess of $500k each year and only work about 45 - 50 hour weeks.

I also know another new grad recently hired at Hudson River Trading, and another new grad recently hired at Jump Trading. Both are earning over $400k per year, but they work 45 hour weeks. And since RenTech has been mentioned in this thread: the people I know there have wonderful work life balance.

I have found that most popular conceptions of bad work life balance in finance apply to banking and sell side, not to the buy side. Working as a developer at a bank usually sucks, both financially and culturally, in my experience. Not always, but commonly. Working at a hedge fund can be very nice both financially and culturally.

What backgrounds do the new grades that work at Hudson River Trading, Jump Trading and so on have? BS, MS, PhDs? What schools are they coming from, etc? What fields did they study?

Usually top ~20 schools with a bachelors in math or CS. Sometimes Masters or PhD, but those end up working directly in research. The new grads I know aren't actually quants.

What are those new grads doing? Trading, development, quant?

They work in what's usually termed the "front office." Quant, sure, but also research development (read: trading algorithm implementation).

Cool. That's adjacent to what i do, but i have more experience and make less money!

As an aside, i love that the names for things vary so much across the industry. Where i am, "research development" means things like building historical market data archives that other people can use to backtest algorithms etc.

It's not a meme about citidael I've never heard anyone praise them. They churn and burn. Plus what are they even doing? Turning a dollar into a dollar five. That's really making people's lives better.

It may seem counterintuitive, but turning a dollar into a dollar five actually makes people’s lives better. Many of citadel’s investors are teacher, firemen pension funds. Even beyond that, Citadel gets paid for essentially contributing to liquidity in financial markets. And, liquid and well functioning financial markets are critical to a well functioning society.

I don’t think it’s much different at Facebook, Amazon, or Google

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