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Comment by b20000 | Hacker News Reader

b20000

what is your job title/level and what do you work on?

My numbers are moderately higher than that ($1M/y, no stock appreciation given it’s all cash).

I am an infra SWE with a decade of experience (34 years old), the last few years focused on distributed systems (think Kafka, Kubernetes, etc).

I have mostly an individual contributor role but I also work as tech lead for a few projects, planning and splitting the work for more junior engineers, and being ultimately responsible for the technical choices of the team.

I would define myself as absolutely average, I am not a brilliant developer and most times I find it hard to dig into a codebase and understand it, or entirely follow technical conversations with my peers. I have no “popular” work in the public to my name, if you googled me nothing substantial would show up, just a few sparse messages in open source mailing lists.

I am at a hedge fund. My role at FAANG would be paid around ~$600k/y (had actual offers at hand in that range).

what are the main reasons to work at a hedge fund vs FAANG?

If you are a SWE, I’d say higher compensation is pretty much the only factor.

I fundamentally don’t like working at all and despise the idea of having to rent my time to a boss in a futile rat race, so I might as well maximize the money if I have to do it, so I can retire early.

I am on track to quit the corporate world as soon I reach $5M liquid net worth, which should hopefully be < 5 years away. After that, I’ll quit without even thinking twice.

makes sense… how did you transition to the hedge fund world from the normal tech world and were you at a FAANG when you made the transition?

I wasn’t at a FAANG, just some random tech company in the Silicon Valley. I mostly just replied to some LinkedIn messages I had in the inbox from recruiters who reached out several months prior, and one of them was a head hunter that had contacts with the hedge fund and things picked up from there. Recruiters are annoying but they can be very useful to speed up the process, when you need it :-)

What sort of IT stuff does the hedge fund do?

Everything that most tech companies do? In my case is systems that move and massage a few PBs of data.

Do hedge funds have need for distributed Java engineers? I'm mid level, not senior, under 30, and work at a bank.

As far as interview, is it leetcode plus some math brainteaser type stuff?

That profile is certainly valuable, with the caveat that my current employer just hires for C++ roles, everything is standardized on C++.

Interview is standard programming, no math, these are infra SWE positions, not quant.

So even infra are getting paid that much? For a mid-level with about 5-6 years exp?

If you are technically excellent I’m sure you can get that even as a mid level, yes. I have 10y of experience and work also as tech lead, so a bit more scope than what you are mentioning.

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