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Comment by arikr | Hacker News Reader

Quantitative trading firms like Two Sigma, Jane Street

+1 quant trading firms with a focus on functional programming languages

In terms of a stable job with reasonable hours out of undergrad, engineers at HFT/prop market making firms make an absurd amount of money. I know people only 2 years out of undergrad who are raking in nearly $400k annually with 6 weeks of paid vacation and typically work less than 50-60 hours weekly.

Landing one of these gigs makes FANG look like a McDonald’s open interview. You need to be an expert in terms of mathematical theory without sacrificing the ability to be pragmatic in real world situations (ie a sociopath…)

That amount of vacation is good, but is 10 hours a day really considered reasonable"?

for $400k? yes definitely.

I'm not asking whether it's worth it for the money. OP said "for a job with reasonable hours, hft pays a lot". That suggests they think 10 hours a day is reasonable, independently of the salary.

I don't think it suggests anything other than 10 hours being reasonable when you're paid $400k. Why would it be a separate thing? Everything hinges on the money. It's not reasonable to work 10 hours a day for $40k, but that's very much not the case for $400k.

I also worked at a top quant firm, and as others have mentioned no one is a sociopath lol, but they are really smart.

Also quant interviews are harder than FAANG, but not because they require math. Maybe that is the case for QR or Trading interviews, but I've interviewed for SWE positions at multiple places (Citadel, JS, HRT, Optiver, IMC, etc.) and none of them asked me complex math theory.

SWE interviews (at some places) ime are harder since they focus not only on algorithmic thinking, but deep knowledge on how your program and language work. Questions like: "How does malloc work at a OS level", "implement this STD object/data structure", "how does python garbage collection work", and OS questions are typical things to be asked.

If the interviews are algorthmic focused, the questions are usually harder than FAANG leetcode and require a clean and correct solution with minimal hand holding.

I work at HRT and have met many geniuses and zero sociopaths.

What does HRT stand for?

Hudson River Trading, HFT has a lot more status games around intelligence. An interviewer from HRT was playing those kind of games w/ me which really turned me off.

Another HFT firm, Hudson River Trading - https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/

I also work at HRT and met zero geniuses and zero sociopaths. (Clearly you're at a better firm than me...)

I have however met a lot of very smart people.

ditto / read max dama

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