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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

Fair enough, I was thinking about companies like Jane Street, paying starting wages of about $200,000/year for engineers [1], and I've seen a few other trading places offering similar wages. When I was at Apple, my base pay was $175,000 when I left, with about $60,000/year of stock. I've never worked for Microsoft but I assume that the pay is comparable to Apple

Entirely possible that the quantity of trading jobs available isn't nearly as high as something like MS though.

[1] https://www.janestreet.com/join-jane-street/position/4274288...

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The total number of PropTrading engineers in the US is most definitely in the low to mid thousands at most. Most PropTrading firms are tiny from a headcount perspective

For example, Citadel has around 600-700 engineers globally and Jane Street only has around 400-500 globally. Both of these firms are actual behemoths headcount wise, and most other trading firms tend to be way smaller (total headcount in the high double digits or low 100s if lucky).

Meanwhile, Microsoft alone has around 70-75,000 engineers. PropTrading gets a lot of mindshare among TC chasers but is a very small industry.

Also, salaries are definetly comparable when factoring in hours worked, exit opportunities (PM/SE/EM/Entrepreneurship while working in Trading you deal with forced garden leave/potential litigation when job switching within Trading), and even the base salary itself. I remember IMC was offering around 100k base in Chicago in the early/mid-2010s when you could earn 90k-110k base at Groupon or JPMC as a SWE while working 30-40 hour weeks.

FWIW I switched from FAANG to trading last year and got a pretty big comp increase. I was entertaining an offer from another FAANG at the same time and it was still nothing compared to my offers in trading.

Wanna share some ballpark numbers? It'll bolster your statement a bit and grounds the claim from others with similar experiences

From my understanding it doubles.

Won't give my current salary because this isn't anonymous, but my 2021 TC was ~150. Another FAANG offered ~200, and trading firms all offered numbers way higher.

TC should have been over 200 w/ stock unless you're straight out of college.

I graduated in 2020, so not far off!

That makes sense! I was giving early career ranges in Chicago in the mid-2010s (without factoring in bonus). NYC PropTrading salaries are (unsurprisingly) higher.

That said, mid-career (5-7 YoE) tech in the Bay Area at least reaches around $170-250k base with an additional $100-400k in stock+bonus over the 4 year vest.

Factoring in hours worked it seemed more competitive than around $200-300k TC for SWEs at the larger PropTrading firms in Chicago at least.

Post 2008, tech companies on the west coast easily beat out financial firms in NYC/Chicago on pay to quality of life ratio, and especially on pay per hour measures.

And as you said, the number of high paying jobs (in the multiple hundred thousand dollar range) in finance is much less than the number of high paying jobs in tech. It makes sense given the heavily subpar performance of financial companies relative to tech companies in the last 15 years.

> Entirely possible that the quantity of trading jobs available isn't nearly as high as something like MS though.

Yes, exactly. Other companies like Jane Street definitely exist in the finance space and pay really well but collectively hire far fewer engineers than FAANG + FAANG-like companies do. The thing I like about them though is that most of the time their comp is all cash (salary + bonus) so you don't have to wait around for anything to vest before you can move on, if you so desire.

Yeah, that's what people tell me, though the Jane Street interview is pretty tough; I've interviewed with them three times, and also been declined three times...so maybe I'm disproving my own point here.

How were the interviews like?

I mean, they were honestly fairly typical interviews, just a few pretty tough CS problems.

In one I remember one problem asked me to implement a hashmap, which wasn’t too hard, and then the second one had to do with some sort of latency prediction thing, where cleanups had to be done after certain numbers of milliseconds. I am afraid I cannot remember the details, but I remember that the second problem was quite difficult.

I suspect I could do much better now (or at least I hope I would), but I have not interviewed for them in like five years.

Qualified to work for Microsoft and qualified to work for Jane Street are entirely different tiers.

At its height, FAANG companies are dishing out > $500k total compensation to engineers.

You would have to be quant analysts themselves to beat that number.

When was its height? Even with stock packages at Apple I was getting closer to $250-$300k/year total comp. This would have been September 2018 until March 2021...

Height was probably something like mid-2021 to early 2022. But note that Apple (broadly, handwaving, obviously subject to stock price fluctuations, offer negotiation, time-in-role, etc.) pays their software engineers less than the other FAANGs. Substantially less than a few of them.

I don't know, I worked at a trading desk of a major bank. All the smartest PhD quant analysts worked from some Siberian village for like $20k/year. Those who really got the dough were the traders in NYC.

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