7 ms·

> Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year. Do you have a source for such claim ? data from h1b salary [1] tells that senior software make 200k base,

by polote 6y ago

> Engineers there routinely make well over $1mm/year. Do you have a source for such claim ? data from h1b salary [1] tells that senior software make 200k base, and here [2] they explain that the average salary is 440k [1] https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=JANE%20STREET&job= https://h1bdata.info/index.php?em=JANE%20STREET&job= [2] https://news.efinancialcareers.com/fr-en/307393/jane-street-pay https://news.efinancialcareers.com/fr-en/307393/jane-street-...

TylerE 6y ago
Wall Street jobs are very very performance bonus driven. Not unusual for bonuses to be 5x or more salary in a good year.
- maest 6y ago
  It's rarely the case that Technology sees those kinds of bonuses; that's most common on the Investment side. And yes, even places like Jane Street separate between Investement and Tech.
  - davidu 6y ago
    The investment side is engineering. If you're talking about IT that makes the printer work, sure.
    - maest 6y ago
      I cannot speak for Jane Street, in particular, but I have spent many years working at a very similar firm, and Investment is not Technology. There are engineers working in Investment, yes, but the risk profiles, the payout profiles and the focus of their work is very different. Investment deals with getting and analysing data, understanding the market and their algos, coming up with trading ideas, handling their PB relationships, doing the actual trading (e.g. portfolio optim, factor hedging, worrying about financing and borrow costs) etc. Technology deals with all things infra and (in most places) ingesting data and making it easily available internally. In particular, I would be surprised if the interns in this article were on the Investment side - a fund would rarley publish anything remotely resembling research. In fact: "Yulan ended up working with both the trading desk that was running this process, as well as the research group, which pointed her at some cleaner cost functions to optimize, as well as encouraging her to try out simulated annealing in addition to the greedy algorithm she started with." The "research group" and the "trading desk" are Investment.
      - davidu 6y ago
        It's too hard to fully explain how wrong this is, so just leaving the comment in case someone else reads it and thinks it might be right. The investors are engineers. Full stop. They write code. The code makes trades. Everything else is noise to support the engineers writing code to make trades.
      - logicslave 6y ago
        You can tell someone worked on the old wallstreet when they jump to explain that engineers are not a part of the core finance business. I've seen this trope a million times, and it used to be true. In 2020, the hedge funds making the most money are the ones treating their technology people like they treat their investment people. They interact, receive similar (though not 2M+) pay, and the programmer often has a part in analyzing the data and building the libraries to push the research forwards.
        maest 6y ago
        You're basing your assumptions on very little information. In particular, my position was with a buy-side fund set up in the last 5-10 years. It was definitely not "old wallstreet".
        logicslave 6y ago
        I worked at a well known hft prop trading firm, and then at an asset manager. The asset manager was staffed by mostly ex two sigma software engineers, a few from tower research. You basically cant even get an interview there unless you already worked with someone working there. A regular engineer there, a few years of experience made around 650k. I know the industry extremely well, and I know your type. I've watched so many buy side firms fall to the wayside because "good tech doesnt help investing, I will hire the humanities degree from princeton instead". Meanwhile, run through the top returning firms in the last decade, they all also happen to be the firms that pay their engineers the most.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      When I worked on Wall Street even the IT guys and the doorman had their personal accounts invested at the firm which was a significant perk given that the firm was closed to new customers.
  - fractionalhare 6y ago
    In HFT (and often stat arb) the front and back office dichotomy doesn't apply as much. Basically anyone doing nontrivial engineering work has an opportunity to share in the profits of the firm at Jane Street. They don't need to be a quantitative researcher or trader.
    - twic 6y ago
      Are you stating this from specific knowledge of Jane Street? The division in trading firms, IMLE, is between front office (making and executing trading decisions) and back office (book-keeping, accounting, risk control, compliance, administration, etc). Both sides have technical and financial people. But only front office - both technical and financial - is likely to get wild bonuses from doing good trades. Back office bonuses are more about doing the job well. If Jane Street is sharing some of the trading profit with back office staff, good on them.
      - fractionalhare 6y ago
        I am, yes. I'm more familiar with their researchers, but I know (or have spoken to) people across different functions there. They have security engineers who earn over $1M/year (for one example of something which isn't usually "front office"). For Jane Street it's about impact: if you substantially improve something at the firm, you share in the spoils. That doesn't mean literally everyone who works there is rich, and the quants will do better relatively speaking. But in the sense of engineers being second class citizens: no, I wouldn't say that's the case at all.
        whatok 6y ago
        Most buyside joints don't have anything resembling a security engineer. If they actually need one, it's closer to a front office role than not. You also don't want some random jabroni in charge of something mission critical like that.
    - IshKebab 6y ago
      That isn't the case at the few London HFT companies I've applied to. They had a clear division between quants and everyone else.
- decafninja 6y ago
  "Wall Street" is such a broad term. Places like Jane Street and their like obviously pay technology employees very well. But they represent an absolutely tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the pie. The vast majority of SWEs employed in Wall Street work for various firms big and small that you'd be fairly lucky to break 200k-250k TC decades into your career. No, 200k isn't a small income, but odds are you could match that number at any number of middle tier tech companies, earlier in your career, while enjoying a much better work environment and various other perks. And of course upper-middle to top tier tech companies (culminating in FAANG) can offer multiples of that amount - and again, probably with much better working environments and other perks. Your odds of making it into FAANG or similar caliber tech company are probably much higher than your odds of making it into a Jane Street caliber financial firm.
european321 6y ago
In finance the money is in the bonuses, which on a good year can easily exceed the base.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
davidu 6y ago
I know people who work there. That comp data excludes bonuses -- and most importantly -- that employees are able to invest in the proprietary funds themselves, which generate insane returns.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Another thing the HN orthodoxy rejects is that professional investing and trading can make money above monkey-dart levels, despite the abundance of evidence that it does.
  - runamok 6y ago
    It's not just HN. It's generally accepted that over 20 year spans almost no actively managed fund beats index funds. Example PDF showing this: https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2016.pdf https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2...
  - closeparen 6y ago
    This assertion is about funds that are open to the general public. No one doubts e.g. Renaissance’s Medallion fund.
    - jeffbee 6y ago
      OK but it's still just false. Go read this obituary of Richard Gilder who recently passed away. He founded a firm that gave ordinary retail investors consistently high returns for decades. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/about/richard-gilder https://www.gilderlehrman.org/about/richard-gilder
      - graeme 6y ago
        The super investors of graham doddsville is also instructive reading on this point.
      - Aunche 6y ago
        I'm sure that some hedge funds know what they're doing, but it's impossible to tell which are the good ones. Investing in a hedge fund still is functionally equivalent to asking a monkey to throw darts at stocks.
ilarum 6y ago
I have read in forums that companies under-report salaries to the H1B database. They only need to report some number above the prevailing labor market and don't need to report the actual salary employees are paid over this.
- kyawzazaw 6y ago
  I think it’s the base salary that is being reported.
toiletfuneral 6y ago
Curious, what actual value do they contribute to society?
tossingcomp 6y ago
Anecdata, but I totally believe this. FWIW, I get inbound recruiting from FAANG as well as some prestige finance companies. I'm a generalist with no degree but ~8 years of experience. I make ~$300k/year in NY. Given grapevine comp chatter, I'm sure that pre-Covid I was leaving money on the table versus what I'd earn if I prepped and left for FB or Google. I'm super happy with my employment situation though, so I've just been enjoying life. Partially to leave the door open and partially just to see how folks reacted, rather than giving a blanket "no thanks" to recruiters I got into the habit of replying to fancy recruiters with "I absolutely love my job and am not looking to leave. <all the things I love about it>, I wouldn't consider leaving for less than $600k/year unless a new role offered <one of several non-monetary things I really care about>." It may seem silly, but with luck, good timing and not using current comp as an anchor I've doubled up previously. My philosophy is that it never hurts to ask for more than you think you deserve, especially if you don't act like you're entitled to it. This was mostly met with "glad it's going so well there" and I can only assume snorts of derision. Meanwhile, the dude from fancy "headhunting" firm comes back with: "Excellent! With your profile, I can get you at least $700k with one of my buy-side client firms." Feel free to decide for yourself how much weight to give the anecdote. Maybe that # has a real basis for someone with (at the time) 5-6 years of experience. Maybe he assumed I must be making something near it already. Maybe he was saying anything to get his foot in the door. Or, maybe he decided I was jerking his chain and decided to have some fun of his own. He certainly made an impression.
- wuschel 6y ago
  I am impressed. Would you perhaps consider a chat/call? Would really love to hear what you are working on, and what skills you developed. My contact details are in my profile. Cheers!
- cvhashim 6y ago
  As a generalist, why don’t you get into software consulting and just set/bill your own rates. You can bill at 400/hr and earn north of 700k.

by polote 6y ago

TylerE 6y ago

Wall Street jobs are very very performance bonus driven. Not unusual for bonuses to be 5x or more salary in a good year.

maest 6y ago
It's rarely the case that Technology sees those kinds of bonuses; that's most common on the Investment side. And yes, even places like Jane Street separate between Investement and Tech.
- davidu 6y ago
  The investment side is engineering. If you're talking about IT that makes the printer work, sure.
  - maest 6y ago
    I cannot speak for Jane Street, in particular, but I have spent many years working at a very similar firm, and Investment is not Technology. There are engineers working in Investment, yes, but the risk profiles, the payout profiles and the focus of their work is very different. Investment deals with getting and analysing data, understanding the market and their algos, coming up with trading ideas, handling their PB relationships, doing the actual trading (e.g. portfolio optim, factor hedging, worrying about financing and borrow costs) etc. Technology deals with all things infra and (in most places) ingesting data and making it easily available internally. In particular, I would be surprised if the interns in this article were on the Investment side - a fund would rarley publish anything remotely resembling research. In fact: "Yulan ended up working with both the trading desk that was running this process, as well as the research group, which pointed her at some cleaner cost functions to optimize, as well as encouraging her to try out simulated annealing in addition to the greedy algorithm she started with." The "research group" and the "trading desk" are Investment.
    - davidu 6y ago
      It's too hard to fully explain how wrong this is, so just leaving the comment in case someone else reads it and thinks it might be right. The investors are engineers. Full stop. They write code. The code makes trades. Everything else is noise to support the engineers writing code to make trades.
    - logicslave 6y ago
      You can tell someone worked on the old wallstreet when they jump to explain that engineers are not a part of the core finance business. I've seen this trope a million times, and it used to be true. In 2020, the hedge funds making the most money are the ones treating their technology people like they treat their investment people. They interact, receive similar (though not 2M+) pay, and the programmer often has a part in analyzing the data and building the libraries to push the research forwards.
      - maest 6y ago
        You're basing your assumptions on very little information. In particular, my position was with a buy-side fund set up in the last 5-10 years. It was definitely not "old wallstreet".
        logicslave 6y ago
        I worked at a well known hft prop trading firm, and then at an asset manager. The asset manager was staffed by mostly ex two sigma software engineers, a few from tower research. You basically cant even get an interview there unless you already worked with someone working there. A regular engineer there, a few years of experience made around 650k. I know the industry extremely well, and I know your type. I've watched so many buy side firms fall to the wayside because "good tech doesnt help investing, I will hire the humanities degree from princeton instead". Meanwhile, run through the top returning firms in the last decade, they all also happen to be the firms that pay their engineers the most.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    When I worked on Wall Street even the IT guys and the doorman had their personal accounts invested at the firm which was a significant perk given that the firm was closed to new customers.
- fractionalhare 6y ago
  In HFT (and often stat arb) the front and back office dichotomy doesn't apply as much. Basically anyone doing nontrivial engineering work has an opportunity to share in the profits of the firm at Jane Street. They don't need to be a quantitative researcher or trader.
  - twic 6y ago
    Are you stating this from specific knowledge of Jane Street? The division in trading firms, IMLE, is between front office (making and executing trading decisions) and back office (book-keeping, accounting, risk control, compliance, administration, etc). Both sides have technical and financial people. But only front office - both technical and financial - is likely to get wild bonuses from doing good trades. Back office bonuses are more about doing the job well. If Jane Street is sharing some of the trading profit with back office staff, good on them.
    - fractionalhare 6y ago
      I am, yes. I'm more familiar with their researchers, but I know (or have spoken to) people across different functions there. They have security engineers who earn over $1M/year (for one example of something which isn't usually "front office"). For Jane Street it's about impact: if you substantially improve something at the firm, you share in the spoils. That doesn't mean literally everyone who works there is rich, and the quants will do better relatively speaking. But in the sense of engineers being second class citizens: no, I wouldn't say that's the case at all.
      - whatok 6y ago
        Most buyside joints don't have anything resembling a security engineer. If they actually need one, it's closer to a front office role than not. You also don't want some random jabroni in charge of something mission critical like that.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    That isn't the case at the few London HFT companies I've applied to. They had a clear division between quants and everyone else.
decafninja 6y ago
"Wall Street" is such a broad term. Places like Jane Street and their like obviously pay technology employees very well. But they represent an absolutely tiny, tiny, tiny slice of the pie. The vast majority of SWEs employed in Wall Street work for various firms big and small that you'd be fairly lucky to break 200k-250k TC decades into your career. No, 200k isn't a small income, but odds are you could match that number at any number of middle tier tech companies, earlier in your career, while enjoying a much better work environment and various other perks. And of course upper-middle to top tier tech companies (culminating in FAANG) can offer multiples of that amount - and again, probably with much better working environments and other perks. Your odds of making it into FAANG or similar caliber tech company are probably much higher than your odds of making it into a Jane Street caliber financial firm.

european321 6y ago

In finance the money is in the bonuses, which on a good year can easily exceed the base.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

davidu 6y ago

I know people who work there. That comp data excludes bonuses -- and most importantly -- that employees are able to invest in the proprietary funds themselves, which generate insane returns.

jeffbee 6y ago
Another thing the HN orthodoxy rejects is that professional investing and trading can make money above monkey-dart levels, despite the abundance of evidence that it does.
- runamok 6y ago
  It's not just HN. It's generally accepted that over 20 year spans almost no actively managed fund beats index funds. Example PDF showing this: https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2016.pdf https://us.spindices.com/documents/spiva/spiva-us-year-end-2...
- closeparen 6y ago
  This assertion is about funds that are open to the general public. No one doubts e.g. Renaissance’s Medallion fund.
  - jeffbee 6y ago
    OK but it's still just false. Go read this obituary of Richard Gilder who recently passed away. He founded a firm that gave ordinary retail investors consistently high returns for decades. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/about/richard-gilder https://www.gilderlehrman.org/about/richard-gilder
    - graeme 6y ago
      The super investors of graham doddsville is also instructive reading on this point.
    - Aunche 6y ago
      I'm sure that some hedge funds know what they're doing, but it's impossible to tell which are the good ones. Investing in a hedge fund still is functionally equivalent to asking a monkey to throw darts at stocks.

ilarum 6y ago

I have read in forums that companies under-report salaries to the H1B database. They only need to report some number above the prevailing labor market and don't need to report the actual salary employees are paid over this.

kyawzazaw 6y ago
I think it’s the base salary that is being reported.

toiletfuneral 6y ago

Curious, what actual value do they contribute to society?

tossingcomp 6y ago

Anecdata, but I totally believe this. FWIW, I get inbound recruiting from FAANG as well as some prestige finance companies. I'm a generalist with no degree but ~8 years of experience. I make ~$300k/year in NY. Given grapevine comp chatter, I'm sure that pre-Covid I was leaving money on the table versus what I'd earn if I prepped and left for FB or Google. I'm super happy with my employment situation though, so I've just been enjoying life. Partially to leave the door open and partially just to see how folks reacted, rather than giving a blanket "no thanks" to recruiters I got into the habit of replying to fancy recruiters with "I absolutely love my job and am not looking to leave. <all the things I love about it>, I wouldn't consider leaving for less than $600k/year unless a new role offered <one of several non-monetary things I really care about>." It may seem silly, but with luck, good timing and not using current comp as an anchor I've doubled up previously. My philosophy is that it never hurts to ask for more than you think you deserve, especially if you don't act like you're entitled to it. This was mostly met with "glad it's going so well there" and I can only assume snorts of derision. Meanwhile, the dude from fancy "headhunting" firm comes back with: "Excellent! With your profile, I can get you at least $700k with one of my buy-side client firms." Feel free to decide for yourself how much weight to give the anecdote. Maybe that # has a real basis for someone with (at the time) 5-6 years of experience. Maybe he assumed I must be making something near it already. Maybe he was saying anything to get his foot in the door. Or, maybe he decided I was jerking his chain and decided to have some fun of his own. He certainly made an impression.

wuschel 6y ago
I am impressed. Would you perhaps consider a chat/call? Would really love to hear what you are working on, and what skills you developed. My contact details are in my profile. Cheers!
cvhashim 6y ago
As a generalist, why don’t you get into software consulting and just set/bill your own rates. You can bill at 400/hr and earn north of 700k.