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Fun fact: Jane Street, Citadel and other HFT firms pay exorbitantly. You can see the base salary ($200-300k) posted public here: https://www.janestreet.com/join

• kennend3 4y ago
  Have family working there. You can get past 300K fairly easily once you factor in signing bonus, annual bonus, and "extras". They pay VERY VERY well indeed.
  • Zaheer 4y ago
    Yup, that figure I posted was just base but we often see folks getting multiples of that through bonuses.
• paxys 4y ago
  They do pay extremely well, but are also very selective. The kind of talent they are looking for can earn similar salaries at large tech companies like Google ($400K-500K TC is pretty common at staff+ levels).
  • kennend3 4y ago
    One difference is Google, etc are all doing massive layoffs and i doubt JS, Citadel, etc will do this.
    • nequo 4y ago
      Note though that Citadel is reputed to have a turnover rate of 100% per year. Their layoffs take care of themselves.
      • kennend3 4y ago
        This! My personal background is a "well known hedge fund" and the turnover there was rather high. Many quit because it wasn't "a good fit".
      • hermitdev 4y ago
        I spent 9 years there, left a decade ago. Turnover is high, but this is a gross exaggeration. It is stressful, and not everyone can hack it. I was there during and after the '05 layoff when roughly 2/3s of IT was cut. That's still the worst I've heard of from what I hear from friends that are still there. Ken G definitely does the "Good to Great" getting the right people on the bus thing, which typically means the bottom 5-10% are cut, but even that was slowing before I left.
        • nequo 4y ago
          Thanks for correcting me. Did you get a sense of whether engineers had a higher or lower turnover rate than traders?
          • tomjerry777 4y ago
            The turnover for engineers tends to be lower than for traders at citadel and at a lot of quant firms. Additionally, the turnover for citadel is not evenly distributed across teams. Certain teams and orgs have a lot more turnover than others. Some teams are made up of people with <=2 YOE at company while others are made up of people with >=15 YOE at company.
    • radlad 4y ago
      Really? Isn't FinTech getting hit harder than just about any other industry right now?
      • kennend3 4y ago
        First, i dont consider Citadel, JS, etc "fintech" because they are not in the same line of work. " Fintech, a portmanteau of "financial technology", refers to firms using new technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services. " This is NOT what people like CIT, JS, etc. do. So maybe FinTech is being hit very hard, but from what i hear Cit, JS are doing just fine (no real layoffs).
        • smabie 4y ago
          Haha yea FinTech would be a pretty derogotory term to call a HFT firm
        • ecshafer 4y ago
          I agree that Two Sigma, Jane Street, Renaissance, etc. are NOT Fintech. Fintech is a really large umbrella which seems to includes people like Paypal or Bloomberg and things like robotraders or companies that deal with some financial product. Hedge Funds / HFT / Algo traders can be really sophisticated with their technology, but I wouldn't call them "Fintech".
      • nvarsj 4y ago
        HFT makes money off of volatility. The more the world burns the more money they make by keeping markets liquid.
        • durumu 4y ago
          That’s true, in much the sense that doctors make money off people being sick. In times of high volatility, it’s HFTs that provide liquidity and keep spreads narrower than they’d otherwise be. It is extremely illegal to purposefully make markets more volatile; good trading firms are not going to do that.
    • paxys 4y ago
      Smaller companies do layoffs as well. They just aren't as highly publicized as those at tech giants. Severance packages are usually worse/nonexistent as well. HFT companies also have much higher performance bars and rates of overwork/burnout. I'm willing to bet that people are leaving Jane Street, Citadel etc. (whether voluntarily or not) at much higher rates than large tech companies like Google.
      • mmiyer 4y ago
        True of Citadel, but Jane Street is supposed to have a solid wlb, and because of the high pay and the few companies willing to pay at that level, people generally stick around there. These kind of finance companies also do better in volatility so they're definitely not laying off right now.
        • Ntrails 4y ago
          I would assume JS has industry standard levels of notice, non-compete and deferred comp - which will sure help keep people around
          • caddemon 4y ago
            Jane Street definitely does not have a non-compete. Citadel does though. Deferred compensation is probably not relevant to any of the major quant firms, payment is almost entirely cash. If you're high enough up to start receiving stake in a prop firm directly as part of your bonus you are an order of magnitude above the TC cited by the original comment. Of course, the amount of comp you can get is a big reason people stick around. For that level of earning potential JS is really good on the WLB front. But it's not going to be as good as big tech is (or at least has been), since QT/QR just has different requirements as a field.
            • Ntrails 4y ago
              > Deferred compensation is probably not relevant to any of the major quant firms, payment is almost entirely cash. Deferred != stock. > If you're high enough up to start receiving stake in a prop firm directly as part of your bonus you are an order of magnitude above the TC cited by the original comment. Fair
    • jrockway 4y ago
      Where is Google doing layoffs? The latest news I have is that people are very worried about layoffs, but so far they've only started putting people on rebranded PIPs. The other FAANGs are definitely laying people off, though. I personally think the recession is a self-fulfilling prophecy, but regardless of my take on the fundamentals, it is certainly fulfilling itself and everyone in tech should be pretty worried right now. This is not the year when you're going to increase your salary by jumping to a cool startup as employee #3.
      • kennend3 4y ago
        you are correct, it has not happened yet, but you willing to bet it wont in the next 6 months? https://www.seattletimes.com/business/google-employees-brace-for-cost-cutting-drive-as-anxiety-mounts/ https://www.seattletimes.com/business/google-employees-brace... https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/22/google-tells-employees-higher-risk-of-low-performance-ratings-in-2023.html https://www.cnbc.com/2022/12/22/google-tells-employees-highe...
      • dasil003 4y ago
        > This is not the year when you're going to increase your salary by jumping to a cool startup as employee #3. Agreed, you won't get a big salary out of the gate because unproven startups paying huge salaries are dropping like flies as the easy capital dries up. On the other hand, the likelihood of getting in on the ground floor of the next FAANG is increasing as staffing costs decrease and behavioral changes increase during a recession. EV obviously still higher at established top-of-market companies, but when has that ever not been the case?
  • caddemon 4y ago
    They do a lot of hiring out of school though, so they are selective but if you make the cut you'd definitely be earning more at the start of your career. Plus if you perform well you can make well over 500K TC by the time you would have been promoted to staff at FAANG, because of bonuses.
  • DWqRdped 4y ago
    a high performer at citadel or JS can make 1m in 5 years. i don't know many people at google make that much.
    • Sevii 4y ago
      Citadel has 2600~ people, Jane street 2000~ while google has 150,000~.
    • dasil003 4y ago
      Not many at Google receive that much in their offer letter, but with the stock appreciation over the last decade and stacked refresher grants, I'd be willing to wager there were thousands making >$1M as of Nov 2021 (many fewer since the stock has fallen though).
      • hansvm 4y ago
        If Google is offering an initial total cash equivalents of $300k (say $140k salary, $480k/4 stock, 15% annual bonus on each), that's roughly the same deal as somebody else getting a base salary of $300k. The fact that a particular investment decision (GOOG) can accidentally push the individual's yearly increase in net worth past $1M isn't a good way to judge what Google is actually offering: Anyone with a base salary of $300k can obtain a similar payoff structure by taking out a $550k loan to invest in GOOG, and taking out additional smaller loans at each stock refresh. The tax benefits from capital gains/losses and time-value-of-money benefits from getting your bonus sooner should handily outweigh the cost of servicing the loan, but even in a worst-case scenario where you pay interest for no benefit, that example Google offer would be a lot more comparable to a $315k-$330k salary, not a $1M+ salary.
        • geph2021 4y ago
          Anyone with a base salary of $300k can obtain a similar payoff structure by taking out a $550k loan to invest in GOOG I'm curious how someone could obtain such a large, unsecured loan of $550k? Even secured against a home with a mortgage cash-out Refi, that's a large sum. You'd have to have built up a lot of equity in your home value.
  • moralestapia 4y ago
    >but are also very selective Yes, we've heard that yadda yadda, Caroline Ellison, SBF, etc...
• selectodude 4y ago
  Those are low numbers compared to the smaller prop shops that routinely pay 1MM+. Gotta have a PhD in pure math though. That shit is bananas.
  • nequo 4y ago
    Do you have a source on the $1mn+ figure? I would be curious to read more about this.
    • selectodude 4y ago
      I mean, not really. This is personal knowledge. You can't really look up salaries because the base is like $175k but even in mediocre years they're getting high six-figures in bonus. Take a peek at what Wolverine, Radix, or Jump are paying new grads though. It's generally like $500k+. Even Jane Street, which is a larger place that hires people who aren't published mathematicians (see: Sam Bankman-Fried) pays $750k
      • caddemon 4y ago
        Yeah the numbers he posted were also base from JS and Citadel websites, so they're not reflective of how much one could (or even guaranteed will with the early career bonus floors) actually make at those places. This is for traders and researchers though. You can get pretty similar early career salary + bonus as a SWE at JS or Citadel, which is probably what more people on HN would be considering. Do you know what kind of pay the smaller shops offer for pure SWE?
        • selectodude 4y ago
          I’m afraid that’s out of my purview. Only familiar with quant traders and researchers. I’m sure it’s as good or better than big tech. But you don’t get to live in San Francisco and the work is a lot more boring.
          • slymon99 4y ago
• rr888 4y ago
  Its kinda sad though being a great company and the only thing people know you for is high salaries. Anything else good about the company?
  • emptybits 4y ago
    Jane Street is responsible for the Signals and Threads podcast[1], which I always enjoy. They also contribute a lot to the OCaml language, standard libraries, and do a great job of explaining why OCaml is a great language and paradigm. I've learned a lot because of Jane Street's sharings. I have no connection or interest in Jane Street but this sure gives me a positive impression of the company. [1] https://signalsandthreads.com/ https://signalsandthreads.com/
    • nequo 4y ago
      Yaron Minsky, the host of Signals and Threads, is also one of the two authors of Real World OCaml[1] which is a good resource on the language. [1] https://dev.realworldocaml.org/ https://dev.realworldocaml.org/
      • caddemon 4y ago
        For anyone that did competition math in HS one of the two authors of the main Art of Problem Solving books is also high up at Jane Street, on the trading side. JS sponsors stuff like math prize for girls now. Obviously there's a potential recruiting benefit to funding contests and posting monthly puzzles and whatnot, but I still think it's a cool vibe that not a lot of other companies have.
• delta_p_delta_x 4y ago
  I'm quite salty about HFTs. I'm a final-year undergraduate with a bunch of close friends who all love C++ (yes, we're masochistic that way). They're all really smart, too (me, not so much—my GPA is 3.00/5). However, after a while, it got really dull and frankly, a bit exasperating when all the rest of them could discuss were HFTs, their ridiculous, outrageous salaries, matching engines, order books, and low-latency trading. Heck, one of our assignments last year was to write such an engine in C++. It seems C++ developers are particularly in demand at most HFTs. Some of these companies I have never even heard of before having entered CS—Jane Street, Citadel, HRT, DRW, Ansatz, Two Sigma... Their names and websites are cryptic, and their job position listings are even more so, unless one knows that they're mostly proprietary traders—in other words, making money for money's own sake. It feels dirty and excessively capitalist—these companies don't even have products to show for all their effort. Any clients they do have probably already make millions to billions, too. My friends defend themselves by saying 'HFTs make money by keeping the market liquid', 'there's nothing wrong with arbitrage', etc. That's fair, but I still feel that's just sugar-coating what I said. At the same time, I don't really say anything in person to my friends, because, well, they're friends, and secondly, my lousy grades make me feel thoroughly unqualified to make any sort of criticism. I personally would rather do embedded, automotive, avionics, or game engine development. I just wish I had someone to discuss this with. Hardly anyone I know wants to do these instead, because the salary is lousy to above average, the hours are as bad, and especially game development is considered a mostly rubbish job to have. It really sucks, because I've gamed all my life and always found video games pretty damn amazing, both technically and just in general. It was a pretty bad bubble-bursting moment when I discovered just how bad the game dev situation was—overwork, crunch, sexual abuse and sexism, bean-counter-led design and marketing decisions. I'm not looking for 100% job satisfaction (I accept even the most exciting work will have its dull periods), but it would be nice if the thing I spent 8-10 hours a day doing for a salary was something that remotely excited me and others, instead of just mindlessly piping money from X to Y and back just because it paid half a million a year.
  • Game_Ender 4y ago
    If you want a good salary with impact and embedded/high performance C++ look into the self driving field. Check companies like “Cruise” and “Waymo” and see levels.fyi. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, but it is making the future vs simply manipulating the finical system.
• laidoffamazon 4y ago
  I’m more surprised people don’t know this. It’s the primary cause for my depression.