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Comment by throwaway129999 | Hacker News Reader

I'm in the range of 3-5 years out of undergrad, working at a quant firm. My total gross comp for this year will be about 400-450k, majority of that is bonus.

By quant firm I mean either a proprietary trading firm (no outside investors) or a hedge fund (takes outside money), but not a bank.

I have a CS background but have self-studied in stats, and received mentorship from people with strong math backgrounds.

Main advantages of quant shops (doesn't apply to banks) over working at Google/FB/Netflix etc:

- small company size, startup style working environment, but big corp pay (or more)

- more varied/interesting work, e.g. mix of distributed data processing, high performance numerics, or performance optimization in latency sensitive code

- compensation paid purely in cash, no stock options/RSUs

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> compensation paid purely in cash, no stock options/RSUs

Hands down my favorite part of working in finance. Better salary, no bullshit.

Regardless of what industry you are in, the closer you are to money, the more honestly you will be paid. This is why in many companies some of the best paid people (sometimes more than executives) are in sales. It is quite difficult to tell an employee that you can only manage a small raise if they can say "I brought in $15 million in business this year." If they have no discernible way to determine what they have earned for the company, they can be had for a song.

This was one of the reasons I left the agency world. I was leading the strategy part and pitching for new business (not to mention scoping the work and contract) and won 7 figures in new business we would not have won otherwise. Didn't get a dime in commission or bonus (or even a raise that year) because I wasn't officially on the sales team and was salaried. Learned my lesson there.

I wish we had more salary threads for quants.

I started 4 years ago at a quant shop fresh out of college and expect to make around 250k.

quant at a quant shop, first year made 200-250; expect to be at least 50% higher this year.

How much math did you self-teach and what did you use to learn it? Aside from mentorship.

A few questions, if you don't mind answering:

> 400-450k

Where is that in the pay distribution? Near median? Realistically, where, comp-wise, would the average SWE plateau?

How many hours are you guys putting in a week?

What was the interview like? Did they go deep into stats/stochastic-calc/derivates-pricing/etc ?

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I'm currently in tech, making near the low end of your range. Getting promoted to the next pay scale (Staff SWE) is a lot more difficult. I'd seriously consider jumping to fintech if 400-450 was below median.

What does it take to make 7 figures at your tech company ?

This sounds really interesting to me. Are there other downsides to watch out for? I imagine the security environment is very restrictive: no work from home? No root access on your workstation?

What kinds of skills do you need to get into this area?

The security varies a lot. At one hedge fund I interviewed at, security was almost MI5-like - no phones in the office, no direct internet access, etc. At the place I ended up working, it's rootapalooza. Not in prod, obviously - there it's sudo-a-gogo.

How did you change fields, what was your transition like? Was it hard to interview, being self-studied and without a degree relevant to the field?

May I ask what is the area you work on? HFT, derivs etc? Also are you a developer or trader?

Sounds interesting and challenging - my contact details are in my profile if you'd like to chat

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