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Comment by drawnwren | Hacker News Reader

Also, fintech is paying significantly more than FAANG right now. The interviews are harder, but there was an ~$60k premium to go to NYC over SF for most of my friends in Harvard's last class. Combined with what is viewed as a relatively low promotion curve vs NYC -- if they wanted a big company, most students took NYC.

At 5 years of experience, the gap was even wider. A friend just took a 400% pay raise to move from Google to a fintech firm. He shopped around at other tech companies, but no one was above a 20-30% increase.

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400% seems much higher than anything I've seen. assuming 200k at google (likely conservative), this implies a 1m offer from a quant fund for someone with no special complementarity for the role? i would be very surprised labor market is this much out of alignment.

Given that recent grads probably male 200K their first year at Google I'd say its probably north of 1.5M which is obviously ridiculous. Top portfolio managers at major Hedge Funds barely make that.

I can't edit the original post. It was a 300% pay raise, salary was 400% of original. 1m at a quant fund isn't unreasonable 5 years out, but it would be extraordinarily high.

agree, but surprised at this number for someone without a proven track record given the high false positive rate for success in these roles

Don't believe it, numbers don't add up. Maybe he moved from Google Iowa to Janestreet. But let's say it's true, it's pretty rare. Fintech is not paying significantly more than FAANG when it comes to software developer. Not even at all.

This is interesting. What do you mean by fintech -- hedge funds and HFT shops, or financial technogy companies like Affirm? Could you share a few examples?

Prosthetics for sharks. It's a growing industry.

Lol. There was a time when I wouldn't post 'lol' on hn, but I've loosened up in my old age.

Did your friend have special domain knowledge like machine learning?

He has a bachelors and masters from a Top 3 US program, but neither were related to the work he's doing. In fact, they asked him to start studying ML (with the understanding that he had no prior knowledge) in preparation for his new job.

My gut feeling here is that the 'I don't do what they're testing for in interviews' feeling pervades FAANG management as well as engineers. They probably don't actually see much value in programmer intelligence above a certain bar.

On the fintech side, they are approaching recruiting as they always have and probably won't even schedule an interview if you don't have a recommendation and a top 5 university on your resume.

Top 3? Go bears! ;)

Can you provide some companies that could offer this? I'm interviewing in NYC atm and would be great to know.

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