Please stop suggesting I speak of these jobs. I didn’t.
I have worked on Wall Street in front office roles for 30 years and was very clear as to what I had and hadn’t seen. In addition my kid was offered 2 full time offers from BB firms so I have pretty good visibility.
If you look up thread to what I actually posted I was fairly precise supplying real time wages.
For kicks, checked with my S who has a friend at Citadel. He is very well paid, but not anywhere near $400k. I think each telling increases comp by 50%, kind of like parents hearing and then talking about scholarships that so and so got.
Corrected and I did not mean to offend you. Apologies.
You didn’t offend me you misquoted me. Thanks.
Anyone who follows baseball pretty much understands that you can be on a farm team and making 25K per season, AND that Derek Jeter makes 12 million and that therefore, encouraging your “average excellent” HS kid to become a pro ballplayer to make 12 million is fallacious reasoning.
The problem is that those same rational parents, do NOT understand that your “average excellent” HS kid who is interested in finance, or “something to do with computers” (which to me is always the red flag that the kid is good at rebooting a laptop which has gone haywire but doesn’t like the math and conceptual stuff that goes with CS) is NOT going to be working at DE Shaw or creating the next unicorn startup in SV.
Parents don’t like to hear that lots of kids go into finance jobs at well regarded consumer products companies making 50K per year. Lots of kids who “want something to do with computers” work for insurance companies as project specialists working to convert a payroll system from A to B, and then after their promotion get to do it all over again converting the onboarding new employee system from B to C. Or the double-header-- a “CS” job at an actual hedge fund, rolling out a fraud monitoring system in the backoffice.
A get it- Dad’s a social worker, mom’s a librarian- all these jobs- finance, something to do with computers- sound so sexy and high paid. And some of them are. And many of them are just the 21st century equivalent of making the railroads run on time. But the idea that you’ll be able to drop your kid off at fill-in-the-blank “high ROI” college and four years later pick up your high earning/high charging kid who has been transformed into a 400K employee at Citadel… Yikes.
Since you mentioned me by name, I am trying to reply to this conversation. I don’t have an interest in getting into an argument :-). I know what I know, and what I don’t know. I have personal knowledge of pay offers for summer internships at said firms (in the 65-70k area). And if that someone tells me that full time offers are being made at this other level, to this, this and that person, depending on where the summer offer is made, I find it believable. You can choose not to believe. You are at liberty :-). I only mentioned numbers etc because the question was asked. I have no great interest in having you or anyone else believe it. I also heard specific numbers for people that left the firm after 3 years out of an undergrad etc… that are far above the numbers I initially mentioned. So the initial first year pay is not difficult for me to believe. Anyway there are not a great many of these jobs every year to be of general interest. As I mentioned, perhaps 150-300. So not worth discussing.
My DD graduated from the school that tops the chart posted above. All of her classmates she is in contact with had starting salary above $200k. Those working for companies mentioned here often do make between $300k and $400k. In fact, their internships compensation was similar.
Many of the numbers posted here have been verified on levels.fyi, which requires proof of income such as a W-2 or offer letter. But as stated earlier, it’s only a few hundred people each year across the entire industry and perhaps no more than a dozen or so new hires each year in each company. And it is in a very specific part of finance known as prop trading, which is distinct from the hedge fund industry which is very large by comparison. So if you know a random person at Citadel, which has 3500 employees, it’s unlikely that they are one of the prop traders.
My friend’s son was offered an internship for the summer with one of the hedge funds in the thread. The numbers being discussed are close. NMF kid majoring in quant finance and engineering or physics at a T20 school.
Good kid and truly deserved. It’s stunning when you think about it…not necessarily in a good way though.
Is there a reason Citadel does most hiring from Chicago & NY? Just recruiting at limited number of schools?
Companies hire from different colleges for different skill sets. For quant trading, much of the hiring into the top firms in the US happens from primarily 3 schools – Harvard, Princeton, MIT. This is because the math departments at these places are considered a step above the math departments at any other school, and they attract the best math kids from all over the world. It is not to say that other schools are not represented, but they will have much smaller numbers placed into the top firms into trading. SWE jobs at the same companies, on the other hand, have a wider set of schools represented. Primarily CMU, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Berkeley, UIUC and a long tail of other schools etc. So I am not sure what you mean by hiring from Chicago & NY. Maybe you mean hiring into their Chicago office and their NY office. If this is your question, the answer is that that is where Citadel has their largest offices. They did most of their hiring into their Chicago office in the past. These days I think it is split between NY and Chicago because their NY office is expanding.
I was incorrect. Seemingly U Chicago is also well represented at Citadel Securities (distinct from Citadel the hedge fund) for traders. And it is a longer tail.
This is what I had in mind when I made the earlier comment above.
And I think these numbers are not fully representative.
I am not sure everyone has a Linkedin.
