Switching from Quant Research to Quant Dev?
Currently a quant researcher at a hedgefund who has done some coding infrastructure work for our trading strategies.
As a math guy, I'm happy to be working with math everyday, but recently gotten burnt out over constantly reading research papers and the research grind has been eating at me. Since doing some quant dev work, I find it actually more commercial than quant research. I can see myself doing more quant dev work and possibly heading to a tech company later on.
Issue is that with quant dev, I feel that you are less valued and earn less comp in general. Any thoughts on this?
In my experience, the farther you're from P&L producers, the less potential for greater comp. If you'll be transitioning to a group that focuses on infrastructure, that'll likely put a lower ceiling on your total comp..The actual effect on the comp will depend on the company, your managers, and your performance.
That said, if you see yourself heading into tech, it definitely makes sense to concentrate on the technology side of the business.
I mean less comp is pretty simple to test out; make friends with devs at your fund and over drinks discuss comp.
not possible with wfh and I don't drink
Tech in HF/prop and tech in "tech" are different things. Tech in "tech" focuses on scaling horizontally (to millions of users), while tech in HF is more about single-machine performance. Sure, there are roles like "HPC engineer" where your goal is to design scalable research infra for quants, but hey -- this is not quant-related at all.
Quant devs could be paid the same as quants. For example, in market making firms. Also check Quadrature -- they do have only quant devs.
'quant dev' at market-makers are SWE. Quant dev is a very specific title in hedge funds and MMs that are hired to build out infrastructure for research, back-test, execution etc
SWE at market-makers make a lot more.
To OP: why do you think are burnt out? Is it none of the ideas are working or are you losing interest in the work?
Looks like my experience is completely different. From what I have seen quant devs work with researchers/traders to enhance signals/strategies, while swes work on infra (including, but not limited to, research and execution infra). Regarding compensation, this is all depends on from which pool they receive a pay, and quant devs usually belong to the front office pool, while many swes are back office.
would love to work for Quadrature, but they're in London.
Those hybrid roles are very hard to find since most firms do division of labor between research and dev. Market making is a possibility, but do NOT want to spend 10 hours optimizing c++ code. (no math in that)
Hmmm, that's a constrained optimization problem that's hard to solve.
the highest paying dev roles in finance are the ones optimizing C++ code for market makers (so yeah, very little math)
FO dev in probability pure quant role for hedge funds
By the way, even if you go FAANG the roles you are thinking of that have comparable pay are lvl4+ assuming your stock appreciates- those roles don't have much math either. Maybe some stats for A/B testing.
If you are burnt out I suggest helping with infra for a bit more and then make a decision in next 6 mths. This will give you time to recover and also build up dev skills and see if you like grinding leetcode. Which by the way is going to burn you out more than reading papers if you don't like that stuff.
What exactly about a quant dev are you looking to do? As you probably know, quant roles tend to be intertwined and disagreed upon
guess commercialize/optimize trading strategies. Idk if I want to do c++ low latency though
Why not switch to tech directly? The guys I know who made the switch from research to dev, did it very early on like 1+ year into the job. One managed to keep his base salary, but of course the stake in the bonus pool is less as a dev. The job satisfaction was worth it though.
so I don't want to make the wrong decision here, and in the covid job market no less
Tech can be really political and full of BS. Friend at FB was harassed by crazy marxists for disagreeing with some of their views when they always bring up politics in the office ( crazy idiots).
Furthermore, most tech roles are either c++ focused on one feature while having very little math. It has to be the right team for me to consider joining, which is dependent on the manager and which feature of the platform I'm considering working on. The allure of FAANG here is that you can earn roughly the same money with less stress/time, which appeals to me as I grow older and more cynical with life. ( I don't go into life thinking I'll be a PM making 700k bonus every year, much more realistic) . So the job satisfaction is something I'll have to question. (Why did your friend achieve higher job satisfaction in tech than finance?)
I like working with macro/markets and the domain context of finance. Plus, I actually like my co-workers in finance and the math involved can be fascinating. There are 4 issues with this
1) I only have a BA; this restricts me from a lot of dream quant jobs where they hire phd only (PDT for example). It's much easier to hit the door as a quant dev when you have a BA than a quant researcher. (Obviously there are prop shops that take in quant researchers, but not hedgefunds and I'm not leaving NYC for family reasons, thus the chicago shops are unlikely going to be my future employers)
2) Signal research can quite hard and it's "easier" to hit targets with quant infra. I'm doing quant infra rn b/c we need it and I find it interesting b/c it is too important for my group. Yes, there is skewed view here, but the commercialization (whether research or dev) of trading strategies is what gets me up in the morning.
3) What other quant jobs are open to you; I would never work at a place like G-Research or a signal factory at a multi manager where it's very closed off and there's no collaboration between folks. I feel that a lot of buyside quant roles are like this and I hate operating in the dark with no context. In general, quant recruiting can be quite tricky
4) I don't know what the future of finance holds in this new macro environment (and FAANG expanding rapidly in NYC). What if finance goes even more into shit? Obviously then I would try my best to go into FAANG. But again, every year I delay doing this goes against me. So I'm trying to think of this as an option that I either let expire worthless or have the payoff decrease in value the longer time passes. Not sure what to do here
I meant switching into quant dev and not tech. Reason was that he found the pressure to continually produce new signals very stressful, and likewise for the pnl attribution and potential of the signals failing.
what about "quant trader" ?
what is stopping you from pursuing that role?
It highly depends on the job of quant trader.
If it's an execution based role where you just oversee the algos made by quant research/quant dev, it's kind of boring
Traders also have much higher stress, compared to quants
a quant trader is a specialist in using quant models to make trading decisions and fine tunes the execution models in realtime as necessary....and is a risk taker.
if you have been working on alpha generating quant models, i would imagine that you have learned how to use those models to trade in the markets...and if not, then i suggest you spend your time with that particular focus
How long have you been burned out for? Are you sure its not COVID or other factors bleeding into your work, or a need to take time off thats burning you out?
for the past 4-5 months I guess?
If definitely overlaps with COVID since a big part of quant research is bouncing ideas off colleagues and I love working with traders. Hate being couped up in an apartment and starting at code.
Can't really take time off. What would I do? continue to sit on my couch while everything is shut? That would suck a lot
Yea I face a similar dilemma, but I guess my point is if its temporary factors that are driving your feeling of burnout, it might make sense to go with a temporary solution rather than something that is difficult to reverse like transitioning into a different career.
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