I am a rising junior in CS and have offers for a 2023 internship at all three. The roles are Tech M&A for Centerview, Quant Trader for Jane Street, and SWE for Meta. I have talked to a couple people in the tech space and want some other opinions/discussions on the three somewhat different "industries". I'm currently trying to weigh WLB / Compensation / Career Growth / Future Career Change Opportunities. Thanks in advance!
Edit: Preference towards JS right now. Will have to think about CVP vs. JS a bit more but thanks for all the comments!
Edit: Took the JS offer, thanks all!
Gotta be between js and CVP.
meta
simply for the fact that you said that you were trying to take WLB into account. if you didnt include that and just wanted future comp CVP or JS is the way to go. You could live a comfortable life at Meta with a very chill work schedule and enjoy the perks of a being at a MANGA. Yeah sure youl have a higher ceiling at JS/CVP but at what cost. Is it worth sacrificing your 20's for some MD to rip you a new one every waking hour? Thats a question that you have to ask yourself but since you mentioned WLB id go with Meta
what the hell is meta even doing on this list lmao might as well add wendy’s cook to the post while you’re at it
I would go JS/CVP purely from a perspective of what keeps the most doors open.
JS/CVP >> Meta is magnitudes easier to do than going the other way. Whether you do the internship at JS/CVP or start your career there, Meta will always be an option. Same cannot he said if you start your career at Meta or even intern there.
TLDR; Try JS/CVP at internship level and go from there.
Don’t think you can go wrong either way. Really depends on which interest you more, they are really different jobs.
In keeping doors open, if you’re smart enough to land JS/Meta internship you can likely do it again down the line. These are very IQ/skills based roles, you have already established you have both to the level necessary to do this role now or in the future.
I would strongly encourage you to use your internship to try CVP. CVP is extremely difficult to land and not just about being smart (think IQ/Skills/EQ). Further, it should show you very quickly if banking satisfies you or if you’d prefer more quantitative roles like JS/Meta.
Just my $0.02 as someone who did STEM ugrad but went into EB.
lol what JS all the way, if you're smart enough to break into JS you take it. Take it from someone who's a CVP banker. My best friend from HS (smartest guy I know) works at JS and makes 2x as much as me and works less than half the hours. Please take JS, banking is banking, CVP isn't some gloryland where we're doing god's work.
I’m going to take the opposite position here and say very seriously consider CVP. Quant is not at all the paradise that a lot of people on this forum make it out to be. It’s an amazing opportunity to have, absolutely, but tenures are short and exits sparse — CVP can offer better opportunities following your stint if and when you get tired of your first full-time position. You have some great offers in front of you, I would think carefully about JS and CVP. Don’t think Meta merits much discussion.
Edit: to add, considering the fact that you already have an offer from JS in hand, you can always interview again and get a fresh offer from them whenever you want (within reason obviously). As for CVP, you only get one chance at an offer unless you’re willing to spend time and money on an MBA, and it doesn’t seem like you want to do that. If I were in your shoes, I’d take CVP, see if you like it or if you like any of the exit opportunities. If you don’t, interview again for JS and start working there.
Totally agree. The only time to break into ibanking is undergrad, and it can be a life-long foundation for your career. You can exit to PE mega funds and earn stable cash of millions without risk of getting fired. You could always go from CVP to Jane street as long as you have what it takes to clear the math interviews (which you obviously have), but Jane Street -> CVP is gonna be nearly impossible. If you decline CVP now, you miss the one golden ticket to PE mega fund career, and it’s probably gonna be your only ticket because PE exclusively hires from pre-MBA analysts. If you miss this golden opportunity, you’ll have to waste two years in MBA to get back into the industry.
Also, Jane Street quant trading is very risky and unstable. The top outlier can earn 500k out of undergrad, but it’s gonna be a one-time luck thing. Once the market trend changes, your old trading strategy will make you lose money, and you’ll find yourself constantly preying to God that the market won’t go against you. The amount of mental stress and anxiety is just unbelievable. Also, the low performers get straightforwardly fired. Who become those low performers are often an act of God (due to pure luck and market fluctuations).
Don’t listen to these people who vote for Jane street, they either never worked in prop trading, or they are just pushing competition out of ibanking so that they have better chance of breaking-in.
I am confused how no one is mentioning that once you have FAANG (or MAANG) on your resume, you can exit to a unicorn startup in a few years and make more than a CVP exit. Of course, if you worked at JS, everyone would know you're pretty intelligent and would be willing to give you a short (although I consider JS to be the final exit), but to say that Meta doesn't have good exits is simply untrue. While I would take JS if I ever received an offer from them, if WLB was my main priority I would go with Meta knowing that I would have the skills and name that other tech companies value.
I keep hearing this stuff about unicorns on this forum but what does this even mean? Asking as someone who works at a FAANG. I feel like you guys think we’re just like oh okay let me join a unicorn and poof a million dollars appears in my bank account lol
Surprised this is even a question being asked. Jane Street TC is over 500k… you’re earning more than MFPE associates ffs in your first year of work. Do you really want to spend your 20s formatting PowerPoint and sifting through excel doing mind numbingly boring work?
people talk a lot about exits which I find strange. IBD definitely has more breadth and you can end up in some interesting roles but from a comp perspective no exit will be better than working at JS. You’ll be earning way more than any other shop assuming you can stay there and perform. This isn’t too hard as JS has refined their program so that tenure of the people that get hired is decent. Less job security for sure but… the money you’ll be making in your career is worth the risk…live a little. The work is actually interesting (imo) too.
you’re earning circ 600k when you start, where will that figure be by the time you’re 35? Depends on you but this is one of the few industries where getting regular 7-8 figure pay days is definitely doable and you have a colossal advantage by getting this internship so young.
Not accurate, over-optimistic about Jane Street earning prospect.
Prop trading is an area where salary don’t have stable increase as your experience goes up.
ibanking, on the other hand, has stable increase in salary over years. VP level is stable 700k, MD level is stable 1-2 million, not to mention buyside which give people 1-10 millions of carry.
That’s why I said it depends on them and their ability. 1-2 million when you’re in your 30s and have given up years of your life doing simple work is ok, but JS gives you the opportunity to make much more.
i said opportunity; people in this forum are seriously risk averse. OP shouldn’t be. PE is also incredibly boring and the comp only gets decent when you’re old as shit.
take risks if you want it all.
FTP (140k base btw)
JS has a more relaxed culture compared to some of the other Quant shops but still maintains a top reputation in the industry and extraordinarily higher pay than Centerview. As a CS major myself and Quant Trader who did a summer in IB I felt like QT was significantly more aligned with my interests and academic backgrounds compared to banking, so I would do some soul searching and think about what you want to actually be doing for 10+ hours of your life every day. If you have a passion for markets and solving complex problems then I’d go with QT, but if you want something more traditional finance and people oriented then IB may be the route for you. Also if you do QT you can go to FAANG afterwards but will be tougher to do the other way around unless you want to be a quant dev.
Damn...if this is a real post, congrats dude, that's extremely impressive.
IMO, this is a no-brainer decision...take Jane Street and run. That shit will literally set you up for life. I'm talking making 7 figures in just a couple of years and work-life-balance is much better than at those other 2 places.
Also, since we are on WSO "prestige" should be taken into consideration and quant traders at Jane Street are viewed as some of the best, although you won't have that much layman prestige, but who cares about that tbh.
Edit: wanna give a quick shout-out to the guy that went ahead and just downvoted about 10 of my comments across random topics/threads, thanks buddy
Take JS. Majority of the people advising to take CVP are in banking or PE, and CVP / Megafunds are the paths to unabated paradise apparently. Generally, bankers or bankers-turned-PE are risk averse and not the most creative in their pursuits towards income, so it's understandable that they would push CVP.
Dude is this even a question. It's 1000000% Jane Street. JS is Platinum, CVP is Gold, and Meta is baby vomit. The ONLY place in the quant world that is better is RenTech. TwoSigma is likely tied with JS. You will be set for life man
Also to FlyingBoat who's accusing people of pointing you to JS just because they want lower competition -- I would NEVER work in IB, ever. Mid-20s and very happy to stay in AM forever. How in the world is saying JS is better than CVP somehow a terrible thing? CVP will grind you (granted, less than some other IBs) and the 'exit opp' thing is merely a way for people who don't make independent decisions to justify their choices
Edit: Lmao some sad loser got so angry that I said exit opps were for people who can't make independent decisions that he MS'd me with a bunch of alternate accounts (I saw the notifications appear one after another in 20min even though I made the comment yesterday). I stand by my words 100% you little shit, keep em coming
Disagree. The top rainmakers in finance will always be fundamental hedge funds and PE partners, not math nerds. Math nerds can get very well-off, but not on top of the pyramid. CVP ibanking lays the foundations for all high finance with fundamental methodology, and in high finance, quants aren’t even comparable to bankers and investors.
You could always pick up math skills by attending a phd program, but ibanking is the only place where you can learn the secrete recipe of wealth — M&A synergy, valuation, leverage finance. Ibanking will give you access to real generational wealth and connections with higher-up executives or even political figures. It’s a different social class.
Quant trading is essentially using math techniques to cheat the whole finance hierarchy system. Yes, it’s a shortcut to 400k TC right out of undergrad, but taking shortcuts will always cost you in some other ways. When you age and you brain power declines, your math acumen will always fall short of young folks in their 20s, and you’ll find it really hard to even go back to your prime days, not to mention gaining steady pay raise. You’ll regret that you went for that 400k quick money instead of a long-term steady career growth.
Lol my 'old' uncle is a PM at a prominent quant firm (think JS, DE Shaw, Tower Research) and he has had enough money to retire for over 10 years when most people in PE are waiting for their carry to be anything substantial. You can't pick up math skills out of nowhere and top PhD programs don't accept just anyone. People who go into quant trading/research do so because they enjoy math. You'll likely have to get a PhD down the line to move from quant trading to research where you can earn much more than a trader, but with JS on the resume I assume getting into a good PhD program wouldn't be that hard.
You have to ask yourself what you enjoy more OP. Do you want to listen to these twats tell you that your math skills make you a nerd and you won't be part of the same "social class" or do you want to be the like of Jim Simons who has consistently beaten the market because of his and other nerds' math skills. If you enjoy math and don't want to have 30+ years of career with assholes telling you how great they are, while they consistently try to backstab you (this is what they call "type A personality" at banks), take JS. If you really think that this guy's words have any merit and want to be part of the "zoo" (in the words of Grigori Perelman) where 18 year old college finance/business majors might one day jerk off to your name, enjoy being an asshole.
A friend sent me this and I literally made an account just to beg you to take JS. You likely already know your starting TC will be almost 3x higher at JS. In my experience, your pay will scale very nicely in most cases, wlb will be great (definitely MUCH better than banking), and attrition is much lower in the industry than people make it out to be. I would be more worried about intern --> FT conversion than FT trainee --> junior trader. Getting JS is an incredibly difficult accomplishment, just off personal experience I'd say it's a fraction of a percentage likelihood a priori. Also, there's no non-compete at JS for FT, the downside is incredibly minimal.
Edit: Also if you don't cop a return, JS is a good enough name on your resume to get your interviews with other top shops
Intern at Jane Street then go work fulltime at Kim Kardashian’s PE firm and become a Partner in less than 3 years.
Is it just me or are 90% of these accounts bots? Jane Street is amazing, but it is not “obviously” the better choice. JS and CVP offer two very different career paths in terms of scope and day-to-days (although I will say that JS from CVP is an option) and it is up to you to decide what kind of work you are more interested in. If you legitimately enjoy quantitative research, and you can get a sense of whether or not this is true from academic research opportunities at your school, then Jane Street may be the better fit for you. If research is not a key obsession for you, CVP may offer a wider range of future opportunities that you might find more fulfilling.
I would not base your decision off of starting compensation. There is a lot of misinformation in this thread (seriously, “guaranteed” 8-figure years at JS? Its like I’m over-hearing hyper-stimulated math club kids in a high school cafeteria). Over a period of 10-15 years, the two opportunities will net you a very similar sum of money. You should focus on the depth of your interest in scientific research-based labor because you can and will burn out fast if that style of work is not your cup of tea.
Just so you know, your choice is not quantitative trader vs. banker. It is in fact: the career path that follows from a stint in banking vs. the career path that follows from a stint in quantitative trading. You don’t have to be a career banker by taking the CVP offer. A very, very large number of former CVP analysts go on to work at premiere hedge funds, growth equity shops, you name it. I would not let the idea of becoming a career banker (which I agree, I personally would not have wanted to do) cloud your judgement here.
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Take JS. People saying to go to banking instead are out of their mind.
Another conspiracy to push competitors out of ibanking industry. If you genuinely think JS is better, then why are you in PE right now ? If JS is indeed better, then why are people asking about “how to get into ibanking“ all the time instead of “how to get into Jane Street” ?
Literally everyone on this site is grinding top schools & grades for ibanking, yet most of them point you to Jane Street, which proves my point: people are pushing away strong competitors like you to other industry so that they can snatch an offer !
Also, a lot of top math major students who have absolute perfect grades end up choosing ibanking. Anyone who studies hard for one or two advanced statistics / calculus course can go through Jane Street, but only the top few elite students who are well-rounded, athletic, out-spoken, sociable and likable can break into ibanking.
LOL
My brother in Christ. I’m already working at a PE firm; I have no incentive to try to mislead a college kid on WSO to save a spot for me at the paradise that is centerview partners, don’t worry.
You seem unhinged. You’ve commented several times on this thread already accusing people of this, your entire post history is absurd, and you obsessively post about finance even though you apparently are in law school and don’t even work in finance/never have worked in finance ???
OP, ignore this guy. From someone who actually knows what they’re talking about and has worked in the industry, JS is just a superior position unless you hate math. Way better hours, way more interesting work, and way better pay. Plus a lot of JS people do cool stuff after; a lot of interesting companies founded in ML/fintech.
Take JS, that is 10x harder to get than CVP and similarly more desirable imo
Without going into much detail, I have an intimate understanding of both places.
These are very different places.
At CVP, you'll find extremely polished, well-spoken, well-rounded, hardworking people. A person at CVP went to a top prep school, is well-dressed, was the captain of the Yale fencing team or past high school debate champion and has a dad on the board of a Fortune 500 company. They studied something like economics at Dartmouth. You'll meet someone who, if you're lucky, will invite you to their parents place on the Hamptons on the weekend. Or, maybe, you'll meet the kid from the state school that can grind but also gets drunk on the weekend (or you'll be that person yourself and wonder: am I in the wrong place?). Half of your colleagues are female and you can't help but notice how everyone there is more good looking than the folks at Deutsche Bank or UBS. You'll find a kid that has a trust fund but decided to get a job anyway due to their ambition, but also the kid whose parents grew up on a farm and is living the American Dream. You'll meet someone there that ignores you and treats you like a peasant because their dad runs an M&A arb fund, but also someone who got a need-based full-ride at an Ivy and somehow knows the answer to every question in Jeopardy. The founders of CVP are among the most impressive and inspiring people you'll ever meet and, even if you don't like investment banking, you can still appreciate truly remarkable leadership in starting what is one of the best places to learn M&A on Wall Street. Blair is charismatic and cares about his people. He's the most brilliant, passionate and effective dealmaker on Wall Street and would have been treasury secretary had Hillary Clinton been elected. Somehow the guy eats Fig Newtons for lunch every day but is still is an energizer bunny with no signs of aging at 50. Does he have good genes? Is he an alien? Does he take an IV every morning with special chemicals that make him a god among men? The world will never know. The VPs and Directors will generally all be sociopaths like at most banks and you'll work until 2am on most nights. If you get out early at 11pm, you'll call your mother one day and silently think about how you want to kill yourself when she tells you she'd love you even if you quit your job there. Your mental health will suffer and you'll visibly age from a lack of sleep and excessive use of Adderall. Every deal you work on will industry changing and involve billions of dollars of money and after you leave you'll be almost certain to get an excellent job at a top upper-middle market PE fund or $1-10B AUM hedge fund. Every month, you or one of your friends will work on a deal that is on the front page of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Part of you will think about the fact these HF/PE investors don't really beat the market risk adjusted and that M&A often destroys value for acquirers Your first year you'll out earn $200K all-in including their signing bonus which will make you outearn all the other banking analysts on Wall Street. Afterwards, you'll edge your way up to $400K over the next 4 years. If you go to business school, it's HBS, Stanford or Wharton.
At Jane Street, you'll find utterly brilliant, quirky, quick-thinking and borderline-autistic people. This person was among the best 1,000 math students in the world in high school. They are poorly dressed and wear cargo shorts. They studied a real degree like applied math or physics at a real college like MIT or Princeton. They have an awkward laugh and like playing Settlers of Catan. On the weekend, they might train a computer to play Go and compete worldwide in an artificial intelligence competition. The person that sits next to you might be worth $100M, but you'll never know since salaries and even titles are kept top secret. The person on the other side of you will have a PhD from Stanford and smell so bad that you feel nauseous at work sometimes. You're afraid to say anything, because what if he also is worth $100M and is, like, really important? Everyone is betting on everything all of the time. Some kid will be wearing a sailors cap because they lost a bet and they shaved their whole head. Another will have to wear pajamas all year as punishment for the same crime. In the morning the trading floor will make a casino sound quiet. You will go to the bathroom and some guy will be there without his shoes on while the kid beside him in the stall is reading SlatestarCodex or an old LessWrong article. You'll silently wonder how the autistic kid got the job after hearing him make wookie noises, but you're too polite to actually say this. Then you'll hear him actually speak about a linear differential equation and you'll see why -- how is everyone here so brilliant? Honestly, good for him. You'll be proud to be at a firm that celebrates neurodiversity. Some kids there will looks patrician and you figure they probably went to Phillips Exeter Academy or something, but you know he got the job on merit - everyone did. It's a highly meritocratic place.
He'll afterwards sit next to you in trading simulation but he'll get up and leave, exasperated that he couldn't use Linux the linux shell terminal and Windows powershell. Ugh, nobody likes powershell! The founder of the firm wears black combat boots and has long ponytail. He doesn't sit in a corner office, but sits alongside some 26 year old that trades an obscure European derivatives product. He doesn't even have a title, but you know he's a badass and is easily a multi-billionaire (which somehow has remained a secret to the world). According to him, the unofficial motto of the firm is "we suck," which is ironic for one of the most successful proprietary trading firms in human history. The firm often prides itself in having humble people. This probably isn't true. They know they are not just smart, but fucking smart. At JS, you'll have a good life. You don't get fired because the IP of the firm is too valuable and you don't leave because you just make too much money. You don't get grinded and if your mental health suffers it'll be due to insecurity, not overwork. You'll do a homework assignment on options pricing and your teaching assistant will look at you like you're a complete idiot if you don't remember partial differential calculus from college. Sometimes you're embarrassed to show up to work, but you're also energized by how ridiculously brilliant everyone is. Your work probably doesn't matter morally - you are "making markets more efficient" whatever the fuck that means. You're taught that you winning doesn't always mean someone else loses and trading isn't zero sum, but in reality you know you're mostly just playing a game. Your impact on the world is making a bid/ask spread a bit tighter than it would be otherwise, making it slightly easier for others to trade. I mean honestly - who gives a fuck. You try not to think about it. Or you decide to be one of the effective altruists there that donate all their money. Probably you don't care about your impact since you just make SO much fucking money, more than any other job in finance, full stop. Your first year, you'll make what you'll make 4-5 years into your career if you start at CVP. Once you are 5-7 years into your career, you will with HIGH PROBABILITY make compensation similar to a senior analyst at a Tiger Cub or a MD / partner megafund PE firm. There are partners there that are 26 years old, including (and particularly ones) that are kids just like you. You'll wish you were him sometimes, but you'll know you can't be - not because he has family connections you don't have but because he's probably just better than you. There is a compensation flatline at JS about $1.5M, but that also exists at even the best HF/PE firms. To make past this amount, you need to have special balls that honestly you won't know if you have until 10 years from now.
Also, don't take Meta. This is clearly the dumb option and you would be a true fucking idiot to work there given the other options.