Citadel or Tech?
I am a junior at a top tech school, and after going through spring recruiting at my school I have received offers from Citadel FTAP, Google, Dropbox, and Palantir for summer internships. Last year I did an internship at a top tech company, which I really enjoyed. I love software development and the culture was great, 40 hour work weeks and the people were very chill. I was planning on staying in software development in the Bay Area until I received the Citadel offer, and now I am unsure. In addition to software development I do have some interest in finance, and I have considered going into trading, however it seems that the field is shrinking, rather opposite to the Bay Area tech scene right now. Going through the upsides and downsides of this decision I have arrived at the following facts:
Tech Companies:
-Better work life balance
-All my friends will be in San Francisco, so will be able to hang out with them and have fun
-Very good chance of offer afterwards, and unlikely to ever be fired
Citadel:
-Will be learning more about finance, chance to possibly transition into a trading / quant development role in a few years if I get a full time offer
-Upside seems a bit greater, assuming I perform really well earning 500k in 6 or 7 years seems possible / realistic, at tech company would probably be closer to 250k all in
-Will be a lot more competitive, being the “revolving door of Chicago” and all means that if I do not perform I will be out the door, and possibly very quickly
-Going with the above seems that I could be working 60-70 hour workweeks, which I do not have a problem with, but if I end up earning the same as my tech friends with 40 hour workweeks that will be frustrating to say the least
So all in all I am not sure how to analyze the decision. When I asked my friends, most of whom had never heard of Citadel, they all said to go to Dropbox, or maybe Google if I wanted to be a prestige whore. Now what they think does not have a huge impact for me, but if I decide to go to Citadel it would be a bit sad if I want to go the tech scene in a few years and nobody has any idea about what I have done the last few years. At the end of the day the Citadel position is mostly programming, but what I am really curious about is what the exit ops are. Is it possible to learn skills at Citadel that will transfer well into high paying trading / quant jobs? All in all I want advice from people in the finance, as all of my friends from school don’t know much about these positions, and therefore it is difficult for me to get a well thought out opinion on the Citadel side of things. Thanks for the thoughts everyone!
http://money.cnn.com/2014/02/28/news/companies/highest-paying-internshi…
Palantir.
I would actually go to Palantir - Peter Thiel's a beast
Plus if you can land FT, base comp was north of 100k + equity last time I checked, but this may have changed since
I agree, I think your best bet is Palantir.
Regardless of the compensation, IMO the work they are doing is really cool. They seem to have a lot of government contracts and, as they say, are "here to solve the world's hardest problems" dealing with cyber defense and analyzing big data. The tech scene seems like it could go any direction, but I think Palantir will do well either way.
If I were you I'd definitely go with Palantir over Citadel.
Jesus Christ, this post is going to make IlliniProgrammer at least semi-erect.
Wow this is a bit surprising, 4/4 for Palantir. I agree that their work seems really interesting, and I was told I would be working on Palantir Metropolis, which is their finance arm. The only concern I have about them is name recognition, however based on this thread this seems to not be a problem. Overall though I am trying to gauge if Citadel is more attractive for a future career in finance? Or is it the case that working at Palantir would also translate well to quant trading? Basically I have always kind of dreamed about working in high performance computing in finance, and I do not want to give up the opportunity to do so. It seems clear that if I do not want to do finance then Citadel is a bad choice, as it does not really pay more out of undergrad than Palantir, Google, or Dropbox and will be much higher stress. Also I do not know of IlliniProgrammer, why would he get a boner over this post lol?
I say Palantir too. Not exactly an expert, and not sure if its for the same role, but people mentioned to me someone went from BX PE -> Palantir for something. Just a reference.
IlliniProgrammer is a big user on the forum. Would definitely recommend you reach out to him about these options. Not exactly sure, but I think he was in or is in quant trading as well.
Citadel FTAP has a couple of very good groups - I believe HFT is one possibility, pays on-par (perhaps more?) than the ITAP program for FT. I think it recruits 1-2 interns/year. I've also heard some of the groups within FTAP do very similar things to the work performed on the investment side.
Outside of that I don't know anything about Citadel. Personally I'd pick Google over Palantir - while Palantir does awesome stuff, they'll work you to death. Google programmers work something like 40 hours per week, maybe less. I don't know enough to add any more perspective though.
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