Which companies in Chicago are siloed, and which are collaborative?
This post is to get some idea about how to find a good employer next. I'm a junior quant at a HFT prop trading company. I've been here for just over two years. My job is to dig out any alphas and then feed them to the downstream department for strategy fabrication. It is very restricted and I don't see much learning opportunity or growth space. I constantly find myself lost and frustrated, since I don't get the chance to learn about and to explore the industry as a junior in the early stage of my career. Eg. I'm not allowed to know anything about how to monetize, and it's very unlikely to switch to a different group. (Don't ask why I've stayed for two years please.) I put "silo" in the title, since I don't know the exact word for the style of my employer. "Compartmentalized"? (I used to not like "silo" but now I think it's much better than what I have on plate. ) For next job, I hope to land somewhere more collaborative so that I could do something more comprehensive. Yet, I find it very hard to know the structuring style of the company before actually signing up, since they tend to keep it very secretive (just like my current employer). So, I wonder if you guys could share any information on this. Also, I'm relocating to Chicago, any recommended firms in the city? Thanks a lot!
As you mentioned there are definitely some firms which are siloed and some which have more of a collaboritive culture. This is something you should try to get a sense of when you are interviewing with the company and talking with people in the industry. In my experience the firms which sell themselves as technology companies are more collaborative then others. Can't think of any in Chicago of the top of my head but G-Research, GSA Capital, Two Sigma all seem to be very collaborative
There are also firms like Tower that are siloed in that different trading groups are independent of each other but each team could still be collaborative internally.
G research is not collaborative. Also GSA I think is also a MM platform.
The MM platform funds are siloed but you usually have access to everything within your team, and get exposure to the full PM process. A lot of funds who say they are "collaborative" are actually siloed in the bad kind of way described by the OP above. They often won't tell you this before you join, and if you end up in those places it's hard to go anywhere else since you don't learn anything useful. I think most of the big funds that hire fresh graduates every year are like this today.
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