What are the Pros and Cons of working in retail?

What are the pros and cons of working as a software engineer at a high frequency trading firm versus a tech company?

• What are the pros and cons of working as a software engineer at a High Frequency Trading firm (like Chopper Trading, Jump Trading, etc.) vs a company like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.? Also, how's the exit strategy like for software engineers in HF trading firms, i.e., what career options does a software engineer have as a next job after working for sometime in an HF trading company? Is it easy or difficult to come back to a tech company or switch b/w trading companies?

• Answer:

  Here are some relevant points, which may be interpreted as pros or cons depending on your outlook: At an HFT shop, there would be less peers than at a company like Google.  While these shops are not all small, they are still several orders of magnitude smaller than an established tech company. Related to the previous point, to the extent that you have peers at other companies, you can't talk about your work very much in an HFT setting, but you can do so a good bit in technology. The strategic missions of the two types of companies are vastly different. The types of tactical problems you may have to solve may be surprisingly similar. At an HFT shop, the company will be solving a fairly narrow problem whereas Google or Facebook is solving many different problems for various products.  The scope of what you will work on as an individual engineer will probably be around the same though (on average). In finance, you will probably be less rigorous about things like code quality but more rigorous about performance metrics.  That is not to say that any of these companies do a poor job in those areas, I am mainly talking about differences at the margins. It's not as easy to switch between different HFT companies because of non-competition agreements.  Those obstacles don't exist in technology.  However, it's not good for your resume either way to make too many changes in your career. You can switch between finance and technology.  People have done that, and some switched back.  Again, if you make a lot of career changes without a coherent story, it reduces the strength of your resume, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.  As far as the actual technical side, there is enough of an overlap of technical skills that you can leverage your experience.  This becomes more difficult the more senior you get, where your expertise becomes more about domain knowledge. There are many technical jobs in finance outside of high-frequency trading.  There are also many jobs in technology outside of the larger firms.  So many opportunities exist for you if you are a strong engineer but realize down the road that you are in the wrong place for cultural reasons.