That's very interesting. I had a chance to possibly work at the NYC Facebook office which I didn't capitalize on, after reading this I'm having intense FOMO.

Are you in Big Tech or Finance?

In a general sense, both. I am working in finance at a hedge fund now, but for a more or less pure tech group. My previous job was for a large e-commerce player, but before that I spent about a decade doing various forms of algo trading and HFT.

What skills do you need to work as a software developer in algo trading and HFT? What sort of job titles should you be searching for? Most jobs in this space seem to want Statistics or Applied Math related majors. I want to look for software development jobs in HFT.

Generally low level C++ will do it. I have been out of the game for about 5 years now, but when I left the game was all about speed speed speed. We weren't trading smarter anymore, it was just about trading fast. If you are faster, you don't just put an order out there with an opinion that the market will move in your favor, you get an immediate risk free return (risk free assuming operationally everything works as expected). I also worked on the "benchmark strategy" side- VWAP/TWAP type algos, when they were very new, and there was some statistics involved but the math was fairly simple. I haven't kept up with that side of the space, I am sure they have added complexity, but fundamentally you are looking at how a particular security has traded in the past- IE how much volume does it tend to trade at 10am vs 10:30 vs 11am, compare that with market statistics for the current day- is it high or low volume, is volatility higher- and apply some heuristics about what % of a parent order to put in the market at any given time.

This is a bit separate from the actual execution in the market, which is called smart order routing, and that just focuses on speed.

The best book on this still seems to be the now almost 10 year old "Algorithmic Trading and DMA" by Barry Johnson. If you want to get a feel for the strategies involved, this is your best bet: https://www.amazon.com/Algorithmic-Trading-DMA-introduction-...

As for job titles, they tend to be generic like "infrastructure developer, strategist" but look for key words like "Smart Order Router, Algorithmic Trading, Index Arb (itrage), statistical arbitrage, market making, dark pool. I put two of those in Morgan Stanley's site and got a bunch of relevant hits. Posting numbers 3119617 3120636 are actual jobs in this space.

A better bet is to just look at job openings for the companies who specialize in this stuff- Virtu, Jump, Hudson River Trading, Citadel Securities, etc...

Great, thanks!

Can't it be explained simply by relative sizes?

Most estimates I've heard are that Google has over x10 times the number of software engineers than Facebook.

Looking at 10ks filed with the SEC for both from the end of 2017, FB reports 25k employees vs Google's 80k.

There is no breakdown on how many of those are engineers, but I would assume that the ratios are similar.

I was interested in looking, because that would be somewhat in line with the ratios I see in terms of resumes, though I don't have real numbers, it feels more like 15:1. I see resumes from google every week, FB... its so rare I can't even give you a consistent interval, once every few months?

Facebook's NY office is also significantly, disproportionally smaller than Google's. Google's NY office is the largest outside of California and is in many ways a second heart of the company, it really doesn't feel like a remote office. Facebook's NY office is extremely small even considering that Facebook is a smaller company than Google (their largest office outside of California is, IIRC, Seattle).

In theory we have just as good a recruiting presence on the west coast, and we have an office out there to be based out of as well (I am all for completely remote, but have yet to get upper mgmt comfortable). In practice, I doubt this is true, and also working for a hedge fund probably has a lot less draw and prestige associated with it out west.

This may account for it but I still find the discrepancy to be unusual.

In addition to what Itaxpica said (which is very true), I believe I read somewhere that FB does have a lot of non-engineer employees. Can't provide a credible source or even a reason for why that is so.

What tech stack or skill set are you hiring for? I would be interested, though not ex-FAANG.