Typically you have to leave to move up beyond entry level work and there is nowhere else to go in Seattle.
Is Offer B trading Asia from NYC? That would be a nightmare. I did it from the West Coast for a while and that was bad enough.
Ultimately what matters most is what kind of work you want to do in the future.
The position descriptions make it tricky. The girl is entry level, but she’s on the buy side already. The alternatives are deep back office bank compliance or being a prop trading assistant (that sounds awful, IMO). Seattle isn’t a cheap city, but you’ll likely have more dollars left over there than with an even higher salary in New York. New York is a cool place for young people (Seattle is too IMO). I mean, do the job you want to do. But the SWOT on this one would have me leaning towards sticking around. Full disclosure: I love Seattle so I’d be inherently biased.
A. 60, B. 55, current 45-50 (trial base currently review coming in two weeks)
A is apparently technically front office in the sense that it’s working directly with the sales guys helping them plan and be compliant. The receiving end for all the back office communication, if you will. Yes, functions will probably be similar to Bo positions but maybe I can spin it more attractively?
B is mostly us equities. Can’t imagine the working hours otherwise ha.
A is a death sentence, unless you want to make a career out of compliance. I think you could go either way with sticking with your current job (buy side, hooray!) and the prop trading position (more upside?). It might have to come down to organizational reputation. If you’re with a hacksaw fund in Seattle, and the prop desk is at a reputable firm, I think the shift would make sense. Not an easy choice, though.
^must agree.
So you want to move to the buyside to compliance (backoffice) for a messly 10K more in New York?
You sound young and inexperienced and your already complaining about grunt work raises so many red flags. Figure out what you want to do and get on that track.
You will have to leave Seattle either way if you want a serious career in finance. If you want an okay career and love Seattle and want to raise a family there, that is a different story. If you want to kill it, Seattle is not even an option. I know all the firms in Seattle and I can tell you there is nothing there, it is a dead end.
The compliance job is a waste of time IMO. It’s between trading assistant and your current role. I don’t know who takes a job in NYC at $55 though? That is less money then you are making now. NYC is 75-100% more expensive than Seattle.
It depends on what exactly the trading job is but I would move to NYC in a second. You can do that job for a year and then easily pivot to a buyside job. Don’t forget, basically no one speaks Japanese and Japan is hot right now.
This is kind of dumb. Russell Investments is very well respected, and there’s a whole host of private equity and asset management firms that could be objectively described as “killing it.”
False.
First of all, Russell is based in Tacoma, which is a shit hole. More importantly though, Russell is a C-class type of buyside job. You think people around here give Fidelity a bad time, that’s because they don’t know about Russell. She would be at Russell for 15-20 years before she would even begin to approach “real finance money”. If making a lot of money is not her goal, that’s fine. I don’t know what her goal is.
There are only two good private equity and asset management firms in Seattle. One is Vulcan, Paul Allen’s fund. You can see there team here:
http://capital.vulcan.com/Team/Index.html
The second is Bill Gates’ fund, Cascade.
No offense to emichan, but she’s not getting a job at either of those funds any time soon.
Most of the rest are hacksaw. Both of the sell side firms are gone (they were hacksaw). Glacier is a hacksaw hedge fund. Archon is relatively hacksaw. Fleckenstein Cap is pretty good but he doesn’t run a traditional fund, you can’t get a job there. Steelhead is good but that’s not in Seattle. The fund emichan is at is pretty okay, she’s actually at one of the best funds given the options.
I think there might be a couple of other very small PE shops. There is not a “host of well respected firms.” There are two well respected firms, Vulcan and Cascade.
^^ Great rebuttal.
Edit: Ever heard of Northern Lights?
Russell is in Seattle now (not Tacoma, and who wants to live there), but I don’t know what’s going on re: sales process. I’ve spoken to some people and sounds like lot of people there are unsure about their futures there. Also, just from what I’ve heard, they’re not really hiring entry levels right now.
Sorry, I might have sounded like I was complaining, but I really don’t mind doing entry level work. I just would prefer to know if what I’m doing is entry level work or dead end work. That’s fair, right?
Turned down compliance role. Waiting to hear from trading, see what the final number is and also talked to the fund here.
I have not heard of Northern Lights. I think I missed one or two others as well. There is / was a mutual fund but I forget the name.
That’s right, I think I did hear that Russell moved and forgot. The thing about Russell is that a lot of the jobs are things like currency ETF rebalancing and other “front office” jobs that don’t really involved investment analysis. They are more like paper pusher jobs. That’s fine for people who want that type of job. It’s not “killing it” though.
Killing it is not all it’s cracked up to be necessarily and I know it’s not the end all for everyone. Some people like the challenge, some people like the money, and other people don’t care at all and would rather focus energy on other parts of their lives. To each their own. But it’s pretty hard to kill it in Seattle unless you were killing it in SF or NYC before and generally have top flight credentials. If I were young and spoke a rare foreign language, I would move to SF or NYC in a second but that’s not for everyone. Anyway, life goes on.
That’s a key point. A lot of places in the US you would think are BSD backwaters (such as Seattle) actually have some top-flight shops with lots of people killing it there. Problem is they’re for people in PE/AM with lots of experience. So you’re dead right that starting out there is very hard.
I think you had half of AF ready to pounce until you put in that last bit of disappointment.
You forgot a nudge nudge wink wink in that post of yours
Stop trying to make my mother happy.
This. I’m the youngest at the current firm by at least 10 years. That’s why I’m afraid that this might turn out to be a dead end job, because everyone else is so senior.
I know I should start out at a bigger firm in a bigger city. It’s just that my alternative now is in trading, so it’s apples to grapefruit juice, which makes it a really hard decision to make.
What do you want to do long term?
OP, you still haven’t answered any of the questions on what you want to do?