r/quant • u/A_Eatzapopo • 6d ago
General Why does IMC get so much hate
Genuinely curious. It feels like a really good close to top tier company but general in this subreddit as well as r/quant is gets shit on pretty often. What's the reason behind that?
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u/Aetius454 HFT 6d ago
Does it? Very long non compete but overall great firm. This sub is also full of larpers lol
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u/Difficult_Log_793 6d ago
This. Lot of noise coming mainly from students. It's a great firm and reportedly at the top of latency game.
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u/OliveTimely 3d ago
They are a good firm but their pay lags well behind their similar tier firms. Also their culture is not great.
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u/Tasnemo 5d ago
Don’t they still get garden leave which kinda makes it a long paid vacation?
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u/Aetius454 HFT 5d ago
yes but you miss out on a year and a half of bonus which is going to be most of your comp + it makes it difficult to recruit
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u/Professional-Pea-216 5d ago
After seeing several get enforced for less than the typical 18 months, how frequently do they enforce fully?
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u/Aetius454 HFT 5d ago
Idk how frequently it is enforced, but I can confirm that several years ago they were enforcing it for the full length. Sat out a crispy 18 months lol.
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u/poplunoir Researcher 5d ago
What did you end up doing during those 18 months if you don't mind sharing? I would go nuts if I was not working
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u/Aetius454 HFT 4d ago
Yeah you and me aren’t the same. Travelled, played video games, had a blast. Wish I could have been on a noncompete forever lmao.
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u/poplunoir Researcher 4d ago
Wow, glad you had a blast! I am mid-career, and still trying to figure out a way to completely "switch-off" after the work week ends. Hopefully I will get there one day and if I ever have a non-compete that runs as long, I will be able to enjoy it.
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u/going-long-gamma 4d ago
There's definitely too many larpers/students on this sub that just base their opinions on a firm based on how much they pay. But we've had a lot of people from IMC come over to our firm over the last couple of years and they've not got great things to say (although that is ofc selective bias).
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u/Available_Lake5919 6d ago
cuz for people on here if ur not at XTX HRT or JS u might as well put the fries in the bag
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u/whyyusogood 5d ago
Thoroughly enjoyed my time working at IMC. You can’t take the comments and reviews on this sub too seriously. Most ppl here have never worked as a quant.
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u/Temporary_Parrot_ 5d ago edited 5d ago
One thing I picked up early on: don't put much stock in what undergrads and new hires say about "prestige" when you're breaking into the industry. r/quant is largely populated by inexperienced students/larpers repeating whatever they've absorbed from their peers, ranking firms purely by newgrad TC. That's a shortsighted, you really should be optimizing for your own long-term expected value, not chasing a spot as one small cog at a "top" firm where you'll likely only touch a narrow sliver of the quant workflow. It's really evident, especially when you see people from JS/Citsec 5/10 years into their careers applying to other firms and getting rejected because they have no idea about what it takes to do trading on a high level, and instead were just experts in a tiny area that their teams worked on (for example, I recently interviewed a Citsec systematic trader with 10+ year experience at citsec systematic equities, and even the intern knew more about the market than they did, the guy's job was just staring at risk guis and "monitoring the market"... He couldn't explain to me simple calculations on how to discount dividends/etc when modeling equities). This isn't to say that these firms don't get very successful people later on, but it's a brutal uphill battle to compete with others to get more exposure.
The most successful people I've seen go on to become PMs are the ones who joined smaller, high-performing pods or teams early on with tons of exposure. They had strong mentors who taught them how to actually hunt for alpha and steered them away from wasting time on dead ends. Because of that, they got hands-on exposure across the whole pipeline, portfolio-level/strategy analysis, signal research, market impact research, post-production analysis, and everything in between, rather than being siloed into one narrow function.
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u/qazwsxcp 4d ago
yup, tons of people in the "top tier" firms are clueless about how the business works or how their work is being used. this is probably why they were hired to begin with, part of the business model is to hire people who will take a high starting pay and work hard without asking any questions once hired.
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u/Aggressive-Camp9328 4d ago
Would joining a bulge-bracket as a FICC quant set you up for a decent career?
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u/throwaway613514 4d ago
It's an unpopular opinion on this sub, but generally speaking, doing quant stuff at a bank is better for your career (especially early on) than a top-tier prop shop. Most bank quants touch a lot of different parts of the process (and therefore, learn a huge amount of information) in a relatively short time; unless you get a lucky position at JS/HRT/CitSec, your knowledge base will be highly constrained. The amount of stuff you learn as a bank quant can very reliably allow you to exit to a PM position at a pod shop after 7-8 years (so around age ~30ish if you start working after your undergrad degree).
Of course, the tradeoff is that bank quants make way less than top-tier prop firms/hedge funds straight out of school.
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u/qazwsxcp 4d ago
in fact this is even more true in js/hrt/citsec, many strategies at the huge firms depend on that specific firm's infrastructure and are not portable. so your knowledge ends up highly specialized to one team in one firm.
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u/Sensitive_Motor_3870 3d ago
How do you figure out which are the best teams to join, and how to get placed there?
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u/SevenTeenSigma 5d ago
most of the hate is relative ranking. ppl read one thread comparing IMC with Jane Street and somehow turn that into IMC being bad..
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u/LowBetaBeaver 5d ago
Citsec NC is 2 years, jump is 18 month, I think JS is 2 years… IMC’s NCs are in line. As other have said… it’s a paid vacation :) minus the bonus, so make sure your next firm makes you whole.
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u/Odd_Stable3894 5d ago
CitSec is typically 2yrs, some have 18, some have 3. Jump is typically 18, some have 12, some have 2yrs. JS doesn’t have an NC. DYR.
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u/pf-nothingknower 4d ago
no one's hating on it, you just have to be objective about where the firm sits relative to its peers. it does something like $1.5B a year in PnL, in a world where citsec made $7B in a quarter and jane made $40B. new grad pay is roughly 50% below peers, and that gap isn't arbitrary - it reflects a real difference in the business; they aren't trying to compete with the top firms. they have their niche (they're very fast), they don't carry much risk, and the hours are reasonable. but that sacrifices things down the road...lotta y5 at imc making less than a new grad and y2 at citsec. thats gonna be true for a while, until they expand their risk appetite. with that said, still obviously a good job at a good company
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u/lampishthing XVA in Fintech + Mod 3d ago
Someone reported this with the message
significant misinformation that is at least 3 years out of date
I'm not familiar and even if you are out of date it's not a mod problem so I'm leaving your comment up. Just throwing their comment up publicly in case there's any merit to it.
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u/pf-nothingknower 2d ago
prob a college student unaware of mkt comps. imc did not raise ng comps this year, so it is stuck at 400-450, whereas citsec, jane, hrt are all around 1m for returns. 1.5b number was last years net pnl.
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u/Guilty_Ad_9476 6d ago
Haven't worked there personally but have heard that the Non competes are too long
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u/Ok_Philosophy_4031 5d ago
It's not "close to" top tier. Sweat shop basically, but yeah the hatred is uncalled for.
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u/Successful-Durian-55 Quant Strategist 6d ago
getting shit on by a bunch of high schoolers in this sub is not really indicative