Quants are currently being hired in vast swathes across banks for automation in e-rates, eFX. Cash equities seems to have already been done by most. The next wave will be flow derivatives eg. swaps, swaptions, liquid bonds & central risk books. Being a quant is a very good place right now but the lack of aggression on PnL by some more traditional pricing quants means that newbies often face pretty meagre pay and talent is being stripped out by big tech companies. Banks seems to be responding to this by hiring quants paid directly by the desk (known as strats). The downside of this is the pressure is far greater as they don’t hide behind a corporate division.

It’s probably lower at regional banks. The figures here came from the larger banks. I would expect base salaries to be similar at the regional banks, but the bonuses to maybe be 20-30% lower. I don’t have the data, though, so I am just extrapolating based on the discount in other roles.

Thanks. Offhand, I’m not sure how you would do that because we haven’t had stories from readers who switched from data science into finance. But I think your best bet would be to aim for hedge funds that use quant strategies or prop trading firms instead of large banks because large banks want to see finance experience and credentials, while the others just want you to get results. You should probably start by creating some type of project such as a trading algorithm or statistical analysis of a strategy you came up with and then using it to reach out to firms. The strategy described here would work pretty well:

https://mergersandinquisitions.com/quant-research-jobs/

Some of them, yes, but humans will always be around in some form for larger/more complex deals that can’t be automated in the same way. So I doubt that everything will be done by algorithms.

Thank you for your insightful answer and very useful link. Love your website – it’s been consequential in breaking in and my career development.

Furthermore, do you think that ‘strader’ types (mr, qr) will supplant the old guard of traders when the dust clears from automation?

I think that could easily happen. It has always been easier to move over from back or middle-office roles in sales & trading to front-office ones, even before automation began. If you can interact with traders on a regular basis, it’s definitely possible to move over (still not ‘easy’ but probably easier than most other back/middle-office to front-office transitions):

https://mergersandinquisitions.com/middle-office-to-sales-trading/

And if not, how hard is it to move to trading from one of these roles?

Good question. I don’t know if there’s a specific reason for the discount, but it might be that traders are perceived as being “more responsible” for the profits or managing the risk and limiting losses, whereas salespeople don’t have to worry about risk in the same way.