salaries in job Ads fake?

[inexorable]

There have been several posts about salaries but i could not find post on this.
I often see salaries posted in quant job ads by head hunters to be very high.
For roles like Quantitative Researcher, Quantitative developer which require about 5 years of experience they post salaries like 300K , 500K USD.
Even if they include bonus and other perks(may be monetizing insurance, coffee in office and other perks) that seems an exaggeration.

may be those are true for a top hedge fund like Renaissance technology but not in 99.99% of other cases?

Also i read in several other places that quants try to exaggerate their salaries to make themselves look good. say, since everyone in his peer circle says he earns 250K USD(even though they make only 150K USD), one would also say he makes 250K,even if makes 150K (imagining a hypothetical opportunity of bonus he could have earned with probability of 0.01)


I know salary depends on role, location etc. But lets say role is specific to quantitative developer and researcher positions and location is nyc or london.
can someone give please give their opinion about what should someone actually expect when a Quantitative developer job ad says 300-350K USD for 5-6 work experience? May be like a break down of what base salary, bonus etc. to expect(bonus nowadays cannot be counted upon as much as it was few years ago, I guess)

 

[Jayanthan]

Check this out, this should give you a rough estimate.

 

[DMD]

what would the average bonus be for someone with a 95k salary? Obviously bonuses vary depending on the job function, but on aggregate.

 

[Jayanthan]

what would the average bonus be for someone with a 95k salary? Obviously bonuses vary depending on the job function, but on aggregate.

Obviously bonuses vary depending on the job function

 

[DominiConnor]

At 5-6 years experience $3-500K is not very unusual, but nor is 200K, it's a distribution.

You expect the % of pay that is bonus to increase as the total comp goes up, at the 300K level, I'd put the base pay on about 120-150, but again it varies to include 90% of pay being bonus and vice versa.

inexorable raises the issues of benefits and these are a complex part of compensation that is going to get more complex.

You can expect healthcare and pension pretty much as standard in this industry, but they vary wildly in quality in the form of exclusions and family cover. Since this is an MFE site I guess many don't focus on the latter, but it can get important.

Some firms provide a menu of benefits and allow you to buy them with an allowance which is actually better. For instance if you're married and both working there isn't so much value in both getting health insurance to cover the other.

When I first wandered into a bank it was standard for there to be a mess of benefits, allowances etc but generally these have declined in value and number, but...

There is pressure to pay less in "cash" and for the more visible staff pay+bonus is creating discomfort, so much so that my Reassuringly Expensive Lawyers (tm) and I have been discussing how to reduce the issues here.
A few things that have largely disappeared but will come back again:
Company cars, in many countries such as the UK, these are quite rare, 20 years ago they were the norm,
Cheap loans, these can be tax efficient as well
Home Office expenses, if people work outside hours then you can set up their homes for it
General Expenses, many things you could pay for staff, travel, sports club membership and more extensive entertainment for instance.
"Insurance", paying premiums for expensive cover that has no real benefit for the firm.

 

[inexorable]

Thank you for your reply DominiConnor.

 

[AlgotFin]

While talking to a few recruiters, these numbers dont look fake. I dont know why a recruiter(who is representing a company) would do fake it, there seems no reason for it, because sooner or later truth will be out. However, I am trying to understand that why are these numbers of $200-500K projected by companies when C++/JAVA/C# programmers are available at < $200K. What is so different that goes in the job which bumps the salary higher than non-quant jobs?

 

[TraderJoe]

Most of the ads for C++ / Java developers ask for Bachelors degree + 5 years experience. Maybe that explains the $150 K salary.

Most of the ads on EfinancialCareers ask for PhD + 5 years programming experience. Maybe that explains the $300 K salary.

I mean PhD + 5 years programming experience is obviously a much higher standard that Bachelors + 5 years programming experience.