Hedge funds are "cool again" for graduates, Big Tech is out
If you're the cream of 2024's crop of technical students, there are many firms and industries vying for you to intern with them. Historically, big tech firms were students' preferred destinations, but at Quant Strats 2024 in London last week, a technology head at a major hedge fund said things have changed.
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Barry Fitzgerald, co-head of front office engineering at Man Group, said big tech had the upper hand when it came to graduate recruitment in the past, but that this "changed almost overnight 18 months ago."
Fitzgerald said Man saw a "sudden big growth of grad applicants again" from those previously tempted away to the Googles and Metas on the West Coast. "Before it was super hard to get good applicants, now we're cool again." He noted applications are now "very competitive at internship level" too.
Fitzgerald partially attributed the change to the wave of layoffs in tech. "Graduates can see that, last year, they laid off loads of people," He said. "Even if someone knows they themselves are safe, there's a risk they could lose someone they work with."
It's not clear how many interns Google hired this year, but it recruited 3.5k in 2021. Meta, Google and Amazon did not respond to us for a request for comment on this year's classes or application rates.
As applications for hedge fund internships and graduate jobs increase, getting a junior job in a hedge fund stands to become harder than ever. Last year, Balyasny got 40k applicants for just 100 roles. Point72 had a 0.6% acceptance rate for its largest ever internship class this year, and received over 30k applications to its Academy. Citadel and Citadel Securities received over 85k applications for their 2024 internships, at a ~0.5% acceptance rate. A spokesperson from Citadel's hedge fund told us that successful applicants now tend to have far fewer offers from tech firms than they have historically, "which shows that they are less interested and active in the space."
Interns at hedge funds can also make over $20k per month, not including some hefty sign-on bonuses. According to data from levels.fyi, interns at Meta and Google earn less than half as much in salary, and don't appear to receive sign-on bonuses at all.
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