People at hedge fund Two Sigma are mostly happy because they don't have to work too hard
How horrible has life been at Two Sigma, the quantitative hedge fund which has got some new CEOs after its founders spent the past few years arguing and were compelled to step down yesterday?
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Maybe not that horrible at all. Maybe quite nice, actually.
We asked multiple sources both inside and outside of Two Sigma to comment on the angst of working for two men who used to vacation together, but who have come to find each other intolerable. No one seems to care. "Two Sigma is a world-class company," declared one insider. "The boss thing has never been an issue for Two Sigma," one quant recruiter says.
This is at odds with what Two Sigma itself said in March, when it claimed that the dispute between its founders (David Siegel and John Overdeck) was leading to exits and making it hard to hire. It might be that we spoke to the wrong people. However, it may also be that Two Sigma has a special power: a relaxed approach.
On forum website Blind, multiple recent reviews of Two Sigma say it's a good place to work by virtue of its great work-life balance and nice people. People are "genuine," "fantastic," "humble", and "kind" say the anonymous reviewers who are validated as working there. "WLB is very chill," says one. The work from home policy is "nice." The stress is "low."
Two Sigma declined to comment, but the implication is that the bitter animosity between Siegel and Overdeck has mostly stayed between Siegel and Overdeck. To the extent that it's a problem, it seems to have caused bureaucracy, a lack of strategic direction and a rift between the modellers (who reported to Overdeck) and the engineers (who reported to Siegel). There are various complaints that the engineers have been doing their own thing.
There are also complaints that Two Sigma doesn't pay as well as rivals. However, last time we looked, Two Sigma was paying an average of £345k ($454k) per head in London, and the company is currently advertising next year's quant research graduate roles in New York at salaries alone of $200k.
Naturally, people have left. Recent departures include Aziz Lookman, the head of data science for private equity, Yan Duan, the vice president of data strategy, and Mike MacMillan, the head of equities modelling data, plus others. Although they all seem to have escaped the data team, we understand there are no points of commonality and that this is just standard churn. Nothing to see here.
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