If you are ultra profitable then the difference between paying market rate and top of market rate might be double the salary and that would still be a rounding error on a spreadsheet somewhere.
I guess it also depends how sensitive your output is to the quality of the developers, lots of enterprises I've worked for you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between a competent developer and an excellent developer since the end result is from a distance pretty much the same in that case it would make no sense to pay more than will get you a bunch of competent developers.
My impression from the outside is that janestreet does see that value.
Some what correlated I love it when companies say "We hire the absolute best developers" and you ask what they pay and market-rate is the answer.
JaneStreet remains fascinating to me though because while they do programming and I'm a programmer we are almost different species because of the problems we solve - which makes it interesting to me.
So it does seem very high, but not impossible?
Edit: I just noticed base pay–then yes, that's about what it'd be, but base pay tends to cap out very quickly so it's not a good measure of compensation.
To be fair I don't care about salaries as much as half of HN appear to, I'm quite comfortable on that with a wife on a postdocs wage too.
A solid salary helps.
Pre or post tax?
As a London fintech contractor (until recently) I have able to pull in around $22k USD pcm pre tax, or very, very roughly $14k USD pcm post tax - contractors have various ways to manage tax load and time off so it's never a direct translation.
$16.5k pcm for an intern still seems utterly crazy, given my starting annual salary of £21k 20 years ago, but if there is a) a ton of money flowing through the company and b) the intern is able to help them bring in more than that over the course of a year then... I guess it's worth it to them, and that's all that really matters.
The salary numbers on https://levels.fyi seem to be plausible enough for US FAANG salaries, if you want an idea of what they look like.
From what I hear though, interviews are hell, worse than FAANG or any tech companies and probably extremely competitive.
https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html?track=Software%20Engineer&s...
Finance non-competes seem to be MUCH more restrictive than tech. Also, you have to average 5-year comps... because Finance pay can be very volatile. Also, in tech, many more companies try to filter out non-team players during interviews.
