Deferred compensation is probably not relevant to any of the major quant firms, payment is almost entirely cash. If you're high enough up to start receiving stake in a prop firm directly as part of your bonus you are an order of magnitude above the TC cited by the original comment.
Of course, the amount of comp you can get is a big reason people stick around. For that level of earning potential JS is really good on the WLB front. But it's not going to be as good as big tech is (or at least has been), since QT/QR just has different requirements as a field.
Currently I work at a large bank. My comp is all cash, but many of my colleagues get deferred stock compensation. Not sure what exactly the limit is but it's definitely much less than, say, $1m.
I worked over 10 years overseas at a Fortune 500 financial firm where my contract specified that my garden leave period jumped up if I ever accepted stock compensation. I got the feeling that was related to some legal requirements for shedding protections for "highly compensated executives". The garden leave worked out well, as I left right at the end of my paternity leave, so I effectively had almost half a year of paternity leave.
I didn't bother checking if I was getting the maximum legally allowed garden leave period in my jurisdiction, as the contract seemed fair. In any case, in some jurisdictions, I think some deferred equity compensation kicks in earlier than one might expect, in order to legally make more employees highly compensated executives.
I've always lived well within my means at my base salary, but even if I hadn't a good head hunter can often negotiate a signing bonus to partially backfill the lost expected TC , so you're effectively not really going down to your base salary during garden leave.
Large banks are for sure a different story, though I've heard of other large banks buying people out that they wanted to hire by offering the equivalent package in their stock of what the guy would've made in the other company's stock.
Deferred != stock.
> If you're high enough up to start receiving stake in a prop firm directly as part of your bonus you are an order of magnitude above the TC cited by the original comment.
Fair
I suppose by the technical definition the year end bonus cash is deferred comp, but I don't think 1 year is especially hard to plan around. People might stick out an extra few months because of it but it's not locking anyone in for years at a time. Plus even if you subtracted an entire year from the JS retention rates they are still quite good.
Regardless, the amounts cited by the original comment are only the base which isn't deferred by more than 2 weeks at a time, whatever your bonus potential is.
