Oh, I have! I spend my days building software for a variety clients, and some happen to be investment banks and hedge funds, so I am still heavily involved with the industry. I am not employed by a fund or bank anymore. I quit my job in finance, not because I was doing badly or making less money, but because it was a terrible use of my time; all I could see was stagnation. It got to a point where I was earning a healthy 6 figure salary for "attending meetings about other meetings". A monkey could have done my job (the only reason a monkey wasn't doing my job is because it couldn't get past the damn finance interview, which is incommensurately harder than the job itself).
When I quit, it took guts, because a job in finance does give you a false sense of comfort and security. But looking back, I was infinitely happier from day one, and am better off than my peers who stayed in their front office roles (this, of course, is not guaranteed and ymmv). I also feel my potential to grow is much more than my past colleagues, who still seem to be trapped in their job's safety net.
Now I'm a passionate engineer and building good products makes me happy, so that's what I do. I have, through my company, launched a couple of private SaaS products, and hope to launch another, more public product soon. I also do a bit of property development in the UK. Whatever time is left over, I use to play tennis or spend time with family. It's great!
grass is always greener though. I have friends that moved into finance from elsewhere and regretted it quickly. For some of them, the pay boost was drastic enough to suffer through the misery. That pay change isn't so meaningful when moving from one high paying career to another.
As an aside, the software engineer complaints about technical interviews always makes me laugh. Finance ones were even worse. Mostly useless and much more intense and time consuming. Engineering is tough because it's hard to point back at prior performance in a tangible way. Anyone can sit in a large corporation and write some for loops. It's much easier to hide in the background in software. Trading was easier to vet: "someone gave me $30m and I didn't lose any of it".
I really don't know. This is something that confuses me about the finance industry in general. Perhaps it's the percentage fee structure on large deals that ends up routing a lot of capital towards finance firms. They spend it frivolously on offices and people.
I suspect he was being hard on the organisation, as in he was providing value but just not the kind of value that he wanted to be adding.
It's valuable for middle/upper management to have someone 'technical' in meetings. Often as a sounding board/is this kind of thing possible/how should we do X/can you explain how Y works/explain it to me like I'm 5. You're providing what feels like 'general knowledge', but is actually knowledge/perspective gained over a number of years working on/in technology.
And depending on the industry, you might also be wheeled between projects and end up having the same conversations again and again just with different people.
From a personal perspective it feels like you're not learning anything (and you probably aren't), and it's a waste of your time. Rather than explaining to people the difference between message queues and databases you'd rather be building systems and solving 'hard' problems (either problems that are hard, or not involving 'soft skills' :-)).
Very insightful; your analysis is spot on! There is also a worryingly large proportion that are well paid but don't add value. Also, a significant subset who don't even fully understand the job they do, and just wing it!
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