I'm not huge into finance, can you tell me what it's supposed to give me an idea about? It seems like he's talking about his early career in the context of possible advice for people starting out.
Some of it is career advice that would be applicable to other fields too -- talking about education, building connections and networks, getting your foot in the door at a company, etc.
The article does read a lot like the "Psychopath's Guide To Career-Hunting". Honestly, the tone reminded me a lot of some of my undergrad peers who were pursuing investment banking jobs, which I suppose makes sense considering his about section.
That all said, if your goal is to get the highest paying job possible, this seems like useful advice.
// However, you have to admit that your ”hard working career builder” statement was designed to somehow liken this character to someone who actually labors for their money. I have to ask…why not work hard building a different career?
The thing you are assuming / missing is that for many of us working in finance is well connected to meaningful impact on the world.
To give you a very simple example - one of my typical clients a few jobs back were state teachers and police retirement funds. The folks who run those funds directly impact the quality of life in retirement of these civic employees - and the entire financial industry (brokers, vendors, etc) exist to cater to them.
So, the fund manager works to deliver best returns for the retirees. The broker works to provide the manager with superior execution. The trading platform vendor works to provide the broker with reliability and efficiency this requires, etc.
The "deeper" into finance you are, the more you recognize the connection between things like farming, energy generations, business formation, etc being enabled through our work.
So yeah plenty of guys chose finance because it's a good way to take care of their family AND they see meaning in their work.
This (and its converse) are exactly the advice I give to undergrads who, here at the University of Chicago, are heavily recruited by both local and NY finance firms. I like to point out that if you love money, you will be among others who do and will probably enjoy your job and especially the pay. And if you don't, hearing about a trader's addition to his Rolex collection or figuring out "opportunities" in an exchange's rules or implementation will destroy your soul.
BTW, I don't give this advice in a loaded way - my wife and many of my friends work in finance.
You're right, I should be more clear. What I meant by that is that there's no clear explicit reason why he's interested in investment banking rather than marketing, consulting, publishing, advertising, whathaveyou.
> the closer you are to the profit centres, the more you get paid
Yes, this. I would go further and say that if you're "IT" in a finance firm you're a second class citizen. You want to do engineering in a trading role: designing prop trading strategies, managing portfolios and pnl.
There are very few financial firms that are tech companies at the core. The landscape today is certainly better than it was ten or twenty years ago. Today, the firms who have a standing chance to compete in the arena have automated everything.
I'm making sweeping generalizations, so obviously YMMV.
Your intuition about ethical dilemmas in finance is not entirely misplaced. I know all the arguments about finance and trading being useful because it is the process by which capital is "efficiently" allocated in the real economy, but that's academic fantasy which ignores how the real world works. The truth is, in order thrive in finance (and, by extension, crypto) you need to be someone who is perfectly happy being "ethically flexible."
By the time you start running into these ethical dilemmas, you're typically in too deep and it's too late to get out. You justify it to yourself because you're just a small cog in a big machine who can't change anything and you need to earn a living (and have gotten too dependent to a certain level of income that you can't earn anywhere else at that point). You can relatively easily make as much as a doctor or lawyer, but I can assure you that in a successful finance career you will need to "ethically flexible" whether you like it or not. A doctor can go home knowing that they saved lives, in finance you'll feel the pretty much the exact opposite.
You said the competition for postdoc is rather fierce, the competition for other jobs (e.g. AI and finance jobs) is just as fierce if not more. Basing your decision on fear of competition is not a good idea because every career or job is highly competitive.
You need to pick a track and work on it. Significant learning is part of it, but I should also mention that your network is equally important if not more. You need to build your network. One way to do this is to stay in touch with people you went to school with, not least because some of them will get jobs in your target field, and they might be able to help bring you onboard. Another way to network is to ask out people you don't know (e.g. that you find on LinkedIn, or profs or whatever) for "coffee" to learn about their industry - this is known as an "informational interview," you can Google the term to learn more. Good luck!
Yep that was the sentence that raised my eyebrow. Is it so hard to imagine that someone might actually be interested and motivated by investment banking or whatever else?
> Get the experience you want ASAP, invest as much of your salary as you can, and then job hop.
This works in tech but not necessarily in other white collar fields like finance. In finance, there is an unwritten rule that you are supposed to settle with a firm by ~30-35 and stay there for the rest of your career. Many firms don't hire laterally unless they have no other choice. Professionals like investment bankers and CFAs are recruited straight out of university and groomed to assume leadership positions in the long term.
> People going into finance were less likely to say they gained an “in-depth knowledge of a field” or that they better understood “the process of science and experimentation” after their four years at MIT.
Maybe that's because most jobs on Wall Street aren't that technical? A huge part of the job of an investment banker is learning how to socialize with rich folks and sell investment products to them. The president of Morgan Stanley gave a talk at my college and made it very explicit: "At Morgan Stanley, you are a salesman first". That's what the job is.
Ex-finance guy here, though I went against the grain and didn't go for financial companies, trying to stay close to where you came from is a solid strategy. Especially if you have some sort of business experience and a level of maturity about you, a lot of companies will be quite eager to take you on because you know the field.
I don't understand the thinking in getting into a career field that you have no intrinsic interest in.
Think of all the people, more or less all of them driven, successful and highly intelligent who go into finance each year. How many of them are in it for pecuniary reasons? Most people get a job as a means of getting money, are to greater or lesser degrees alienated from their labour and are not achieving peak actualisation or anything close to it in their work. Those who do are living the dream and if you don't know anyone who does so it hardly seems a plausible goal, does it?
> the finance sector lures away high-skilled workers
I only just recently learned that doing finance is something people want to get into. And I still don't understand why, so that's my question.
See, I've always thought of it as this thing that people only do because they thought they were supposed to. I'm in a maths degree right now, so I really know this feeling of not being qualified for anything real.
Other than being a teacher, which is the thing I want, being an office boy in an insurance company is like the only other option I've ever been given.
So I always thought finance people were only in it for that same reason. Not having a choice.
> if all you care about is money, go where the money is. ... go into finance
I've not seen clear evidence that "finance" is an especially reliable way for a reasonably smart person to make a lot of money. Mostly what I see is anecdote, which I consider worthless because NYC people and especially NYC finance people are full of shit about how much they make. It's the culture. Furthermore, to the extent that finance is well compensated it's hazard pay. Lots of burnout and layoffs. Also, unreasonable hours.
I personally know an engineer in suburban philadelphia who works for a firm that does elevator retrofit consulting for older buildings. He's worth tens of millions. I have met a very rich guy who built up two plants that produce pasta. I indirectly know a very wealthy guy who flies around the world consulting on expanding sewage treatment plant capacity. I also had a wealthy old guy neighbor who just ran four car washes very well for many years.
I have yet to personally meet a very wealthy person who made the money in "finance". I also don't live in NYC, so take my estimations with a grain of salt.
The evidence that I can personally trust indicates to me the low risk, high probability way to get a lot of money is with niche industry expertise and risked capital. I also think there's a "where there's muck there's brass" thing going on where real physical businesses like climbing in elevator shafts, sewage plant pools, and grain towers are under-competed. Everyone wants a finance desk job.
PG is an amazing writer and the wood worker analogy is very smart, but I am just amazed at how biased he is against finance.
I do not know a single person who gets in to finance because 'they want to be rich'. Most people go in to finance because it is viewed as a meritocracy where all your coworkers are really smart. I'm disappointed that someone as smart and experienced as PG has not taken the time to understand such a large a diverse industry.
There have been a number of comments from people who find the idea of the markets 'unfun', or just not relevant to the roles and tasks they want to be doing. My impression from what has been released so far is that there is actually a plethora of tasks/technologies/etc involved, and as such 'useful' skills will be used regardless of if you're in the finance industry.
Some of it is career advice that would be applicable to other fields too -- talking about education, building connections and networks, getting your foot in the door at a company, etc.
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