Everyday I wish I did Tech instead
Hi monkey's, did two years at a BB in IB and I knew it would be shitty but I figured once I'm in PE it'll be better. Now having been at an UMM PE shop for the past 5-ish months at one of the better WLB places I have noticed that this isn't the case. Even when I look up to seniors, it's still not as cush as people make it out to be.
This realization has made me go not a single day wishing I hadn't done tech instead, it has left me incredibly depressed.
I don't want to go into a lower tier role that doesn't pay as well so Corp Dev, Corp Fin etc... is not a viable solution, I'm looking to exit Finance all together. How can I make the switch to SWE?
what are current wlb/hours like
70 or so. Even when it goes down to 60 the worst part about high finance is that there is never any separation from the job and your life. As much as people might want to make it seems like there is.
check out severance
News flash. Competitive well paying jobs are “move up or out”. And there is never truly separation from the job. You live in a fantasy world where you can “love” your job, make a lot, and be able to check out and disconnect. People want these jobs more than you that’s why you won’t last with that attitude. 60-70 hours a week is totally doable while having fun and a social life. Come back and talk to me if you have kids. Get real man,
What about product marketing or marketing in the tech industry?
PM is also a good role but is slow and oversubscribed
Bump for product marketing. I work PM for one of the B2B/B2C electronics giants. Strategy oriented, GREAT wlb, ok comp at higher levels, and very little genuine talent to compete with (at least in my division).
I'm a low-level grunt with a shitty manager in a flailing product segment, so my hours blow, but almost everyone else works 40-50 hours max and has at least one week per month at 35 or fewer.
Comp range? What is progression / next roles like
Just a thought; it may seem better now but the progression in tech plateaus out VERY quickly. And beyond a point seems as though there is a ceiling to upward mobility unless you are one of the exceptional ones. Would say the floor is lower in finance but the ceiling is definitely higher. I had a similar dilemma and that’s why I decided to choose finance.
On a similar note, tech is so volatile and I definitely feel way safer in my seat now. Know friends who got laid off from SWE months into starting (and in one case even before starting).
Would add that finance generally has a better promotional structure since Tech roles are often at large F500 companies that just don’t operate the same way IB/PE does (analyst->associate->VP etc…)
No right answer obviously with tech vs finance but just something else I think worth considering
I honestly kind of disagree. 1st year at MF and some of my FAANG friends are making similar comp, with path to promotion. Seems like if you can climb to like L8 at Google that’s 1M+ comp including RSUs (which is effectively cash or more than cash at FAANG). Can’t imagine difficulty of climbing the ladder in tech is that much harder than IB/PE where only top performers are promoted every 4 years.
Lol’d at L8 at Google being the example. Godspeed but that’s the equivalent of “if you make it to partner…” L8 probably going to take 15 years and there are very few seats like that and very few googles. I have a friend that’s a L5 and we’ve had this convo a few times.
He’s very happy generally and has a great gig but the comp progression between us is material despite both being at larger players in our respective spaces.
L8 at FAANG is more difficult to achieve than a partner in a BB (that have annual promotions to partners).
Besides that, if you're talking about an IC L8 (and not an M track): one has to have their brain wired in a certain way to enjoy solving technical problems for decades. I'd argue that more people can learn how to sell (partner's job) rather than how to be a slightly autistic genius
P.S. Intered at BB; did buyside; currently an MLE at FAANG
That's what i thought too but after talking to some of my friends in tech / mid level engineers, I don't think this is really true.
If you're good in tech you can easily make upper six figs in your mid-to-late twenties.
Yes, you could argue that a PE partner makes more than a senior engineer but I would say it's less relevant when most people flame out of PE way before that point (due to WLB, stress, life crisis, being pushed out for not being good enough), so it's a bit of a moot point. If you really wanted to compare you would compare successful PE partners to successful startup founders (like the same difficulty within finance vs tech), in which case startup founds go head to head with PE partners on wealth accumulation.
Overall, your career is a marathon not a sprint. It's much more sustainable to have a long career in tech than in high finance and therefore I feel that the risk-adjusted returns in tech is higher than finance. I personally regret choosing the IB -> PE route vs tech... but to each their own
>If you're good in tech you can easily make upper six figs in your mid-to-late twenties
Which firms exactly? Upper six figures seems to take about 10 to 20 years at Google. The only way you'd get that in your mid twenties is be lucky with RSUs, or be extremely good at a niche firm.
Grass is always greener on the other side …
Believe me ppl who make serious money are also overworked
All good paying big tech is run by hardos … atleast in UMM PE you get to sit on the board someday
> My hours are too much and I don't have WLB
> CorpDev/Fi is not an option, I don't want to make less money
Have your cake and eat it too? You're in the best paying field of Finance out there. I'm a little surprised that you have earned your keep through years of hard work but still feel a level of entitlement to a lot of money for as little work as possible.
Also, at least from what I know of my SWE @ FAANG friends, the whole "making a shit ton of money and working 2 hours a week" thing is mostly a joke. You could get lucky with a group that actually does have a very small workload, but the vast majority of those people are working fairly similarly to banking hours (50-70).
It's almost as if... higher paying jobs require more hours and workload...
Comp Sci is gay
based
These posts always stink. If you're interested in tech do tech, if you're interested in finance do finance. Not that hard
I’m a software engineer, I pivoted my career a few years back but still like this forum and come back every now and then.
So you can get into tech, there’s lots of finance roles at many companies like you’d expect elsewhere. There’s also adjacent roles that probably would like a finance background, like others have mentioned (Product Management being a really compelling role). The meme of working 4 hour days is dead. It did happen in some firms, but it’s basically gone now. I’m seeing an increasing competition among schooling prestige mattering (to some degree) and relevant experience being looked at more harshly. It’s just becoming more competitive and the general idea is to do more with less, especially since companies can post record profits and still do layoffs. Not getting into “right vs wrong” of that, but it’s just a trend that seems persistent.
Many top earners work a lot, in excess of 60 hour weeks of lots of focus. Intensity paired with hours feels a lot worse than just raw hours with downtime. There’s an expectation to perform largely consistently every single day, stand ups can be stressful (it’s basically a daily meeting where you speak to what you did yesterday and what you’ll accomplish today). Weekend work might be less regular but not unheard of too.
The “tech compensation ceiling” thing is a myth too. If you work your way up to Staff Engineer/ VP of Engineering/ VP of Product at top companies you’ll make a ton of money. These jobs are far and few between, much like moving up the ranks of top PE firms/ IBs. There seems to be a wider distribution of companies within tech, so you’ll see a wider range of compensation.
Most no name companies pay okay. I’ve worked at these, I’ve made $210k a year there as a Senior Engineer. I worked a lot. Some no name companies print cash and you can clear $500k, work hours will be volatile (some weeks long, some weeks chilling out). Top companies pay a more standardized range, levels.fyi is accurate for the most part.
Product and Engineering pay seems roughly the same.
So you did finance and then pivoted to SWE?
Was that before or after graduating?
I worked for a RE Development/ GC firm after college then pivoted into being a SWE
lol yes if you get promoted to a VP of engineering role at Google you can do very well. This isn't a trivial task and by no means guaranteed.
Agreed. My point was to showcase that it’s not true that tech caps out at $500k. It isn’t easy nor even probable, but it is possible. Same goes for making MD- not easy nor probable, but possible.
If this is a legit desire, I think tech remains one of the most accessible fields…. if you have the skills, you will get hired. If you build up relevant experience, you will have lateral opportunities. Start learning python or C++, fundamentals of programming, then data structures, then algorithms, maybe some probability and statistics. Crush some leetcode. Do a bootcamp or a degree if you have time or desire.
Not an expert at all but tech is one of the most accessible fields, all info to break in is online and all steps are straightforward.
If every day you regretted not being an NFL player or a Hollywood actor I’d tell you you’re shit outta luck. If every day you regret not going into tech there’s good news my brother you can still make it happen literally all you have to do is try.
You sound like a pussy
Lol people be like I wanna switch to SWE, etc. but don’t wanna try coding in the first place.
Have you actually tried debugging a massive pile of code / leetcode? It is mind numbing and very repetitive task actually finding the error / writing out the whole code. If it floats your boat then good for you, but I tried for few weeks and I hated it.
Lol this. Most people that want to switch to SWE haven’t done engineering school. Because holy shit… op doesn’t know how good he has it
following
better dead than work in tech, too nerdy for my taste
Every time I see a comment like this I can’t help but ask do you know what tech means?
Every day I regret not being born rich.
See, this is the kind of post I can get behind. Can you please make this a post?
I studied cs in college and most of my friends work in tech- if you're sure you want to do tech that bad then go do it man. The job market is a little tougher than what it used to be but there's 2 really easy ways I personally know people who did a 180 into tech that did 1) masters in CS 2) coding bootcamp.
I often joke that I fucked up and should've gotten a job at a FAANG with friends because they really do have much better WLB but I also know myself that I'd likely be no happier in a much more slow-moving career path where the work is magnitudes smaller in scope. If those things don't matter to you in the first place and you just want to do the 9-5 grind then it's really not as hard as you think it is to pivot.
Do you know the names of those bootcamps?
What are the good UMM/higher MM shops in terms of WLB? I think those are the kind of spots I am realistically hoping to exit into being at a mid-tier BB FT next year.
Following, worked at a Faang as a Ds and now at a startup. You should definitely check out Ds analytics roles, they usually pay at a slight discount to SWE but at some companies they pay on par. On top of that, solid WLB, better visibility, and usually closer to the business side of things. Definitely a different skill set but probably closer to the one you have right now.
What kinds of skills did you need to get a DS role? What did the interview process look like?
Do a couple of side projects applying some basic regressions and ML libraries, learn basic python, learn some sql, and some basic statistics and that’s all you need. Your interviews will test you on some of these, usually only sql tests from my experience. Sometimes basic stats questions and python stuff too.
I'm a sophomore right now and I'm seriously considering changing from Finance to CS + Math or just CS. I've always been really good at coding, as well as math, and I think my skills in both far surpass my people skills which are obviously big for Finance. I'm just hesitant because all the effort I've spent in the first 1.5 years of college, including leadership positions and clubs and what not is all geared towards finance.
Grass is always greener right?
Read a post a bit back about the "efficient career hypothesis" or something along those lines, where basically every high-paying career's various aspects (WLB, prestige, quality of work, salary) balanced out between the different professions. As someone trying to figure out where to go, it seems like every space has its own upsides/downsides.
Try tech sales or PM. These people are notorious for not doing anything but collecting big fat pay checks. Sounds like exactly what you are looking for. Your experience at ibanking and PE is valuable because it means you have good soft skills. Polish your resume and start applying. If you worked in TMT coverage group or tech investing, that’s even better, you can easily get a PM role
Try tech sales or PM. These people are notorious for not doing anything but collecting big fat pay checks. Sounds like exactly what you are looking for. Your experience at ibanking and PE is valuable because it means you have good soft skills. Polish your resume and start applying. If you worked in TMT coverage group or tech investing, that’s even better, you can easily get a PM role
Try tech sales or PM. These people are notorious for not doing anything but collecting big fat pay checks. Sounds like exactly what you are looking for. Your experience at ibanking and PE is valuable because it means you have good soft skills. Polish your resume and start applying. If you worked in TMT coverage group or tech investing, that’s even better, you can easily get a PM role
Having worked as a Product Manager for the last 7 years after 6 years in Consulting, I will say that I think people are in for a rude awakening if they expect that a PM will just sit on their ass all day. Definitely not Consulting hours, let alone Banking, but started out with 55-60 hour weeks (spiking higher to 70 at times) and over the last few years have brought it down to 40-50 (spiking to 60 at times), with pretty full days.
40-60 hours is as good as it gets. Unless you’re key researcher or senior EM leads, there’s no way you can get below that hours in any high-paying profession
Try tech sales or PM. These people are notorious for not doing anything but collecting big fat pay checks. Sounds like exactly what you are looking for. Your experience at ibanking and PE is valuable because it means you have good soft skills. Polish your resume and start applying. If you worked in TMT coverage group or tech investing, that’s even better, you can easily get a PM role
Just read through that entire debate about tech promotion. Let me add some facts about tech industry and why you should NOT join as SWE.
SWE promotion is highly political and luck-based. Here’s the thing: even in the same company and the same org, some engineers are working on high-profile stuff like ads algo that print several billions dollar per year or some fancy AI product that is literally God’s work, while other engineers are stuck on shitty projects like fixing pipelines, maintaining legacy shits, or working on a crap product that is bound to fail. It goes without saying that the former engineers are gonna get promoted like a rocket, the latter engineers are gonna be stuck at L5 for 20 years and making peanuts.
Now the issue is that SWEs don’t have the fucking control over which project they get, especially at early-career. The team matching process is a joke. It’s not like ibanking where all analysts get similar deal experiences and you also have league tables that allow you to compare teams. In tech there’s no such thing, everything is opaque, sometimes you don’t even know your product is failing until the day you get laid off. Take Amazon Alexa AI as an example, it was a natural language AI ( just like ChatGPT ) and there were tons of PHDs on the team and everything was looking rosy, until ChatGPT came out and Amazon found Alexa suck so badly compared to GPT and then entire team is getting axed 🪓, including the new grad SWEs on that team, they lose their jobs and their career is dead, and is it even their fault ? No they were just in bad luck and got matched with a shitty team.
So SWEs are betting their entire career on a single product but they don’t even get to choose which product they’re betting on. And even if they’re lucky enough to end up in a good product, they may still end up in a bad project. Someone gotta change the color of the UIs and shift the button to the left while their next-desk coworkers are building multi-tenant coordination over 500 nodes. And that UI-shifting engineer is saying good bye to career progression.
Imagine the amount of politics involved in assigning projects — The managers play favoritism. Indian managers give good projects to Indians. Chinese managers give good projects to Chines. People back-stab each other for the good projects. This kind of randomness, politics, and the feeling of not having your fate controlled in your hand but rather your fate is determined by the product manager, your engineering manager, the VC investor … but just not by you … is suffocating especially in an awful market environment where hiring is minimal so it’s impossible to even job-hop out of this shit.
The ceiling is real. A L8/ L9 making a bit over one million, 2 millions if you joined at the right time when stock is low ( again based on luck ). In other words, you gotta be top 1% and be blessed by the god for just one million dollar, which is less than the bonus of an average MD in an average bank …
In short, join tech SWE at your own risk. The god will not save you when you get laid off. And be prepared to say good bye to 3M+ annual comp and Hampton penthouse for your entire life.
I suffered the same mentality as OP. Every day I wished I had chosen quant. Quant research is way more fun, SWE is full of grunt labor and I loath it. But it’s so hard to break into quant research after having spent years in SWE. I have gotten depressed over this. Once someone is a SWE , he/she cannot get into other industry anymore, because this job is essentially a technical specialist and it closes up someone’s career options. You can’t be SWE and then go work at PE. But you can do it in reverse order.
About me: I worked at Amazon and I hated every part of it. Then I went to Google but Google offered a down-level and a lowball just like it always does. Google was chill but it was so slow. I was bored to death and I couldn’t afford mortgage in Bay with that meager Google lowball. Then I went to quant hedge fund and now I’m getting yelled at by quants and I’m burnt out. There’s just no perfect job in this world.
I totally agree with this and “grass is always greener on the other side” is real.
The thing is with SWE, barrier to entry is very very low. Anyone with some random degree + bootcamp can be a SWE. You cant do this in the finance industry. I am actually a software engineer now and trying to switch to a finance role and it’s awfully difficult - a bit of luck here but managed to secure a SA role with a BB for next year. But again in the end it depends on your personality and if you like the job. After working for a few years as SWE, I know I dont like the job (developing software products, fixing bugs, etc) and I cant imagine myself doing it until I retire. There’s whole lot of new tech out there coming out every now and then. GPT came up and practically a whole lot of relatively new NLP technologies just went obsolete. Imagine that in your 50s you still need to pick up new tech when compared with some fresh grads out of college. Your knowledge gets obsolete very fast. However, in Finance, the longer you stay, the more valuable your experience and knowledge will be. We are also working long hours in tech. I stay with 2 friends - 1 working in Google and another dude working in a bank (risk management position). Guess who work longer hours? (It’s us working in tech).
I also think there’s no perfect job and so in the end, choose the job you think you hate least.
The above is spot-on. The only thing that I disagree with you: the low barrier of entry is actually a good thing, because it means you don’t have to work super hard in schools to prepare for recruiting. But the low barrier of entry is ending. This year, it’s impossible to get an interview with even a perfect resume from target school. Lots of MIT and CMU grads end up in consultancies. FYI consultancy is the IT outsourcing companies that everyone look down upon
Everything in tech has reversed. The good wlb has reversed. The easy entry has reversed. Tech is the most volatile industry I’ve seen. It almost feel like irrational and crazy. Working in tech industry is like walking on a minefield. You are having a good time till an invisible mine explodes and blow up your career. LLM was an invisible mine and it blowed up the careers of most old-school NLP-ers. Rising interest rate was an invisible mine and it blowed up the career of the entire 2023 new grads. Metaverse was also an invisible mine and it blowed up Reality Lab teams. Rumors are that RL is doing layoff again in the very near future.
Become techie if you truly like adventure and wouldn’t mind you career getting blown up in front of your face.
There’s this website called The Odin Project. If you’re serious, do this - it’s a free bootcamp and covers everything you need, though you’ll need to be committed as it’ll be months before you go through it all.
The grass is always greener on the other side tbh. There are probably a lot of tech jobs you could get like PM or Corp Strategy type stuff once the market picks back up. Also you would have no problems getting into a top MBA and could use that to pivot to tech. Very common path. Or you could do a masters in Computer Science and use that to do SWE.
There will be a bunch of people telling you those grass is greener on the other side bs.
No, tech is WAY BETTER for sure.
The culture while could be toxic at some places, it is in general way less toxic than finance.
There are communities helping each others, people open to hire career changers who self learnt coding at 30s, opportunities at startups, SMEs, big tech and be in swe or pm or pmm whatever
WSO is nothing versus teamblind, levels.fyi, cscareerquestions etc.
The big techs laid off people but offered someone them to come back with accelerated process. Can you imagine banking offer this?
Nah, this was the good old times. The party was fun while it lasted. But now the party in tech is over. Time to pack up and leave. I don’t know if you have noticed, there’s always an information lag in these online forums. Couple years ago when tech was growing like a weed and techies were having such a good time, no one on WSO took tech seriously and ridiculed it as third-grade career choice. Now WSO people are posting “tech over finance” posts weekly but tech is going downhill and will soon become another mediocre unattractive industry. The information lag is real.
I wouldn't say it's going downhill. every industry fluctuates and this is definitely the modern tech bubble similar to what happened in 2000 when VCs starting yoloing cash at every fancy URL that did a thing. I've been in tech as a PM since 2018 and can say the high was definitely 2021 for me in the industry but that was also a 5 year look back period. We're literally going through some of the most revolutionary technological changes in history at the moment especially across the great financial refactoring (breaking down and building up of that heinous bedrock that is banking core infrastructure all built on COBOL). I am looking to switch into RE at the moment but I wouldn't say i'm looking because the "party is over." There is still plenty happening in tech as it has been for the past 4 decades and i would argue that it's just getting started for several industries (yes even existing industries not just the buzzy AI, Influencer-tech, or fintech space)
Many people were contacted back to come work for the teams shortly after 1-2 months.
IB / PE / consulting backgrounds tend to land nicely in Tech Strategy & Ops. Did my summer internship in healthtech and my boss had that type of background. Brutal job market though right now, I'm trying to return full time and it's still tbd.
The party in tech is over…
I personally think you missed the boat on this pivot and are better off just staying in PE. You're doing classic "grass is greener" reasoning and operating off information that's 5-10 years out of date.
- Tech is oversaturated, just had massive layoffs industry-wide, and you have no coding or tech experience. It's better to hate your life in PE than hate your life being unemployed. Not saying you're incapable of learning a new skillset, but understand how hyper competitive the tech hiring environment is right now and that you're well behind.
- The fact that you're even asking this question to WSO means that you don't have any high level connections currently working in tech to speak to. I was going to say that connections would be your best hope of breaking in, but you don't have them.
- Tech comp isn't what it used to be. If you got an entry level SWE job tomorrow, you'll find yourself working similar hours for less comp and less advancement opportunities. As other posters have mentioned, promotion structures at the higher levels are based around accomplishments (founder who sold company, PhD research experience, etc). You don't get promoted simply by virtue of being smart and working hard, at least to an extent. You hit a ceiling.
- The tech landscape changes rapidly. You have no idea what's going to be the next big thing. No one is hiring blockchain people today when that was all the rage like 3 years ago.
- A lot of the corporate/product roles in tech are diversity or nepotism hires. If you don't know anyone, or you aren't in some sort of "protected" group, you're not getting the job.
- Tech has massive H1B pressure. Enjoy competing against Indians with fabricated credentials for scraps.
Please don't do this. A lot of people can code. You can't even code. Don't ruin your career based on a hunch. Plenty of people would kill for a PE role.
I was part of the layoffs that happened :)
While layoffs happen, I've never heard of finance/strategy people being affected. It's not really as big a risk for OP.
My whole FAANG team got gutted recently - low bonuses and hours are a lot worse than they were a year or two ago. Wouldn’t recommend right now tbh
I was in tech. The entire department I was in got laid off (including all management to Director). Many people I worked with was also let go, just the valuable folks who are part of teams where product was still in demand/required stayed. My original focus was to stay to finish an OMSCS from Georgia Tech to get that Senior SWE role (comp starts at $160k-$200k + bonus/RSUs), but we will see. I took a hiatus to figure things out and where to go from here. Ageism is a thing, but not necessarily. Ageism can be used as an advantage to you - just be eager and enthusiastic about the opportunity.
Right now, the current environment makes it difficult to recruit for software roles (or any job for that matter). There are roles, though, but companies are starting to gut and recruit good, strong talent (most of the teams I worked with in the past are offering generous salaries for engineers).
Bootcamps are still iffy, as many places want that *degree*. If you are serious, get the Masters in CS or SWE or IS. Just make sure to be prepared to learn new tech stuff while off the clock and work a ton of hours. As soon as the layoffs hit, teams I know were pulling 8 am to midnight on the daily (this is a large telecom company), for FAANG I am sure it is the same.
PS - For those who want to do DS roles - get a MS in Stats. The tools and software used in a company is great to produce stuff, but what is the point in all of it if you can't accurately tell if the data is correct? The MS in Stats is considered the golden ticket to DS roles.
Thanks for the useful information. What would you say are the benefits and drawbacks of going the DS route, possibly via an MS Statistics?
Benefits - Niche role in a heavy quant type role. Many people venture into Pharma (Stats Programming, Biostats), others went to the ML side and eventually became management fairly quickly (high comp). You would be the defacto expert when it comes down to numbers. Many people I know who are in the director level side in biopharma/ML had mentioned that they wished they did a PhD in Stats. Wall Street firms also like to pick up MS/PhD Stats folks. The led for the Biometrics department at some biopharma also have PhD in Stats. It is a well-respected route, and you would not have to go through the hurdles of what SWE/IS people go through.
Drawbacks - Again, niche field. You would be in an impossible situation to pivot towards any other industry with those credentials. Lower starting salary until you ramp up, but as far as I am aware of, once you hit mid to high levels in the industry this no longer is a concern. The AD the company I worked for recruited paid for him and his family to move, generous sign-on bonuses that totaled about $600k for the first year.
People I know who had PhDs and went bootcamp route held PhDs from Ivy Leagues and utilized their alumni network to get roles at FAANG ($300k+ according to what people shared). The MS/PhD in Stats will be always in demand and there are no shortage of people going into or thinking about stats as a career. The MSDS is still a green/new field, but hopefully it gains some tractions. The route of strictly getting a MSDS is that you need to be able to explain the inner details of the data and how things originated from start to finish. However, the MS/PhD in Stats would provide a stronger credential to enter the field.
The hiring environment right now is very different from two years ago. The era of bootcamp-and-get-into-Google is gone for good. The hiring spree during 2019-2021 was a one-time market inefficiency that would probably never occur again in the next century.
Right now it’s impossible to land FAANG offers without a BS in CS and prior internships. My nephew graduated from CMU in 2023 and is now working at the technology division of JP Morgan Chase ….. He failed to get return offer from FAANG even after I used my connections to help him. And he has a BSCS degree from CMU which is literally the best CS school. I can’t imagine how hard it would be for those who don’t have degrees. It would be impossible unless you have some serious serious connections.
Friend, the people I know that did the bootcamps and got into FAANG at very nice roles got their PhDs from CMU. Bootcamps still serve a vital role for people who possess strong credentials in STEM but want to transition into software.
BSCS = starting point, but most place wouldn't necessarily bat an eye for the candidate. MSCS/PhD is the norm for recruitment.
I would pivot to a business role in tech - can leverage the skills you’ve built and still get a much better lifestyle. Should be very readily achievable in strategy, M&A, finance, etc.
If you really want to do SWE because it’s a passion, go for it, but you will need training / education and to take a step back career-wise.
I worked for a successful late-stage venture-backed tech company with several former finance people and now work in venture capital alongside a healthy mix of finance-minded IB/PE vets and tech-minded product + engineering people with deep startup experience. My perspective here mainly comes from early-late stage venture-backed private companies rather than sizable public tech companies or Big Tech.
First off, don't feel regret. You took a fine path that has put you in a good spot for a transition to tech. Be grateful you didn't wait too long. 2-4 years of finance experience is heavily valued in tech, and you'll have many skills and good habits that others who started off directly in tech will lack. It is much easier to transition from finance to tech than the other way around. You can go into corp dev, corp fin, strategy, or even product/sales (if you care enough about the product and the mission). There are so many interesting venture-backed tech companies working on a lot of cool shit--I'm sure you could find one with a vision you find compelling and that would like to have your skills. Most people working in finance will be way too absorbed in the traditional way of making a living to ever explore these other options. I find it sad that so many finance people are willing to put up with such poor conditions and hours doing (mostly) meaningless work in exchange for a relatively minor increase in career security.
For a finance-focused person in tech, I think the bigger career risk than layoffs is straight-up company failure (bankruptcy and/or returning capital to investors). However, to minimize that risk, you just have to pick a company that is well-capitalized, growing quickly, and is backed by reputable investors. Moreover, in all the layoffs we've seen happen in the past few years, I've never seen anyone from a strategy or finance team affected (it's mostly talent, operations, compliance, and maybe sales). In my view, this is because it is of existential importance for tech companies to know how to optimally allocate capital, manage burn, and raise more capital. Tech companies also tend to keep finance teams pretty lean, which can make it harder to find a role, but once you do you're more secure than other departments.
SWE doesn't make much sense unless you're somehow a born-again technical person--there are too many specific skills to learn, and you won't really be able to leverage your past finance experience. But I do recommend learning enough about software for it to be helpful in your finance work within tech. It'll help you communicate better with technical staff and understand the strategy and product visions of your company.
I have yet to find a finance person who prefers the culture of banking. Tech is known for offering much more autonomy, upward mobility, creativity, and contribution across different parts of the company that might be of interest to you. Never heard of a traditional finance person regretting going into tech either. Once people experience the thrill and camaraderie of being on a team that is building a great product, they tend to not want to leave the space.
Lastly, understand just how much equity upside is the value proposition of working in tech. That is why it is so important to pick the right business to join, and why the choice between an early-stage private company and a public company can make such a difference. With public companies, you can get guaranteed liquidity in only 1-2 years at one place, whereas in general you have to put in 4+ years at an earlier-stage company to get liquidity. You'll want to understand the product roadmap, the growth trajectory, and the timeline for future capital raises. You're going to want to negotiate hard on equity, push for a better vesting schedule, ask about refreshes, and understand possible dilution.
This is spot on. In my summer internship which was in a Strategy & Ops function, my manager was previously a finance guy (had capital market and M&A experience) and seemed to love the diversity of his day to day work experience. Just like me, he seemed super passionate about the products that the company was offering. Still have my fingers crossed to see if I can return FT (budgetary issues like a lot of tech companies).
One of their previous MBA interns (T10 grad, former strategy consultant) now runs the GTM strategy for a relatively new service line we were offering and I believe holds the P&L responsibilities 3 years out of their MBA. The pay is probably not great (I'm guessing it's around 130-150K base, who knows about bonus) but as I got more exposure during the summer, I thought the new service line was very interesting and had a lot of potential in garnering partnerships / alliances with companies that could use the service. I'd imagine a successful stint for that MBA grad who runs it would open up a lot of doors either internally or to other competitors in the same niche tech space.
Look, to everyone on this thread who is considering a tech/quant role in the near future. Do not worry about the landscape. It is completely irrelevant (to a degree), but in the extent of "how do I find work" or "layoffs". Layoffs and restructuring are just natural cycles that occurs in any industry, and we live in a fast-changing pace society that does require adaptability at a moment's notice. What helps in this regard is to be able to change and market yourself with a new skillset and embrace as things unfold. Just make sure to put in an honest effort, do well, and enjoy the waves as it comes and goes.
PS - One thing about STEM roles is that I get to work with brilliant smart individuals.
Not a popular take but if you have the personality for it a pivot into enterprise sales would be your best attack. Might have to take a big pay cut in the beginning but if you’re good you can easily be making 250+ relatively quickly.
Having done both IB and PE you will be miles apart and can easily find your way into management and eventually a BU leader for a GTM function + eventually work your way up to the c suite. Haven’t done this personally but I’ve seen instances of people from high finance in tech sales sling shot their way up.
Currently transitioning to tech/quant through potential online MSCS programs. Math major here so also counting quant as a potential route. Heck, I had the opportunity to do an MFE/CS degree when I chose to do a master's a few years ago. Lured by prestige.
It is definitely doable even if you do not come from a STEM background. Plenty of choices out there to do a cs degree either part-time or full-time.
As others have said below, do a couple of introductory courses first. I recommend MIT's 6.00.1x and 6.00.2x. By the end of those two courses, you should be able to tackle a small program that incorporates ~700 lines of code comfortably. The way you should do it is to be patient when debugging, writing everything down before you write a single line of code, know your mini-algorithm, etc. There is no clear roadmap to create a solution. If you feel good/at least not terrible, you are probably on to something.
Are you at Georgia Tech?
Harvard CS50 is also a good foundation too. I saw the MIT course you listed. I come from a Python background, so it looks interesting.
The most important things is solving leetcode. Leetcode is the ONLY thing that can get your foot in the door. If you don’t have a degree, that’s actually fine as long as you’re a leetcode wizard ( not in the 2023 brutal market though. If the 2024 market improves, that no-degree fashion may come back ) . If you don’t solve leetcodes, that’s straight game over no matter what fancy degrees you have unless you’re a PhD or Math competition winner. So my genuine advice: if you want the switch, solve some leetcodes before you make the time & money commitments to a master degree. Use Python to solve those leetcodes because Python has the easiest syntax ( don’t waste time on language syntax, syntax is not the essence ). There’re plenty of high quality online tutorial that help you solve leetcodes and they’re free. IMO you need to solve most easy leetcodes and some common medium leetcodes before you should make the commitment to a master degree. In master classes you won’t work on leetcode but those skills are super handy in the weekly ML project assignments, plus leetcode will get you internships in tech companies
Hi OP, wanted to shine some interesting light for you on my end.
Currently Finance & Strategy at FAANG and find the work to be interesting along with the people I work with coming from all types of backgrounds in finance and engineering. That being said, I don't rely on my day job to put me in the next tax bracket. You'd be surprised by the amount of marketable skills you gain from IB/Consulting that you're under-utilizing in the job and can be offered to smaller businesses for retainers/hourly work outside of your normal work. On my end, currently run a business where I do what I do at work on a smaller scale with flexible hours (since Im offering the service its my schedule).
Hopefully, this can be an inspiration for some of you who feel lost in IB and want to move to tech finance but still make good money.
So go to tech
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Hey,
I'm a product manager in tech right now. Happy to chat but just wanted to say that the grass is always greener. if you look at my post history i've asked a few questions in the RE channel trying to make a switch into property development. So just wanted to share that so you know you're not alone. A lot of people in just about every industry may not be super happy with their current path. The good news is you have highly applicable skills. NOW making the switch from IB/PE background into an eng role may not be a good fit imo simply because it's a very different domain and you'd be starting pretty low in the food chain with a lot of grunt work that may not be ideal (although it likely won't be anything compared to your existing hours unless you happen to join and get put on-call during a critical incident).
That being said -- i have seen many a times the switch from IB/PE/Cons into product management. If you're super into reading or curious about it i'd recommend reading the book (inspired) by Marty Cagan (founding partner of SVPG) to get a feel and see if any of that resonates with you. The TLDR is that a product manager exists to discover problems, prioritize the ones that are most important to the business (increase revenue or reduce cost) and that are most important to the customer (will this increase customer NPS scores? increase top of funner conversion? accelerate integration speeds and improve time to value?). It's the work that happens before during and after any code hits github and it can be very satisfying depending on the team you're on.
I won't bore you or the WSO peeps because i'm sure i could write a post the length of a book by now but happy to connect and chat if you're seriously considering leaving the finance side for a more tech-focused role. If compensation is a factor you're considering - depending on where you are in your finance journey you may take a paycut to start but the equity packages in tech can get pretty high (it's obviously different than getting a cash bonus at the end of the year or carry since it's taxed differently and highly tied to company success) but it's a nice perk if you work for a large public company that isn't dying in the market.
Annual TC: Base: 201; Equity: 155ish (some fluctuations lately)
Equity is public company? YOE?
Nice TC :)
Hey sorry, just saw this. i've been in product since 2018 and it was my first job out of college when i started as an associate pm in banking running some payments products.
Yeah ok hot shit now you pivot to tech, land a role at Amazon, and then proceed to get PIP'ed and I guarantee it will be much worse than what you have right now.
Sorry but tech is Leonardo Dicaprio and you're a chick older than 25, it aint happening.
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