Anyone else feels dumb working in finance?
First time posting with this new account but have been in the finance world and on WSO for a while now.
TL;DR: how do you deal with the feeling of not contributing to the society/not doing an « intellectual » and fulfilling work?
I have a pretty scientific background (banks in France really love engineering students) and have been in finance for a few years working at two BB. I actually now feel pretty ashamed of what I do, especially in front some of my friends that are doing research/engineering/teaching/senior public service/CS/bioscience… I have the feeling that I work in an environment where no one is really brilliant. I’m not saying that everyone is dumb, I’ve found many people very intelligent but I was never really impressed by the intellectual capacity (more by industry knowledge or stuff like that…).
I feel the same way with my consulting friends: we chose a default career path because we were at target schools and it was pretty « easy » especially in engineering where this kind of companies invest a lot on campus event but students are not that interested, but we’re now doing job that does not even require college education (you spend you first year basically being a secretary). A lot of people say the job is stimulating, I do not agree. Of course it is very dynamic, there are always lots of things to do but only a few are stimulating and interesting, the majority being really boring and not elevating.
I am now hesitating between following the traditional path of PE (in an industry that would interest me a bit like Energy, metals and mining…) or trying to get a job that is more stimulating (but I have no idea what kind and I feel that I can’t do anything that is not finance related).
I know that I am not the only one feeling this way within my friends so I guess some people here might feel that too. I don’t think my feeling will pass anytime soon since I’ve been feeling like that for a few years now.
How have you been dealing with that? What are your plans for the future?
Perspective is a hell of a drug.
First things first, contributing to society and intellectually stimulating are completely different things. Teachers are classically seen as being a fundamental pillar society is built on. Most of the people I went to school with who are now teachers are the kids who did hard drugs and partied instead of learning basic algebra. Working as a quant for AQR has got to be one of the most intellectually difficult and stimulating jobs I can imagine, but will classically be seen as "not contributing to society".
Second thing, you need to believe down to your core that the work you're doing (at least at a high level) matters. If you don't, you'll burn out sooner rather than later. More importantly, you'll probably feel like shit about your work and get depressed. You might not be teaching the next generation, or saving lives, or putting bad guys behind bars, but you are providing a valuable service. Without IB, securities don't get issued, loans don't get made, M&A doesn't happen, next thing you know the economy breaks down and we're all hunting each other with pointy sticks for food in a Mad Max style apocalyptical wasteland (obviously joking a bit here). In all seriousness though, financial services providers contribute to society, no matter how often non-finance society might tell you otherwise.
My advice would be to take a hard look at yourself and think about changing your mindset. Or starting to look at exits. The discontent you're feeling right now will only get worse if you don't make a change.
P.S. If you're wondering what this back office schlub is doing handing out advice, please know that my title on here is wildly inaccurate and I just don't care enough to change it.
Get your money up not your funny up
Ok, we don't have a tangible scientific output. What's wrong with that? We are literally the economic backbone of the highest levels of business. If we were in the USSR we would be economic planners, who help to efficiently allocate goods and services through our analysis. Fundamentally, we provide capital to companies which provide society with the most competitively priced goods and services that society needs. Do you think the years-long deflationary effects of capitalism which have raised the quality of life of the majority of the world and have brought billions out of poverty would be possible without bankers doing the analysis of company viability and valuation and providing the connection to capital? We who enable economies of scale and who deny inefficient access to capital?
Ok yes I know it sounds like I drank the koolaid, and understand there's a lot of drawbacks and issues with what we do but at the same time we are performing a function which is infrastructural to the global system.
Have you actually ever worked as an engineer/researcher? Because I feel like you wouldn't be saying any of this if you actually had. 95% of the research being done in labs today is grant-grubbing horseshit that will never move the needle for the benefit of society. I spent about 5 years doing clinical research before transitioning into banking and then VC, and man, if only you knew how useless a lot of "science" is today. The main reason we praise scientists and scientific achievements today is because we're lauding the 5% of research — and I'm being generous by saying 5% — that actually is breakthrough work.
Same thing with engineering. Yes, if you work at NASA, you're clearly doing highly intellectual work that will directly benefit people, knowledge, and commerce within the next few decades. But not everyone works at NASA. Chances are, you're working as an "engineer" at a social media company doing god knows what. It always strikes me when I hear people say, "if you worked in tech or aerospace, you'd actually be contributing to society" when their concept of significant societal contribution is just changing the color of the login button on some website.
I'm not trying to say that high finance is any better: it's not. A lot of the work that we do is random bullshit to keep stuff flowing through the global pipe system. But that's pretty much every possible form of employment. Bullshit that keeps the system moving. Unless you're the sole apprentice of a Nobel laureate or working in some top-priority lab in Langley, I promise you that you're not "contributing to society" any more or less than the 99% of the people around you.
But if you look at that top 5%, presumably the top 5% of scientific researchers benefit society more than the top 5% of financial service providers.
Frankly, that's wrong. The top 0.05% of researchers, fine. I think those guys will make life-changing, society-upending discoveries and I am grateful that there are people like that in this world. But the other 99.95% will realistically accomplish nothing. As dumb and menial as logo-pushing and button engineering might be, finance, consulting, tech, etc. all keep the economy moving and end up producing incremental value for others.
No point in talking about maximizing individual "contributions" to society, whatever that means. If you want to do that, go spend 8 years getting your PhD at CalTech, then spend the next 30 years working on some obscure physical phenomenon in the hopes that your research has some relevance in a few decades. And even then, there's a very significant probability that you'll die having little to nothing to show for your work.
Frankly, this is a terrible take.
I assure you the work of more than 0.05% of researchers matter. Plausibly more than 5%. There are an incredible number of subfields where groundbreaking work is being presented and lauded every year. For example, every subfield has their version of Nobel/Turing/Fields, and the research that gets awarded DOES matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_known_as_the_Nobel_or_the_…
Group theory, computational neuroscience, genomics, condensed-matter physics, the list goes on. Now go find the most groundbreaking paper in each of those fields last year alone and count the number of citations they made. And maybe for good measure, count the number of citations their citations made. Science has come far and people build over the work of hundreds of others every single day. Every Nobel winner has read many thousands of papers over their career.
I feel like this idea that "only x% tiny number of absolutely god-tier genius researchers ever have hope of doing anything meaningful" was only true up until the 1900s, or is true only for a very small number of fields.
Citations? Awards? Really? I thought you were about to make a good point until I read that.
Also, this should be glaringly obvious, but "thousands of papers over a career" is what, 5,000 papers? Let's say a career is 50 years, that's about 100 papers per year. Do you know how many papers were published in the biological sciences last year alone? 400 thousand. 100 papers is quite literally 0.025% of that total. And most "Nobel winners" don't read 100 papers a year. They read the 40-50 most critical publications in their field that come out.
I understand that this is a hard concept to grasp for people who have never worked a day in the sciences, but this is the reality. The academic establishment is not some heavenly city upon a hill. It's largely a concentrated group of geriatric assholes that have nothing else to do. Yes, like I said in my original comment — there is a very small subset of researchers that do indeed perform groundbreaking work. I am incredibly thankful for these individuals and teams as they are making discoveries and innovations that will effectively change my life and yours. But the majority of researchers are not like that at all. So get their many cocks out of your mouth and relax.
There's literally no right answer, you're asking a highly subjective question. What I like may not necessarily be what you find fulfilling and vice versa. Fulfillment is a mindset. As few as they may come, bankers who find their work fulfilling do actually exist. So unless you want to start divulging some personal information about the type of person that you are and your past work experiences, I don't think anyone in this forum can determine for you what kind of work you'd really enjoy.