Are People in Finance or Tech Smarter?
Was having this debate with a friend.
I personally think people in FAANG/Big Tech SWE are slightly (but not very much smarter) smarter than people in IB, but IB people generally have better "people skills."
However, the SWEs at places like HRT / Jane Street / Five Rings etc. are SIGNIFICANTLY smarter than people in finance. If you know any people at these firms, you will know what I'm talking about.
I went to a top college and graduated with a 3.8+ GPA, but man the top CS guys were built different.
Thoughts?
Obviously finance. We work harder not smarter.
working harder doesnt mean smarter tho lol.
That person is clearly joking lol
Here’s your answer lmao
bump
People on this site are so obnoxious. No one asked about your grades or where you went to college.
The people who are "SIGNIFICANTLY" smarter are probably much better at specific skills but I would bet are lacking in bigger picture thinking or judgement. Maybe higher IQ or super good at technical work, but I'm not sure about smarter.
I mean if you think DJ Solomon or Jamie Dimon are "smarter" than Terence Tao or Stephen Hawking because of their "leadership ability" then sure.
I'm talking more raw intellectual ability, of which Tao and Hawking would blow Dimon and Solomon out of the water. The reason I don't define leadership (DJ/Dimon) as smart is because you could replace the CEO of a BB with numerous people that could do the job just as well or better. They were at the right place at the right time. But people like Tao are one of one... how many people could do what Tao does.
How about you just quit taking yourself so serious, okay? You’ll never be as smart as any of them. Quit trying to gain confidence
Ppl in tech are probably way more smart academically, but professionally in all aspects finance wins
The insecurity coming from tech is bizarre. People in finance don’t go into tech forums and adamantly defend finance over tech, I’m not sure why so many people in tech feel the need to do the opposite here.
Finance is very broad. You have quant traders, investment bankers, private equity analysts, and so on…it’s hard to make these generalizations. There are smart people in both fields, and not-as-smart people in both fields.
dont assume its tech people defending tech and making all these comparison posts, its 90% insecure finance people (even OP said they are in IB). go to any tech forum and literally noone makes these kinds of posts on the other side. not surprising given the extremely high % of people that regret going into this industry
It’s because they’re looking for short-term gratification since they know we’ll make more $ in the long-term. They’re also addicted to cringey internet forums, like reddit, blind, and wso, since they’re scared of women and need something to occupy their spare time.
Bro you are literally a second year analyst. You're just assuming you're gonna make more than tech guys in the future? Lmao. Classic WSOer thinking they're easily going to make millions.
You do know SWE senior people comp scales up to 2 mil a year+ lol, not to mention the boom potential with startups.
This same kid ddd1 kid has been posting about tech on this forum, like bro do better, go study and get a SWE job or IB, both are fucking great jobs that allows people to move up the social and financial ladder, to achieve these kind of jobs it's not about being smart, it's about having the right guidance and resources and connections, stop posting the same shit get a life dawg. Anyone can get be smart if they put the work in, you don’t have to be smart to make money if that’s, stop comparing SWE to finance , get offf this forum kid
im in IB bro, arent u a cs minor?
Yea and I hated it(not because of difficulty , because it didn’t interest,) leading me to be in IB,
That user is a troll, constantly talking about tech on here, always arguing with people
"An2 at Credit Suisse" gave me MS lmao
Quants are smart asf
I, on the other hand, accidentally had FedEx print 62 copies of the wrong version of a management presentation
Both are dumb. Tech people just copy paste codes and write config files. The smart cool stuff has already been built and code monkeys just reuse them. Finance people just align PPT fonts and input numbers in excel.
The real smart people are the neurosurgeons and the quant traders. Code monkeys at quant shops are no different than FAANG code monkeys. It’s the quants that truly make a difference.
"Tech people just copy paste codes and write config files" you have no idea what you're talking about. Do you even know how to code?
I am a SWE who is trying to break into quant. The truth is that the smart problems in tech ( algorithms and high performance distributed systems etc ) have pretty much already been solved in past 10 years. Most SWEs are standing on the shoulder of their smart predecessors. They re-use their predecessors’ solutions by importing libraries and writing dumb config. Again, building those libraries from scratch is very smart work, but using existing libraries / frameworks aren’t smart at all. 40% work is boring server / infras config, 40% work is dumb CRUD, 20% work is even dumber on-call.
Quant traders are the real brain 🧠🧠🧠 And neurosurgeons are also pretty smart since they fix people’s brains.
Ya done fucked up kid. The dude is a literal SWE
Both are equally stupid and on par with Real Estate guys - except the latter don’t kid themselves.
Easy job, great money, and no socially awkward squids in the bizz
Slightly? More like "massively". Based on easily google-able research studies, tech guys / gals have significantly higher IQs (1 St. Dev. plus) than finance guys.
As a personal aside, I was a STEM major pre-IB (had several friends take the quant path and end up at Jane Street / 2 Sigma / etc. & knew dozens of others who ended up in FAANG) and can attest first-hand that my IB co-workers are significantly less intelligent than my classmates in college.
Having said that, most of my ex-classmates would still fail miserably at IB / PE / Finance-in-general as they lack the people skills to succeed in a high finance job. As a matter of fact, as I look around my office and see the split between the STEM / Finance majors, the Finance majors are head-and-shoulders ranked higher than the STEM guys (and have received better exit-ops at the junior level), this despite the fact that our group obviously selects the STEM folks with superior social skills (some of my classmates in school had ZERO social skills - one example that comes to mind was a CS major friend of mine who - on a first date - asked that their food "not contain the color green"). The same guy now works at Google and is doing well.
At the end of the day, Investment bankers & Private Equity financiers are not trying to hire geniuses - they want to hire folks who can speak with business leaders and financial intermediaries on equal terms, while also being a little smarter than them. They are not trying to find the smartest idea to act on, they are trying to find the smartest idea, which they can explain to the group, and then they act on that.
If you doubt this thesis, look up the profiles of finance types on Linkedin and track the number with IMO / IPho / USAMO / USAPhO / Academic Decathlon medals. You will find very few. Most bankers don't even know what those acronyms stand for. By contrast, one of the quickest ways to find quants at top funds (who often hide their employment on Linkedin) is to look up past medalists from these competitions and winnow down the list from there.
TL;DR - STEM >> Finance
I think ur kind of overexaggerating how socially bad STEM majors are. At my ivy target, while some were "nerds," there were many STEM guys who were insanely well spoken, especially the ones that TA'd classes, head of clubs, etc
Certainly can think of a couple examples like that (my Math Department Chair / PDE prof. was very well spoken), but the vast majority of my classmates / Profs. were not terribly socially adept.
Also, might want to consider where you went to school - Ivy's are not generally the top STEM schools (excld. Princeton) - hardcore STEM types go to MIT / CMU / Stanford / Cal Tech / Berkeley / etc. Look up the Grad school CS rankings on US News for reference.
As an aside, the hardcore STEM major probably doesn't care as much about how strongly a particular school is seen by the general public, but might care a lot about how strongly the school rates in a niche academic subject. As an example a cousin of mine was accepted into Yale but turned the offer down in a second after she got into the University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign, the reason being that she loved Algebraic Topology - Yale had ZERO Algebraic Topologists to study under (for UG research) and UIL had half a dozen. She is now a PhD in Topology.
My point behind this being that the people who are drawn to particular research subfields / niche areas of interest at the undergraduate level are not the sort who would care about being head of a club or being well-spoken, instead they will focus 110% on their studies (and correspondingly have poorer social skills). You would not really notice this mass of people unless you were in the same crowd, which I think distorts your view of the actual (STEM) student population (as you are only able to see a non-representative, socially more adept subset of the total STEM population).
TL;DR - your historical sampling is not representative due to participation bias.
Neither you or your friend can be that bright if you’re arguing over such an asinine question lol
yep i agree tech is smarter shouldnt even be a debate
Neither are smart. Both are just bright with a high work rate.
The smartest go into academia, research, medicine, or carve there own path that has never been scathed before.
Can confirm. I know a bunch of these guys.
Their smartness is actually derived from raw intelligence + bit of laziness
Can’t speak to tech but most of the people I have met in finance are average on their best day.
Even in PE?
Yes. We obviously all define this differently but I’m very rarely blown away by people in the industry.
I know tons of people at HRT. They aren't as gifted as you think - try talking about stocks and ask what stock you should buy and why - they can't say anything useful. Try asking them how markets would react in different interest rate / growth environments, they have no fucking clue. Perhaps a few do based on echoing news and popular conventions / parroting hedgies but absolutely most can't add value here. Just my experience from a large sample. They can program the shit out of many market orders and create algos to recognize existing patterns that eventually fade and then they move on. That’s why firms like HRT make easily $6bn a year and no one fucking knows why. Their skills are mechanical but at a level most people are just too lazy to work toward. Because most people are lazy, you could say they are smart on a relative basis. Maybe that's you. They learned what the do at a young age and were consistent through academia and enjoy what they do even if they don't understand the consequences their strategy has on the markets or even if they don't have a clue what market manipulation is…..Some may have seen office space though
"try talking about stocks and ask what stock you should buy and why - they can't say anything useful. Try asking them how markets would react in different interest rate / growth environments, they have no fucking clue" -- same with most IB analysts lmao
IB analysts don’t give stock recs cause it’s not part of our job description and buying individual securities is a bitch because of compliance reasons. Stop making shit up OP, people in IB know how interest rates and growth rates affect the economy; we see it everyday on the job (mainly because it’s what’s driving layoffs right now)
I’m sure IB analysts at least know the tickers of what they trade
Disregarding quants from 'people in finance', you're comparing a Wharton finance/ business administration, Harvard English/ geography grad against an MIT/ Stanford computer scientist/ physics grad. It ain't even a contest.
Include quants into the finance sample then it levels the playing field more, but since quants are a small majority of finance peeps it still doesn't help much
i think just generally speaking, comparing the big tech swe kids to bb/eb ib kids, they are both academically sound, driven/hard working people, and it is sort of impossible to distinguish which group is smarter. both are really successful groups of students; no need to debate here.
+ agree on the swe at HFs.
I feel like Tech tends to appeal to the classic "nerdy" intelligent types and finance is more for the competitive/hardworking (but also reasonably intelligent) type.
Genuine question: based on OP’s replies in this thread, do you think he’s ever touched a woman
Congrats on UBS/DB!
Thanks for answering my question
The smartest ppl r in both…
Most people everywhere are quite unimpressive to be honest
I think it is a matter of perspective.
Engineers and CS folk get their high from solving worth while problems.
Finance guys from closing deals but begin massively comp'ed
"Tech" is way too broad a term. If you're talking about SWEs at FAANG type companies, it's probably similar or a slight edge to the SWEs. Any other role in tech is inferior. Then you have roles like quant / prop traders where the people are smarter than the average people in IB or in "Tech", and it's difficult to decide whether some of these more algorithmic traders are "tech" or "finance" people. Those guys are definitely the smartest by a large margin though.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/skorea-fines-citadel-securitie…
Here’s how citadel makes theirs money
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