Are there better finance jobs than IB?
If a young undergraduate/graduate wants to start his career in finance the best way is to enter IB. However, after 2/3 years, most of the Analysts go away from IB. I was wondering, what finance jobs could an analyst take on which will not require 80 hours a week but that could be around 80/90k of earnings? Probably none right?
Well theres PE and HF- but those are long hours
Besides that there are opportunities in tech for corporate finance analysts and they pay like 70k I think- Amazon, Visa, etc.
do those tech opportunities have upwards potential?
Yeah- you can move up the ranks Id suppose at Amazon- I have no real experience with this- maybe someone else can comment.
If you know you want to stay in tech, then I would say that a corporate finance rotation program at a major tech company (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft) is a decent landing spot. It doesn't create the same pure optionality and sparkle as investment banking, however you get a much better lifestyle than banking, with a bit less pay but you still make enough to begin living an okay life out of undergrad. From what I've seen some positive outcomes from the corporate finance rotation could be:
Tech Corp Dev if you're a rockstar, which at any of the companies I listed above would be a very desirable post-banking exit for plenty of Tech IB Analysts. If you're then a rockstar with corp dev, the entire tech industry opens back up to you, you could even do tech VC or Growth Equity from there if you really hustled into it.
Transition to a more operational or product role at one of these companies. These can get high paying and start to open up a ton of optionality in startup land if you want to go risk-on.
Transition to the same role at a hyper-growth company. A lot of times the next Uber, Airbnb, Coinbase, etc. looks to fill their various finance functions by pillaging the ranks of the tech giants. If you play your cards right you could land at a decent spot while it's still on the upswing.
Get an MBA. Big tech corporate rotations are still seen fairly well, so that door remains open as well.
Edit: Btw, these are just random paths I thought of super quickly in my experience with Corporate Tech people, so the list is definitely non-exhaustive. There isn't really a comparably standard career path in tech, so I'm sure there are really cool outcomes I forgot to list (as well as a bunch of more mundane career outcomes).
An entry level financial analyst at a FAANG makes TC 100k+ easily
Look up business analyst programs. i have a friend at Capital One who makes 90k working standard 40-45 hrs a week. there’s definitely more out there as well
IB is like your entry ticket to get into those better finance jobs that will allow you to make six figures with more reasonable work hours, whether that’s in PE, HF, corp dev, or higher levels of corp fin. You get that experience in order to be able to interview for the jobs people really want (still on you to sell yourself, but it’ll get people to take you seriously), as opposed to Joe Sixpack fresh out of a random school looking for any job that will take him.
Equity research is an equally to more rewarding career with excellent exit ops and a much better lifestyle. Comp is the same at lower levels and less at higher levels but you can still make well into the six figures and even over 1 million (300-600K base plus bonus) as an MD level analyst. 7-9 workdays as opposed to 8-2am workdays. Promotion and advancement from level to level is not as strictly in place as IB but the lifestyle is so much better and pay is great at upper levels. Great exit ops in HF and CF as well.
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