Do Engineers/SWE’s irritate you guys as much as they irritate me
To preface I'm a double major in both finance and computer science (hoping of landing on a fintech desk eventually). I constantly see on TikTok and Twitter engineers making fun of Business majors (even though I don't think they are specifically referencing finance), for the coursework being significantly easier.I've taken math classes through topology (this is traditionally past linear algebra and differential equations) for my computer science major a long with teaching myself thermodynamics and that shit so I could build a computer as a personal project. My finance coursework was far and away harder. I was in some special group at my school that's Ivy adjacent (I'm sure you can figure out the school) in order to break into IB. The classes I had to take for the group cleared any math or computer science course in terms of difficulty I've had to take. Not to mention my sophomore year internship was at Google for SWE and I found it significantly harder to land the BB IB internship offer. Does anybody else think these engineers are talking out their ass. The hardest class I've taken at undergrad was the Financial Derivatives and quantitive finance class my school offers. Can we please start bullying these people back into reality. I'm willing to concede that pure maths and physics might be harder than finance but other than that I disagree with any other major. At least at my school, the top talent goes into finance because that's where the money is. Consequentially they make the coursework harder as a result. My point is I'm almost positive anybody in IB could crush engineering at any school regardless of the field. I genuinely believe that the people who go into finance are smarter than those in engineering because Finance offers more money and I think you'd have to be an idiot to pick a lower paying field unless you are scared of the competition. I don't even think very many quants are smarter than IB guys they are just more fluent in higher level math but I'm convinced most people in IB could easily grasp it.
Quant finance is also a joke. Pair trading doesn’t account for innovation between firms, arima models are empirical at best and time series data rarely is capable of predicting future price movements, Technical Analysis is fairy dust, mean variance usually only works if there’s some news that isn’t priced in that causes an anomaly, NLP models that gage market sentiment don’t work because all news is already priced-in, and LLM’s simply hallucinate strategies that sound good while reading but fail at every step of back testing. HFT Market Making is the only strat that kinda works and that’s only because these founders of these firms were mostly nepo babies and were able to raise money from rich family members to by millions in fancy hardware to get the most accurate real time quotes and they still usually fail. SBF and my queen Caroline Ellison proved this for me perfectly. That's my rant. Can we just please shit on engineers and humble them and bring them back to reality.
And just to continue real quick. 65% of the kids in my CS classes couldn’t even figure out a FizzBuzz question. Academia also had to come up with this fake thing called “imposter syndrome” because too many people were getting computer science degrees and fucking sucking at programming because it’s not for them and they can’t actually code. So again where am I going. Maybe some SWE’s are smarter than IB guys but half these guys can’t even center a div after 4 years of school and are working as front end devs making buttons for some shitty company website. How am I supposed to take that more seriously or think it’s harder than organizing an M&A lmao
First of all, ppl major in cs =/= swe. Same way not all banker wannabes will make it to decent IB shops.
As someone who studied rocket science in college and now working at EB RX, I have to say technical side of banking is easier but that is simply not what sets IB apart from other industries for undergrads. Let’s not pretend financial models (even with 100+ tabs) are more complex than liquid rocket engine model with PID control. Excel is nothing more than glorified calculator tbh. But IB is the only place where fresh grads gain in-depth yet big picture knowledge in industries within a year or two. Not to mention the optionality in exits for IB analysts.
It’s a sales job at the end of the day. MDs may invent some things new (think uptier and dropdown for RX recently), but nothing we, the analysts, do involves creating something new. We merely use the same old template/method for output lol. Let’s face it. But I still shit on swe or engineers in general cos I enjoy the easy money lol
I understand your point and I definitely don’t disagree that Aerospace Engineering is an extremely difficult field. With that said, I feel like Finance in particular at target schools is still more competitive. I can agree with you that no company valuation is as difficult as engineering a rocket or missile. That being said, CS at my school was in the engineering school and I would say 70% of our grades would usually come from group projects or homework. I was extremely lazy studying CS and ended up with a 3.8 GPA at one of the top (non-Ivy) (non-research institute) universities doing for me what I would consider the bare minimum. Finance was nowhere close to similar to that for me. Again the math might not be as difficult, but that doesn’t mean the classes were not harder. For my finance degree I would say at minimum 70-80% of our grade in a class comes from un-curved tests that you are given nowhere near enough time to complete. Coupled with the fact that my school rounds down and will only give a certain number of A’s per class so that the average class score is a B- or C+ makes it extremely challenging to maintain a 3.7+ GPA in order to land at a good shop.
This feels like a meme post, but idk man maybe some of y’all are smart as fuck where this shit hits diff, like I’m a dumbass and it was way easier to recruit for BB IB (after RNG, the interview itself was a cakewalk lmao, no EB / RX level stuff) than MBB or SWE / PM. Granted didn’t go to a top school, so maybe that’s why my finance classes were easy af vs my cs classes.
Thing is, that’s probably true for most schools, where business is like the default major for ppl who want to party through college with a 3.x - yours is likely an exception, hence the general sentiment opposite to your experience. Plus, class / grading structure differences you described are highly variable across even different professors at the same college, let alone diff colleges. Like it’s a meme at so many colleges that all the business majors just party and go to bars all the time vs engi majors stuck grinding for the same grade, but the justification is that engi majors grind more in college to grind less after vs opposite w business. Lot of anecdotal truth to that.
End of the day tho, it’s a major / job mate, anyone who takes their shit too seriously (on either side of this argument) just has ego / validation problems which -> being insufferable / irritating. Judging ppl by how “cerebral” their work is a sad way to view the world imo
lol he doesn't even goto a real "finance" school...
remember the top targets don't even have finance as a major for undergrad, yet still send so many into finance hmmm
Rocket science? That’s sick hahaha
No because I’m a normal person who doesn’t derive my self worth based on what people say about my job
Why do you care what they think? Are you insecure that they are having successful careers with more work life balance and similar comp?
I’ve definitely run into the most weird issues with dev teams I’ve managed. I mean weird personal issues you don’t really see once people are making over 80k a year let alone $200k+ lol. Only physical manufacturing ops is less enjoyable to run.
Lmao this sounds entertaining. Please share what kind of weird personal issues do these devs making $200k+ come up with?
kelley ibw?
Lol
All for free speech and minimal moderation, but can we start banning these tech vs. IB posts. They're so many of them, and all are pointless exercises of mental masturbation
You talk with such authority on things you clearly know very little about…I think we have an MD in the making here boys!
Build your own computer? I would challenge you to actually design one from scratch that could actually be used in production. Topology has nothing to do with anything but I guess you're trying to tell us you're smart. But taking a class doesn't make you an expert if you've never done it for real with money on the line. A Google SWE job is a backup route for talented CS majors, and the most talented ones at a real target want to join YC, not investment banking. And to top it all off, you strawmanned a list a quant finance buzz words but you're so proud of your stochastic calculus class.
If you're so smart, why aren't you already rich? FYI you're just as irritating as the people you complain about.
I would challenge you to run the economy, why would I build computers when I am doing gods work
What's YC
Y Combinator…a top early stage tech incubator.
I feel like you failed interviewing at the elite quant firms and now this is your elaborate cope. The set of people who chose IB over quant who can realistically succeed at both is {}.
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My thoughts exactly lol… if you’re in it for the money and had an opportunity at a true quant HF/MM then you majorly fucked up by choosing IB. Hence he never had the opportunity…
Most of what you said is true. Google hiring bar was very problematic in 2019 - 2021. The low bar was due to the fact that they had endless amount of free cash, which is getting adjusted in 2023. Most quant strategies don't work. Most of AI / machine learning models are useless non-interpretable garbage. The "day in life" Tik Tok video makers are very annoying and overly narcissistic. But … there's a BUT. But ChatGPT does work. And RenTech does have amazing Sharpe. And HFT quant does make millions at age 24. One truth that I learnt from life experience: being selective is not equal to being valuable. Value does not alway go proportionally with selectivity or exclusivity. Tech has low bars and hire not-so-cool kids who can't break into exclusive clubs nor tell the difference between 5 types of PPT fonts. But tech is multi-trillion dollar industry that have fed up tens of thousands of TMT VC, PE, and TMT bankers. Quants are nerds who make weird black box that no one cares about, but they do generate 5+ Sharpe and billions dollar of individual PnL. HFT engineers are merely OS specialist and C++ code monkeys, but they build softwares that manage millions of dollar of transactions every microsecond and trillions of dollar of throughput in days. These people do have what it takes to brag because they are exceptionally successful in their career. However those people should learn to be more low-key, as jealous from peers can be very dangerous for them.
Hey bro I'm going to be working in quant trading soon making >500k and really don't care if IB folks are smarter than me or not. Focus on yourself first bro.
x
Think think lowly of us, we don’t think of them at all. You tell me whos winning the battle. 🤷♀️
Think think lowly of us, we don’t think of them at all. You tell me whos winning the battle. 🤷♀️
Think think lowly of us, we don’t think of them at all. You tell me whos winning the battle. 🤷♀️
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