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.

30 Comments
 

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

 
Funniest

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.

kelley ibw?

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