I Feel Like an Idiot for Choosing Finance Over Tech
I graduated near the top of my class from a competitive Bay Area high school and went to Cal along with 50+ kids from my year. Most of them pursued tech but I told myself I was a grinder and wanted to work my ass off in my 20s to set myself apart. I spent my college years grinding networking, recruiting, clubs, and part-time internships while maintaining a near perfect GPA. I'm wrapping up my analyst stint at a top BB/EB, and have an on-cycle offer from a MF. I'm close to as successful as you can get as a finance major but despite that I make less with a significantly worse quality of life than my peers in tech who were "less successful" relatively speaking.
My friends from HS and college who were average or above average students mostly work at FAANG or FAANG adjacent tech firms making similar TC and working half the hours I do. Friends who were top students with similar GPAs and test scores as me are working at unicorns, top fintech firms, or as quants making twice my TC (a lot of times more with stock options) still with better WLB.
I don't think I'm dumber or less hard-working than these people; we got similar SAT scores and did just as well in the STEM AP classes, none of them were winning math or coding contests, they were just smart, hard-working kids that pursued a different path.
Some people might say I'm bitter but could you really say you wouldn't be in my position? I vividly remember opening Instagram on an Uber ride home at 2am on a Saturday morning and seeing a group of friends in tech on a Thursday to Monday vacation to Hawaii or Vegas without using vacation days (3day RTO).
What prompted me to make this post was that I recently wrapped interviewing for what I'd consider a dream offer. It's nearly 300k all-in in bizdev at a hot fintech company working 35-40 hours a week with great benefits and 4 days in office. I'm strongly considering forgoing my MF offer if I get this as my physical and mental health is shot from working 100 hour weeks for 2 years straight but the real kicker is I have friends that started working at this company from undergrad that are making more than I would with better career progression. I killed myself grinding to the bone for 4 years in college and 2 years in IB just to get the chance to interview for a materially worse offer they got out of undergrad.
It's a beautiful Friday evening, two of my friends have been in Europe for the last week and are returning next Monday while using a total of 3 of their 25 vacation days. I'm getting ready to exit my toilet stall and work another 5 hours tonight then 10 more on Sunday. I love high finance.
Idk why you’re doing this to yourself, but stop measuring dicks at this point in your career. You can blow the top off this mother fucker if you want, the race just started.
Just want to disabuse you of the notion that you have "power" or know what it is as a VP in PE. The ones with power are the LPs and founders.
What is your "access" going to give you? Imposter syndrome? Maybe a few chances to cut a seed check out of your personal savings?
Rejected - you can miss me with the disrespect / manlet mindset and, evidentially, you’re way too careless with assumptions. I do not care if you don’t believe it and don’t care for your personality.
You should work on your EQ, this isn’t a way to get answers you want.
Best of luck in life and save your time replying to me, I won’t read it.
Avg poor, overworked PE VP…come to hf land if u have what it takes and make some real bucks. My buddy made 4 mil 2 yrs out of college…that’s probably more than your NW
Ngl I was making myself feel better via your first comment but now that I see this second comment I realize that OP is right and we all should have just gone into tech.
Except you omitted the fact that finance is actually interesting and tech mind blowingly sucks at least for me.
Any quant/ml stuff is infinitely more interesting than 90% of your day to day as an investment banker
Nah, sorry no - not for me
If you're constantly comparing your position in life to others, you've lost ten times over. Odds are, there are kids born with trust funds and generational wealth who can outearn your next five years' worth of income. Does that matter? Not really. Does it affect you? Only if you allows it to.
The other post hit a few points that you'll hear a lot in how careers aren't linear, your growth and work in finance is fundamentally different than tech and the skills you develop will help you remain employable regardless of the firm.
But I'd actually like to take this from a different angle... why do you care where your friends are working? Have you ever had an interest or passion in coding or building apps? Is their work interesting at all to you? If the answer is no, it seems you're solely looking into hours in, salary out. Well, the truth to the matter is having so much of your salary restricted on a pre-specified vesting schedule limits mobility to jump to other firms. In Tech, most people start at around L2/L3 and hit terminal promotions/salaries are L4/L5 with very, very, very few cracking L6 or higher, which means that the majority of them earning higher salaries will have significantly less salary growth over five to ten years unless they're the top 1% within those specific roles.
You're in a fantastic position career wise, if you want to take the Fintech role and earn some time back to dedicate more time into the other aspects of your life, by all means, go for it. You'll be able to afford a nice vacation to fight the burnout, you can join social clubs (running club, boxing, tennis, etc.) to meeet other folks, go out for concerts, eat at a few nice places, and just enjoy some down time. Of course, that will come at the cost of earning multi-million annual salaries in the later stages of your career if you choose not to pursue the MF route. That's betwen you and yourself. Not some other MF kid earning carry, or the latest PE associate who made $500k. Their positions and salaries really don't matter.
tl;dr - you're likely doubting your sacrifices and career progression. Talk to yourself. Take a break. Re-engage.
Not OP but feeling the same as they do. This take doesn’t resonate with me.
Yes, I am looking at a job as WLB-adjusted comp, hours in salary out as you said, and really don’t need the incremental dollars beyond a certain amount, say $400k p.a., if it means I get to actually enjoy my money. The problem comes from incorrectly choosing finance instead of tech, even with this prioritization in mind, and I just can’t stop kicking myself for it.
Any tips on how to deal with this kind of self-hatred would be appreciated
Seems in your view it's more of a matter of acceptance. There are choices in life that brought us here, many good, some bad. Those choices can be painful reminders of our shortcomings or faults, one of which is deciding on a career path so early.
If you're in this headspace, one that I myself have been in countless times, I would say begin writing a gratitude journal - having a negative bias will amplify bitterness, greed, envy and self-hatred. It will weigh on your day to day activities making you question why work in job x if you're never going to make it into job y and ultimately push others away as that kind of bitterness can strain relationships over a long period of time.
There is no overnight fix or magic set of words that can mend something like this. It comes from continuous acceptance for you to move forward from this past choice, similar to moving past trauma.
You can also ask yourself what in Tech you enjoy and see how you can incorporate it. If it's purely monetary, I hate to break it to you, but most folks have seen a tech firms layoff thousands over the past few years. Their platforms are burning as we speak. If it's not monetary, then find ways to integrate their workflows or ecosystem.
What's with the obsession of comparing yourself to your peers
I’m confused. Are you just solving for work life balance? In that case, yes - tech will certainly be a better career choice. Being a W2 employee in tech is a great lifestyle, but what you see tends to be what you get. Your compensation and time required to generate it at 3-5 years in to the job and 15-20 years tend to be very similar.
Finance is steeper, and correspondingly riskier with worse work life balance. Note that we’re generalizing both fields here, and different parts of both fields will be interesting/dead at different times, but it’s no surprise to anyone on this forum that the job changes substantially as you get more senior.
The bigger question though - what do you want to do with the bulk of your time? If you’re interested in finance problems do finance, if you want to work on technical problems do tech. Everything else is really secondary.
You’re clearly smart, I don’t know why your thinking on this is so clouded with envy. Life isn’t a game of applications to the next stage. Spend time working on things you care about.
Unstructured thoughts:
But overall, it's good thinking. Arguably, traditional high finance roles have become less attractive (on an absolute and relative basis), while the competition for them has remained steady. The smartest kids will assess the facts and decide for themselves, instead of blindly trusting other people's perceptions.
If it's any help for you to cope, my older friends at FAANG said that they do get grinded and have to put in around 60 hrs/wk typically. Plus, don't underestimate how tough it is to practice leetcode for interviews, since this takes a ton of time. This is especially worse given how much of the tech industry is getting cut down in terms of employee numbers, and it's somewhat uncertain to stay in a decent seat. Since you mentioned comp in your comparison, TC for them seems to max out at around 400-600k where it's unlikely to increase as promotions past the senior swe level are pretty hard to get. For the quants tho, those guys are rockstars and probably smarter than anyone who chose finance. Even then, there's a downside with extremely high turnover for them.
Overall, this sounds like a very grass is greener situation, and I think you should take solace in the fact that many people face similar worries (in and out of finance) and have left more mature and appreciative of their current situation. Just know that on an relative career standpoint, you're at a better place than 99.9% of ppl, not even just in ur age range.
I think you should take that bizdev offer. You seem excited about it, and it would be bad to take MFPE if you end up resenting it for forgoing the other offer, especially when you'd get grinded to the bone as much as in IB. You say it's "materially worse" but how so? On a comp level, sure. But is that your only gauge for determining if something is important to you, since you said tech could be better even tho they make less? All in all, this is just an outsider perspective, but you need to figure out your priorities in life soon since you're slowly reaching the point where optimizing optionality isn't the best move. Sure PE gets you the potential for crazy upside and brand-name for other opportunities, but based on the tone of this post, it seems like you already have the ideal exit in front of you.
Cope doesn't help. What OP needs to realize is that there will always be someone who works chill hours (or not at all), has more interesting work, has more money, etc so there's no need for the constant comparison to one's peers.
I get the sentiment, but I think when he's feeling disappointed about himself for these aforementioned better pay/lifestyle jobs, it's important to have the full picture before writing oneself off as inferior to the peers in other industries.
fuck grinding 12 hours per day on litcode or whatever other nerd sht
shoot me, that's not life as someone said. Looking at a business, on the contrary, makes u learn/see smth about the world
not even money/hours, it's about what you do all day and what u learn/see/underdtand better
do u wanna understand biz/finance/management thibking/economy/products/etc. or master - after 5/8 years of hard work - a software/programming language
personal choice btw
I suppose you haven't read about the massive layoffs within the Tech industry over the last couple years. The gravy train is over and there's definitely a fear of getting laid off throughout the industry. Also, new offers are significantly lower than what current employees are getting paid, which are driven mostly due to stock appreciation. With a looming recession the jealousy you feel from TC growing 1.5-2x due to stock appreciation will slowly be relief that your comp is mostly cash based or long term carry
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