I wanted to write a post addressing the professional pros of a career in finance vs. a career in computer science. Growing up and while in college I made the decision to pursue finance with the ultimate goal of breaking into investment banking which luckily came to fruition after a lot of hard work. This may not apply to you, but in retrospect I believe I may have considered computer science more seriously if I had to do it all over again - not saying investment banking doesn't have its perks, but a lifelong list of achievements in computer science looks like it now yields more equity and entrepreneurial opportunities vs. a lifelong list of achievements in finance. I just even think about the computer scientists that are making software tools for investment banking (like Memo|Fi, Mapping|Intern) and think of what an opportunity it would be if I could create IP myself.
Investment Banking (Advisory) Pros
-Opportunity to create prestigious connections with executive managements, buyside/AM investors, and your own BB, MM, or EB managing directors directly out of college.
-Ability to learn how to position/market an enterprise to prepare if for transformative business transactions such as capital raises, mergers, and/or dissolutions.
-Forced fluency in excel and powerpoint, which at the end of the day still continue to lead modern business in the software arena.
Computer Science Pros
-Opportunity to be on the front lines of startup America as software engineers are continuously exposed to ideas in the office and through personal networks.
-Ability to single handedly bring a website or software to life without the help of hiring a freelance software engineer - essentially, the ability to create your own IP at your own will (no roadblocks)
-Forced fluency in computing languages that will be the framework of all future softwares and business
-Job security during economic downturns that affect corporate America
I am sure all of you in investment banking have business ideas and more likely than not the thing holding you back is your inability to bring that idea to life with your own skills. What do you guys think? Investment Banking vs. Computer Science?
Bro, you are posting this on a finance forum... you think everyone is going to say IB or COMP SCI? I wonder...
you’re right why wouldn’t I work in IB where the benefits are 1. prorated salary of a McDonald’s fry cook 2. I’ll become an expert at copy & pasting + PowerPoint 3. After 30 years of making useless models I’ll have a sick title next to my name
gotta love the classic weekly IB vs X threads
Current CS major at top 4 public thinking you are over glorifying the profession. 1). The job security is exaggerated as roughly ~25 percent of the CS majors at my school lost their summer internships/ full time job offers 2). For those who go to non FAANG level companies compensation tops out at ~140k in addition there is TREMENDOUS pressure to keep up with the latest technologies/ frameworks otherwise you are shown the door. Try studying the latest IDE and language updates with the declined logical abilities of a middle aged adult raising a family. 3). For the better or the worse the lack of protectionist policies against foreign nationals and low barriers to entries will drag down wages and job prospects.
CS is not a career path, it is an academic subject. Do you mean SWE? If so, there are plenty of people from non-CS backgrounds or top bootcamp backgrounds in SWE. It's not like saying medicine where there's a 1-to-1 mapping from subject to career path - please stop treating it like that.
The only two industries where SWEs make outsized amounts of money are Tech (bigCos/GAFAM, tier 1/2/3 established companies, well-funded startups mostly based in tech hub cities) and Quant Finance (tech-driven prop shops, quant investment firms, quant trading teams at banks). In almost every other industry or in a professional services firm (both of which are where the VAST MAJORITY of SWEs work) there's absolutely nothing special about the career path. It's as good as any middle class, white collar job.
Both Tech and QuantFin are highly remunerative industries in and of themselves. Largely because of their approach to paying core talent well. In Tech, all of the core talent (SWE, DS/Analytics/Applied ML, Product, Product Marketing, Design) gets paid very well at all IC levels and also on the management track with maybe SWE and Product leading the way. Similarly in Quant Finance core talent (Quant Traders, Quant Researchers, SWEs) also get paid very well. In Tech, the comp structure is more clear (esp. with late stage or public stock) i.e. sandwich of base+yearly vesting stock (multiple tranches of RSUs vesting)+bonus, in QF, it's more opaque - i.e. modest salary + significant year-end bonus.
Although SWEs get paid slightly more per level than other core roles, they aren't the only ones making cash in Tech - it just pays well overall. There is nothing, absolutely nada special about being a SWE in and of itself. Tech just pays very well - for both core technical/biz roles and for support biz roles. Which means, unlike banking where the industry and the career are one and the same, the premium doesn't come from being on the SWE track it comes from being in the Tech space itself.
Banking and SWE share absolutely 0 in common on an ideal temperament/functional interest/skillset basis. You may as well be comparing Music and Medicine. There certainly are core roles in Tech that do share somewhat of the same talent pool as Banking and other top business jobs - notably Product and Product Marketing - where it would make sense to form some kind of comparison between the two tracks. And there are absolutely non-core roles that are even common exit opps for bankers and the like - e.g. CorpDev, BizOps/Strategy, BizDev etc where a comparison more than makes sense. But the point is, you are fundamentally comparing two drastically different paths: one of niche skill specialisation and one of broader business strategizing/soft skills/handling ambiguity. You choose either one or the other not both. Seriously, try having a conversation about anything finance or business to a group of technical nerds and vice versa try having a technical conversation to biz/finance bros won't take more than a few seconds to see eyes glaze over.
Traditional high finance (IB/Fundamental HF/VC/PE/Fundamental AM) probably has consistently higher ceiling than either of Tech or Quant Finance. Most folks in either space will be effectively "stuck" at an upper middle class type of income (i.e. ~$250-600k) for the rest of their careers with only a few people making it into the rarified air of higher comp (i.e. higher IC/Management levels in Tech, significant PnL linkage/responsibility in Quant Finance). In traditional high finance, so long as you survive, you're more guaranteed to be among the highest of earners (i.e. high six figures to mid seven figures) in the professional world as an individual contributor.
All this said, the only REAL way of becoming exceptionally wealthy is to start a company. It could be your own fund, a vc-backed startup or a new chain of restaurants, whatever it is, that is the only path to becoming a true BSD in this world. Not measuring dicks over whether Tech or Quant Finance or Traditional High Finance or Medicine or BigLaw or Consulting or Corporate Functions/Leadership or whatever other formerly upper middle class yuppie-infested, insecurity ridden career path exists out there is better than the other.
Seen CS kids come to finance, not the other way around
Yeah because computer science is harder than finance..
I swear this same topic gets posted every month. I’m a CS major that made the jump to IB. One isn’t better than the other, and the people that enjoy coding and computer architecture probably don’t enjoy finance and vice versa. I ended up hating writing code, it’s not for everyone, and the narrative that being a software developer makes it that much easier to start a million/billion dollar startup is laughable. Even if you can code, but not just code, write clean software AND have a great idea, many many people still fail. This is one of the dumbest comparisons of all time. But, it just shows that so many people are worried about how their career or job is perceived or how much they can make in X years. Do something you are interested in and that you don’t mind getting up everyday to do, and do it well, and you’ll make money.
Im going to post this exact same question next week for all of you
Agree with a lot of the points above that most people here way over-glorify SWE as a profession. I'm a CS major, did an internship at a big tech company, and hated it and switched over to IB. That being said, the one pro of tech is the jobs are probably a lot easier to land. At my target, literally anyone who is able to graduate with a CS degree and isn't completely socially inept can land a great CS job, whereas you see plenty of qualified kids recruit for IB and get skunked. Due to the difficulty of a CS major, I think a lot of it is that people just get weeded out earlier (as opposed to IB when people get weeded out during recruiting), but in my experience tech recruiting is less of a black box with all the hoops you have to jump through (hirevues, networking, etc) and smart people get the good jobs.
Finance interviews were harder because (surprise) you’ve never taken an accounting or finance course before. Meanwhile you’ve been coding a ton. Also IB is the gold standard of finance so you have to compare it with breaking into Google not just getting a dev job out of college.