So I have a couple friends who are computer science/computer engineering majors. I know some other friends who are gonna do MFEs. They always think that, technical people are the best in the world (which I do not believe, because I like strategic and conceptual thinking better).
They also seem to despise Excel, something that bankers use a lot, because they know programming languages.
So is Excel really inferior? Is that true ?
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I lost brain cells reading this post. Your clown friends don't realize that excel is a fucking spreadsheet software. It could be a third grade programming platform and wouldn't matter.
Life advice. Don't listen to people opine about careers or things they know nothing about.
Ugh, fuck this makes me glad I'm not in college anymore. You should get out more and try to solve whether Becky's ass is inferior to Lucy's. Or just anything that actually matters or is some kind of interesting. Fucking excel.
I'm a former banker / PE associate who is now a software developer so I've used both Excel and "legit" programming languages extensively. Excel is great for its intended purpose: ad-hoc modeling and calculations with small, messy, heterogenous datasets. In a banking or PE context, that is all you really need.
Programming languages are great for building software or doing advanced analysis with large, standardized, homogenous datasets. Outside of quant style hedge funds and a few projects at consulting firms, you probably won't come across a need for this in finance. On the industry side, you may need this on occasion, but most companies' data is such an inconsistent mess that putting it through some advanced Python model is a complete waste of time. Most companies would be better served focusing on being able to produce a clean set of financials and a reliable way to track 2 or maybe 3 simple KPIs (you'd be surprised at how many fairly large companies cannot do either of these things).