Prestige of finance went down hard?
I feel like the prestige of being in banking or "finance" in general has peaked somewhere between the 80s-2000s.
Like it was always considered as this savy/chad-like type A kind of career, that people looked up to and respected.
Nowadays esp. when dating it almost feels weird telling "I'm In FiNaNcE".
Back then, esp. trading, was really this more masculine / eat what you kill / go-getter environment. These days, being in "Finance" buckets you in a cesspool of insufferable people. From stereotypical finance scam bro type of things trying to shill something via youtube/linkedin, to crypto but also to gazillions of insecure early 20s student who build their whole persona about wanting to work in finance.
I honestly hate that.
Ever heard of prop shops? Banks don't do eat what you kill because you can't "prop trade". I work in trading. Being in a quant shop or HF is still a really good career and pays better than basically anything else in finance
Such is the result of the current market. Everyone wants to maximize their income because there's no way you can afford a house and kids on a normal income, and social media has turbocharged the ideal lifestyle of being rich and having a yacht and shit. People want the high life. Only a few industries can give that: Consulting, law, tech, medicine, and finance. If you're not really smart, law, tech, and medicine are a tough sell. You can make it in consulting or finance just based on hard work and not being insufferable. So ofc you get a lot of people desperate to break in.
Annoying people shilling shit is everywhere. Why? Because it works.
I would say I somewhat agree with what you're saying, in that finance has declined a bit in terms of what you can earn and what you can do. THAT SAID, areas of finance have gotten way better, namely the areas that require a technical background. Finance is incredibly broad, so ofc you're going to have a great disparity between the haves and the have nots
Law and medicine require more intelligence than finance and consulting? I don’t really think so. Think back to undergrad, the pre-meds and pre-law people weren’t that impressive compared to people getting IB and consulting offers imo
Most of those people don't make it through law or med school. It's a whole other world once you actually get into those schools(if you even do). Also, some schools bias one way over another. A school like UPenn or NYU will have more smart students biasing towards business, while schools like Vandy or JHU will have more going to pre med and law and other stuff. It could be the case that you went to a hard business target that biases most smart applicants towards one area over another, but in aggregate smart candidates tend towards harder topics. It makes logical sense, because finance and consulting have the tradeoff of worse hours and often brutal culture at the entry level, in exchange for high pay and progression, but a smart student makes the exchange of their intelligence for high pay and progression.
I’m not sure about banking but for consulting (at least MBB), you def can’t cut it to partner by just being “hard working” (some exceptions as always of course).
To be honest, I personally often feel to dumb at my firm. A large part of partners I work with have an advanced degree in a STEM subjects. There are even various senior partners that come to my mind with PhDs in physics from top institutions.
it’s probably different if you do IT consulting at Deloitte, but MBB is filled with a bunch of nerds on the spectrum and IQs to the far right side of the normal curve.
I went to med school and work at a hedge fund. The average person from my med school class is for sure smarter than the average person I have met in banking, ER, PE and consulting. I have met many very smart people within my niche of public investing, and I would say the average intelligence is similar to medicine, but with greater dispersion.
Good comment. The highest paying jobs are the ones that reward intelligence and creativity. The more sales oriented jobs in finance require less of both and it’s not surprising there has been wage compression.
The tech glaze on this site is insane. You don’t even need a good gpa and you really think prompting chatgpt to stitch together for loops and package libraries is the epitome of intelligence?
Modern scripting is just excel with an extra layer of abstraction lol
3.0 in STEM > 3.7 in finance. Also, for top firms, you absolutely do need a 3.5+.
Very clear you don't know much about SWE. SWE is way less about coding and far more about design work, which is very intellectually demanding. it's one thing to write a simple program, it's another to scale it to billions of people efficiently and without any errors. That does require a lot of intellect, as you have to think about a million different use cases, and a million different ways a user will break your program.
In finance, especially traditional finance, if your model has poor assumptions, it's an easy fix. If your model has poor assumptions and breaks in tech, you end up losing millions of dollars.
If it was as simple as gluing things together, SWE would be the easiest job ever, but that isn't the case.
In other words the bar has never been lower to prove people wrong.
CS and engineering kids are smelly nerds that can barely talk to women, med school kids are drowning in debt making 60k in their 4th year or residency (after 4 years of med school), law students are insufferable know it alls, the list goes on... the grass is always greener on the other side
funniest part about law students/lawyers is that the "know it all" stops when they need to take some risk, suddenly they aren't as confident anymore
just tell them that there are SCOTUS / indictment bets on Poly/Kalshi, and see how quickly they shut the fuck up
Of course lol, they are the king word-cels. Love armchairing things. Epitome of theoretical but not applied.
i agree tech kids are weird no doubt, but my friends that did tech are doing much better then my friends that did finance my friends in tech 23-24 are making 150-200 working 20-40 hrs a week and a lot of remote. My freinds in finance 23-25 make 200-250 but their lives are hell. But finance long term probably wins tech salaries dont really scale.
Back in the "good old days" (pre '08) there simply was more money being made (inflation adjusted) - that I think is part of what you are describing. If you were a successful BB MD advising on M&A + underwriting debt you could feasibly make $100m in your career (today that's a stretch).
There also just weren't as many funds / banks, and hence not as many Brads / Chads working at them (it was perhaps viewed more prestigious / rare), and less competition for targets, etc. That coupled with more financial regulations has put a bit of a damper on the money being made, but may change soon...
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Sounds like insecurity
Best thing you can do is just acknowledge it. When I tell people (dates especially) that I'm in banking, I give it a little eye roll and acknowledge I'm in a generic d-bag industry. It helps you look normal. Anyone that would say it with pride is kind of red-flaggy if you ask me.
Totally agree
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there's just too much visibility into what finance (specifically IB) is via the 1,000 "day-in-the-life" videos and the amount of meme material going around on social media that cheapens it. There's no mystique or mystery to it anymore. You go on a date with your average marketing girl and you tell her you do IB and she's thinking ok this guy just looks at powerpoint all day and makes less than a UPS driver or Chipotle employee per hour because Litquidity told me so. Boring. It actually hurts you to say you do finance now, and probably has for some time. Same with consultants. The amount of stuff I see on social media that is either (a) consultants are idiots (b) consultants add no value (c) consultants ruined the world.
Agree with your points.
I think with consulting to an extent it’s even worse.
If you look at consulting influencers it’s basically never somebody working at McKinsey. Which is fair, don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to gatekeep.
But in this “day in a life of a consultant” they completely miss present the actual higher end of the market (ie, strategy consulting).
These videos are typically made by a guy/gal working in PwC IT Consulting and basically are represented like EVERY other 9-5 job (even clocking out super early) because in a sense there day to day job is much closer to a normal corporate job then doing actual top management consulting.
Anyway. In terms of prestige I feel like none of these industries are top notch anymore. Working in both jobs, you get bucketed into a super stereotypical finance/corporate-bro bucket. Women will think you work a lot and are a bit douchey.
Congrats on Guggeinheim
One of those guys listed is on my team and definitely runs laps around the Ivy League guys.
In my personal experience based on who I’ve come across, a lot of the non targets went to pretty elite private schools, went to a non target for whatever reason (SEC football, Greek life, play a D3 sport, wanted a small school, random major etc) and then pretty heavily leverage their high school network + their dad. They are nepos, not non targets, especially if it’s a good LAC (NESCAC & the like) or appears on those lists of being schools for rich kids (WashU, William & Lee, Colgate, SMU, etc) vs Boise St or UNH or something.
It’s definitely not what it used to be.
2007 Lehman Comp is public due to the bankruptcy, look it up. Obviously a high water mark, but good benchmark for what comp was like pre-GFC. VPs making like 700-800k. Associates making like 500-600k.
All in comp is down significantly just on a notional basis. Factor in inflation and it’s not even close.
The way technology has evolved since then too has made the job more challenging / less bearable. Always available (2 phones, iPads, etc) and also the speed and frequency of communication. The amount of content / size of decks that teams churn out now are insane. I get 600 emails a day. Calendar full basically everyday from 830 am - 6 pm. Constant zoom meetings. Internal garbage, client calls, in person pitches, etc. Expected to be available for anything, anytime, at the drop of a hat.
All of the above said, it’s still a great opportunity, but just not as attractive as it once was. 20 years ago, a career banker could truly become RICH. Not so much anymore.
I think it’s moved from Banking/PE to Pods & Quant generally in terms of what is perceived as amazing
There a thread like this literally every week. You guys are so tired
I'd add "people who are concerned about the prestige of finance" to that list of insufferables
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