Why is banking becoming more competitive, given that more and more top students choose to go to startups in the Valley?
Isn't the whole point of pushing banking recruiting earlier and earlier in order to snap talent early, before they've had the opportunity to consider other options?
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Same number of seats or fewer seats. Ever increasing pool of applicants. Even the lowly, WSO besmirched middle market banks can afford to be more selective. I don't buy for a second that the valley is draining talent - perhaps +/- 10% of any target's given class who is on the fence may choose SV instead of wall st., but those are the lucky ones to have a choice. Everyone else is still fighting for a spot to get in. One just has to look at how quantity of applications for summer analyst seats have been trending the last decade or so, and the corresponding offer-to-application ratio. I think offers hover around 1-3%? Also consider that not every summer analyst comes away with a full-time offer, and it frames things that much clearer...
Because "all of a sudden" people started to finally realise that tech isn't the hot shit into infinity that is made to believe by force shoving "Meet this 20-something year old entrepreneur ..." Facebook and Medium garbage up your throat.
I said this in the Amazon MBA recruiting thread and the tech is overrated for MBA thread and will re-iterate it here.
Unless you're hardcore STEM with very strong programming skills and technical knowledge, tech is an overrated career path.
Banking, despite the bad rep it gets, offers awesome compensation, great exit opportunities, and relatively interesting work with very talented people.
People are realizing that the vast majority of startups are total crap. Why join an unstable startup for crap pay and "paper" money rather than a stable lucrative career such as banking or consulting?
I have always believed that tech is hype, an obnoxious bubble. I'm glad that people are waking up to this reality and thinking through in a more sober manner.
Most tech jobs are in SF Bay Area and Seattle, which are awful places.
Dances hates on SF and Seattle every chance he gets, but that's a topic for a different post. The rest of what he just wrote is accurate in my opinion. If you're not a 'tech' person (in that you don't have strong technical skills), you're not likely to rise through the ranks to run a tech company, and there will be a natural limit to the jobs you can do. Similarly, you don't get to run a bank without understanding finance. That's just how it is.
There are only a handful of well-defined starts to career paths that make meaningful amounts of money. Finance is always likely to be one of those paths, so if you're not sure what you want to do with your career at 21 or 22, investment banking and consulting set you up better than just about any other path you might choose. I have some friends who killed it in the start-up world. But you're rolling the dice there. I have a lot of friends who are extremely clever who didn't yet hit the jackpot in the start-up world. It seems like an enormous gamble to me, and I used to be quite the gambler. Investment banking is a safe bet that maximizes your career options, and that's always going to be attractive to a huge number of people, so the applicant pool keeps increasing, especially since so many non-targets now try to break into Wall Street from Bumfuck University.
I think there are two big differences since I was recruiting almost 20 years ago that have made banking relatively more competitive (or more democratic at least).
The first is that non-targets have learned a lot more about banking and the playing field is considerably more level, so there are many more candidates. Part of this is due to greater access to information that WSO and other websites provide; it used to be that the banking recruiting process was this mystery that was only passed down amongst target schools and that has changed. I also think bankers are much more open to casting a wide net, and for a long time there was frustration at the sense of entitlement that many target school kids were perceived to have had (although that has receded considerably).
The second is the process is considerably more structured. I went to a target but didn't do an internship in banking (albeit in a relevant industry), had zero prior finance experience, and my grades were average at best. I didn't get on any interview lists. Still, I was able to cold call bankers who covered the industry I interned at and was able to get 6-7 decent interviews and 3 offers. That's not happening today. Even our summer interns have relevant experience and the process is so structured, it feels hard to imagine my path is possible today.
diversity
Oh yeah man there are so many blacks and Hispanics and women in investment banking and they’re taking all those spots white men deserve to have
AndyLouis how is this flagged as the best response in the thread? Typically for sarcasm, but when its snark is based on ignorance
Actually, I think it's more competitive BECAUSE of sites like this, Mergers & Inquisitions, and the ease of access to prep guides + useful resources. The ease of access removes the advantage of information scarcity so your competition pool is at a more even level. Simply put, technology allows people to be more well-prepped. This is why networking is becoming such an important factor because being likeable is one of the few scarce differentiators.