It is clear that technology/AI will rule the world in the coming future. Many say it's a necessity to know code and that studying finance is archaic (similar to studying law in the 2000s). I can't help but find myself agreeing that tech is where the money will be at in the future.
Thoughts?
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Yes
why do you say that?
100% agree, honestly seems like tech is where the money will be rather than finance.
This is a very quaintly 2019 take.
Also, tell partners in K&E and Latham pulling 7mm cash on average that studying law in the 2000s was a bad idea.
Lol? The top 0.1% of every field will make a lot. How many people do you see out there that are billionaires that are practicing law vs created a tech company? lmk
Apples to oranges. Tech billionaires are basically entrepreneurs. How many billionaires you see out there who joined a FAANG or other prestigious tech company as a SWE (not when it was a startup). Yeah lmk.
Just from Latham in their New York office, there are 600+ partners (portion of that will be non-equity) who pull on average $4.5m a year. L8s at Google don't even make that and there's less of them in the whole of Google.
Either way its harder to guage top tier lawyer net worth as they are paid in fees and don't own publicly listed companies that you can easily see the value of.
Focusing on billionaires is such a bullshit viewpoint. Don't focus on the outliers, despite how shit hot everyone on this forum thinks they are they wont get there. Look at the average worker in the field you want to go into, this is most likely what you'll achieve. You'll most likely be an average SWE at FAANG or an average VP at some IB, base you're assessment on that.
So many prospects on this forum think they'll be a MF PE partner because they excelled in high school and are excelling now at a target school. They don't realise that they are average when they get to the desk in IB, and they're up against serious competition to excel from there. Same applies for SWE, most will average workers at FAANG rather, not unicorn founders.
The point is valid but for the sake of accuracy, the average partner at Latham doesn’t make 7mm cash. I’m sure that some make and even exceed that, but not everyone can cover the Carlyle account!
ya this job is so boring
It really is, if I had any idea how boring IB is and how much analysts exaggerate the work (or importance, thereof) they do on networking calls, I would have chosen SWE. I am a CS major and this year is just too tough to transition with no internship experience in SWE
you can still recruit for swe lol
Great points. Now, can you price update the charts?
Computer Science is Paradise
I agree supreme pay; great WLB, and and transferrable skills from job to job as well as and ever-growing market.
Computer Science IS the future however I think this will not mean what the tech praisers on WSO think it will mean. First of all, it will not mean that your best path to riches is to study CS instead of finance. Here is a pro-tip for you: if you are even on this forum then you are already too low IQ to ever become someone in the top 0.01% of CS PhDs, which is what it will take in the future to command 7 figures. Let me explain:
Tech is the pinnacle of globalization. You do not need to speak english to code, you do not need to have wealthy connections to code, you don't need anything to code other than to know how to code. This means that any and all tech companies can very easily set up entire operations in really cheap places like India to build what I'll call the regular infrastructure. What's regular infrastructure? Well, after an algorithm exists like the typical streaming algorithms used by, say, Youtube then you do not need your CS PhD genius to keep working on it. You give it to a typical Software Engineer to tweak it or adjust it, and that's all. Therefore I see all of these 'routine' Software Engineers jobs shifting to India or similar places. I already know plenty of tech start-ups that have their entire tech team located in places like Spain where you can find really good talent but also pay them a fraction of what they'd cost in California. So what do these smaller start-ups do? Shift all tech to Spain and retain in California only their core finance and strategy teams. Therefore who will be making the big bucks in the future? Same as today, the finance and strategy teams. However, of course, there will still be some tech positions that remain here. For example, Google has a separate tier for 'Research Scientist' which are also software engineers but they are almost exclusively all top 0.001% Computer Science PhDs and they work in the most advanced projects that will probably not see monetization in the next 20 years due to how forward-looking the tech is. Those jobs will remain here because the reality is that you will not find a top 0.001% Computer Science PhD in India or Spain. The guys who are autistic enough to get to that level already got their MIT scholarship when they were 13 and so by now they are comfortably living in the states.
Of course right now we still see plenty of jobs in tech staying here but I see the current recession we are going through as the final nail in the coffin. Seriously, why in the fuck are tech companies paying $200K for a mediocre programmer in the states when they could easily get an indian who has been programming since he was in the womb for just $100K. And here I am talking about India because fuck me I know some real big brained Indians but the reality is that there are dozens of countries building emergent tech centers to catch some of the tech outsource pie. This will be a huge market in the following decade.
If I was in tech right now as an engineer I would honestly be upskilling myself to become a product owner/project manager because my prediction is that in the near future tech companies will work in a model where they have all their product people in-house but all the tech people outsourced to India. And the highest paying tech job will be the few guys who survive this cull and get promoted to project managers so that they can be the ones to review all the code coming out of India and approving it to be merged into the production code. And honestly, as this would be a management job, I would not be surprised if the preferred candidates are management consulting/IB people.
Devils advocate- To your point on "Seriously, why in the fuck are tech companies paying $200K for a mediocre programmer in the states when they could easily get an indian who has been programming since he was in the womb for just $100K." When I think of a programmer in the US, I think of an Indian immigrant on a H-1B. That programmer that you think companies will hire in India wants to move to the US. When the crème de la crème from India (or any country) live in the US, companies hire them, if they all lived in Cambodia, companies will hire them there too and pay market wages. Secondly, do you really think outsourcing 100% of your engineering workforce has not been tried? What stopped IBM (which many would say at this point is an Indian company lol) from having 100% of their engineering workforce in India. Seriously think about it, IBM is a company that literally makes decisions to save pennies, wouldn't they have loved to have their engineering division overseas and pay lower wages? If it has been done (or tried and then swiftly reversed course), there is a reason for it and people in the trenches get it. We all know startups that hire freelancers from Fiverr too but c'mon there is a difference in a 4 person "company" having Ukranians designing their logos for a dollar and FAANG having a 100% overseas workforce. The future in my view is engineers in the US and overseas being a part of the workforce together. So.....I guess same as today lol. Google and Amazon has a large workforce in India today too. The teams in the US like they do today will continue to have senior management and local engineers which to be fair will also include tons of Indian immigrants anyway.
" And here I am talking about India because fuck me I know some real big brained Indians but the reality is that there are dozens of countries building emergent tech centers to catch some of the tech outsource pie. This will be a huge market in the following decade"
I am sorry that is straight outta 1995. Forget tech companies, you have US and EU banks which are the embodiment of corporate inertia that started hiring folks in India in the late 90's. Today, you have some banks that employ close to 15K people in countries like India and Philippines. This is such old news. At this point, there is plenty of data to show what works and what does not. Companies by now know what they need to do in the US and what can be done overseas, nobody is expecting any seismic shifts to happen.
"Therefore who will be making the big bucks in the future? Same as today, the finance and strategy teams"
Excuse me, what lol? You mean finance roles in general or the ones at tech companies? Because finance (and law, strategy, etc) in a tech company is back office. You do not generate revenue. It's a 9-5 job with a good work life balance. An accountant or a lawyer who does not want the partner lifestyle at a big 4 or in big law joins the in house team at a tech company to have a better work life balance.
Nah not really. There's a major difference in tech comp between US and Europe purely because there is a greater supply of devs in Europe than the US (mostly from Eastern Europe who can freely move because of the EU). US tech salaries are only so high because of the supply shortage relative to other geographies due to stricter immigration. You make a point about Indians can just come over on an H1B but this is very hard these days and you have to be lucky.
FAANG devs in London literally make 50% of what their counterparts in SF make for doing the exact same job. A lot try moving to the US but FAANGs only have so many visas they are allowed to give out and European FAANG teams are reluctant to let their devs go so it's really not as simple as people make it out to be. Its a lot easier to move countries in IB since salaries are pretty much standardised.
There is one factor that you are not considering which was not available in 1995: Javascript.
Tech has been evolving very fast. Every 2 years the technology changed significantly and as such the definition of what a great programmer is changed too. The only people able to keep up with this rate of change were the few very talented people that for the most part lived in the US. But now Javascript exists. Do you need state of the art front-end? You use Javascript’s React. Do you need state of the art back-end? You use Javascript’s Node.js. Simple as.
You can now just mass-produce engineers with 3-6 months Javascript bootcamps and they would be able to code 99% of all apps you use on the daily. And you would be surprised how much software engineering is just basic tweaking of the front or back-end. You will still need a few actual genius tier engineers to do the planning and designing but coding itself is a very routine job that can be done by anyone who knows the syntax. Javascript is changing the game and soon enough similar solutions will be found for other problems. See Python for data science as a good example. The bar is getting lower and lower. Things have changed a LOT since 1995.
This was an interesting take, but I wanted to note some points where I have a different perspective. (I did CS PhD, joined one of the FAANG companies as a research scientist. After some years, I quit tech to join a hedge fund as a quant researcher to make that 7-figure money.)
Great post. To add on your point, companies can find the the best talents in India with significantly cheaper price, but those talents will soon be invited to US with luxurious private jets once they prove their talents are worth it ( example: Citadel ). So the best talents would have already been in the U.S. even if they were originally born in India.
There are literally thousands of SWE headhunters lurking on LinkedIn stalking good SWEs and offering as many benefits as they can to steal good SWEs from competing companies. So even if their current employer doesn’t provide immigration support, their competitors will love to do so.
May I ask if you can PM me?
Thanks!
agree
There has been a deficit of engineering talent in the West for years. To your point, you’ve seen a lot of outsourcing of low-level coding to Eastern Europe. No one wants to be the first to do this at scale since the risk is still there, but I suspect that migration will continue.
While some IB work is outsourced to Indian teams already, there is a ceiling as English skills are imperative in the job. This same limitation does not exist to the same extent in tech imo
The USA has the largest number of software engineers and software companies by a massive margin.
It's not a deficit, it's an overwhelming demand, as about 0.5% of human beings know how to code at the least. The key factor is access to personal computers, which is far less common than access to tablets or mobile devices. The US and Switzerland lead the world in access to personal computers, and this is why Switzerland is also the software development center of Europe. It is about capital, as these nations have highly developed economies and have the capital to be on the cutting-edge of technology.
One must remember that people from India, Eastern Europe, or anywhere else are moving to the USA to work in technology and other fields. It's a nation made of mostly immigrants, from the West and the East. This demand has brought in students and workers from all over the world, and they become American in the process.
However, the bubble is liable to pop as before. It won't destroy the high tech industry, but it will definitely wipe out a ton of the excess and create a recession as with the dotcom bubble. Maybe this seems efficient from the perspective of an economist, but the next global economic crisis will be horrible on a human level.
Other people made good points- but your take on making 7 figures is incorrect. If you want to stay an IC, then yes. Being a PhD specializing in the right type of ML at the right time is a prerequisite. But pairing good soft skills with good enough programming skills and decent architecture skills can get you to that Director/ VP level, which can garner 7 figures too
If this take was accurate, IB analysts would be outsourced equally or far more than software engineers lol. (more of a manual labor job)
From a practicality standpoint, everyone needs to code in the same language. You can't just have one person writing code in French and another in Japanese. Just wait until a bug occurs in the code or it doesn't behave as intended. If you a fellow colleague cannot even read your coworker's code at a basic level let alone understand what it does, there's no way you can fix it. This is like an analyst sending their associate a broken financial model and an incomplete pitch deck in a different language. It is extremely inefficient and going to lead to far more headaches. For now the major tech companies use English, and that requirement isn't going to change in the future.
ML/AI is a completely different field than what SWE's do, and the educational requirements, classes, and foundational knowledge are completely different, and the learning curve is significantly harder for the former (there's a reason top individual contributors hit 7 figures). SWE's wouldn't be able to tweak it properly. Not to mention that these algorithms have to keep being tested, monitored and re-invented as people's preferences change and the topic composition changes as well (for example more political based suggestions around election times compared to non-election times).
Speaking from personal experience, coordinating projects and tasks across geographies is incredibly inefficient. You can only find so many people who would be wiling to work 9:30 PM - 5:30 AM IST routinely (this is the equivalent of 9 - 5 PST). If you can't find that (and you won't because people in India have lives/families just like everyone else does), then you lose all the hours in-between. An issue that would take 5 minutes to communicate often has to sit for a full day, because your Indian coworker is offline. There are also language/communication issues that can often arise as well. The only way outsourcing works is if you outsource an entire division abroad, which is typically what firms do (and hence why they have regional offices in India), but there are plenty of divisions that they would rather work in tandem with their C-suite, strategy, finance, and product teams and hence decide to keep in the US.
Additionally, you are missing the point that tech firms are trying to buy out the talent here in the U.S. before they do something great by offering a cushy job. As much as you think FAANG talent is mediocre, there are definitely dozens if not hundreds who would go create their own startup if they find themselves out of a job, and the last thing Facebook wants is for a new social media company to arise that takes it over, causing it to fall by the wayside like MySpace.
As the world continues to develop, startups will start propping up more and more abroad to catch the emerging markets. So while the supply of engineers may increase, the demand will rise as well. You are resting on an assumption that the market will be fixed in the Bay Area, and that all the additional centers will lead to wages going down. I don't think this is going to be the case at all.
Having your managers in the US and subordinates all over the globe sounds great in practice but is extremely inefficient in reality. I mention this above but the time zone issue alone is a big deal. Project timelines matter in tech just like any other industry, and taking days to do simple tasks because everyone is all over the place is simply unfeasible. Even worse if there's actually a bug on the website, and the issue needs to be fixed ASAP. Another issue is the communication/language issue. Even if everyone knows English, different countries have different variants of English that is taught, and misunderstandings between products and devs can easily occur in your scenario. Except compounded with the time zone differential, they find out about these problems much later than they should have.
Why do they need to be here? It's much better for those guys to also be in India from an efficiency standpoint, although practically this will not happen as they need to be in communication with upper management. . No point seeing a bug in a code or asking for a slight write-up and then have to wait 24 hours to get a response (that ends up being a clarification question), only to wait another 24 hours to see your Indian subordinate's question... you get the idea. Additionally, you can't just have one person reading code in the same way you read a pitch deck. You have to test it to make sure that it makes sense (think scenario / Monte Carlo analysis in financial modeling), which when you are dealing with thousands of lines of code requires an entire team. The top guys in tech are definitely the AI/ML researchers and they will 100% be in the US.
One of the main selling points of FAANG is WLB. I don't think they want an ex-IB VP making their SWE's work 80+ hrs/week. Hours aside, who in IB /management consulting can be able to manage, review, and give feedback on code? Unless someone has a CS bacgkround and understands coding at the FAANG level, I don't see how this arrangement works.
what are your thoughts on PE vs Founder?
https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forum/private-equity/unicorn-founder-vs…
I don't think you have enough experience in tech. Many outsiders equate tech talent with fancy algorithms but that's a really naive, outsider take. An algorithm is a bit similar to a "business idea" your buddy pitches to you. It's the execution that's important, and the idea or algorithm will be iterated on over time. Most of the money in tech is not coming up with algorithms, but the creation and maintenance of large scale systems. For a startup, offloading some of that work to a cloud provider like AWS makes sense, but once the business gets large enough, it's better to invest in their own infrastructure. That investment is still worth it despite that these systems are massive and impossible to fully comprehend.
it's VERY hard to find someone with the appropriate experience doing the above. Outsourcing to India isn't really going to help because it's not about intelligence. You can't learn the skillset designing distributed systems by reading a book or running a research project, even at the top industry labs. The only way is through experience, which majority of engineers never really get.
Sounds like the guy who thinks all finance is going to move to Hong Kong because their IB analysts are cheaper...
Yeah... right...
Philosophically, just being able to code is the same as just being able to build a model. Neither is going to get you f you rich in isolation.
You know who gets rich in tech or any other sector? People who know how to take risks and build businesses.
Agree with your second point, disagree with the first point. I’ve done both financial modeling (LBO and M&A synergy) and coding. The level of difficulty, intricacy, and abstraction are not even close. I’ll give your an example. Excel Circular reference has been the most conceptually-hard thing for financial modeling and a lot of IB analysts don’t understand it. But its logical intricacy isn’t even comparable to the most basic algorithm in machine learning.
it's amazing how in all these financial modeling courses online they always put the circuit breaker in the "advanced" modeling sections ... like wtf
Irrelevant in this context. Neither is superior to the other in the context of building a business. Code monkey = Excel monkey if that's all you have to offer.
The comparison is apples to oranges, because IB is focused on client relationships not modeling, and the models are only to serve as a rough guide, not to have pinpoint accuracy. There are groups in finance that focuse solely on building financial models and some of them even utilize ML (such as GS Quant Strats). I would make a compelling argument that these groups are not tech since financial modeling at advanced levels prioritizes math and finance skills, not SWE skills.
I'm a programmer and I don't think you can separate the two. Very long tech vs finance reply incoming.
Finance is where the money literally is because it's quite literally the business of money. It's the largest industry in the world and a central component to the global economy. It's like saying railroads/steel/oil are where all the money is in the Gilded Age. Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, those monopoly men were our tech billionaires and their very similar tech monopolies. Finance was still around then, still around now. It was doing very well in the 15th century too and is still extremely lucrative.
Honestly, you have quants making less than fresh IB analysts, but I read in another thread that arithmetic/algebra is the most math you'll need as a new investment banker. That boggles my mind, until I realized that it really does seem like a business that requires a lot of people skills and power brokering. Making deals, working with clients, doing a ton of modeling and due diligence. It really does seem to be the kind of role that a merchant plays as opposed to an engineer.
This is why finance has the highest compensation, creates the most billionaires and millionaires, manages the fortunes of nations, and has consistently played the apex role in the global economy. It's not exactly new and sexy because it's just always there, often quietly so. Behind every new major industry, from tea to railroads to semiconductors, are bankers. The future is always arriving, but it's not going to finance itself.
Funnily enough, fintech is now a huge trend in Silicon Valley. The fastest growing startups right now are fintech focused. Mostly public-facing stuff like cards, crypto, personal finance. Way before this, massive fortunes have been made by innovating technology in the "plumbing" of the finance sector since the 1980s. Guys like Thomas Peterffy, not a household name or online celebrity entrepreneur or whatever, but still made billions developing the first electronic trading platform and similar tools. That was the intersection of tech and finance that was already booming 40 years ago, it never stopped, it's just not the new hot thing.
You won't hear much about it outside of Wall Street, and that's really the culture of it. Banking has allowed people to very quietly build fortunes going as far back as ancient Babylon, when the latest innovations were things like "agriculture" and "the concept of time", it's not anything new. Maybe high tech is the new hotness, but they still need loans, bank accounts, insurance, IPOs, M&As, and other financial services. The money has always been with the people who control the money, and it has been that way for thousands of years. Banks quite literally create money by making loans.
Finance is not just where the money is, it's where money itself comes from.
Final note.
There is this novel called Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. It's about a young billionaire financier who rides in a limo across Manhattan to get a haircut, going through all these crazy scenarios along the way. It's not incredible or anything, but it's not terrible either. During this limo ride, he talks with this programmer / tech guy that he's employed, who says that the greatest use of a bright young mind is at the intersection of technology and capital. The whole thing is ironic, because it just sounds weird and twisted, but that's our reality today.
What is a bright young mind inclined to do today? Work with computers, go into the tech business, get a CS degree. It's the highest paying degree in STEM, and STEM is seen as the most challenging application of a bright student. So people do it, universities bank on it, it's a whole thing. Why? It serves the interests of capital. That's it. Entire lives are being molded around the demand by large tech companies for tech workers as an asset. It's like a factory production line, and the factory manufactures what the market demands. Who owns the factory?
Well, they are listed publicly on Wall Street. They borrow from Wall Street, they need Wall Street to go public, and they certainly need Wall Street for their corporate bank accounts and other financial services. Finance isn't the future, it isn't the past either. It just is. It's also not immediately obvious to the public in how it works, as it is wrapped up in layers of technical abstraction and excruciatingly boring details like some sort of weird f*cking Greco-Roman mystery. This is why it remains low-key yet immensely powerful. All these capitalist celebrities come and go, but the entire structure of global commerce will remain centered around banking and financial centers.
Great write up but I'd just add a few things.
First we should remember that technology is evolving at an exponential rate. If you think about it, the medieval world didn't look too different from the Ancient Greeks. 3000 years of time, and the two societies really weren't too different in terms of technology, lifestyle, intellectual enlightenment (one could even argue that the feudalism was a regression in that regard). Look at what's happening now: in just the last 30 years (a time difference two whole orders of magnitude smaller), we've developed these pocket-sized devices that have made society unrecognizable. If you plucked someone from 1990 and plopped them into the world today, they wouldn't be able to function. Sure, banking has been around for a while, but does that substantiate its continued persistence into the future? We're heading into uncharted territory. In theory, you could make the first principles argument that money will always need to be held somewhere, but the question is, by who? And where? Will it still be the banks and financiers? Personally, I'm not big into all that crypto and fintech stuff (let's be real, I'm an investment banker), but who the hell knows where this tech might take us? Why are top VC funds, run by some of the most well-connected, well-informed, deep-thinking investors in the world, dumping money into the space? The fact that we're seeing this exponential trend is what scares me. I do not know where the future will take us, but I would hardly be surprised if finance looks nothing like what it does today.
>There is this novel called Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo.
Did you see the movie? It's pretty good.
There’s nothing I love more in life than to watch a bunch of finance guys talk about how anyone can do my job and that it’s going to be outsourced to Indians for cheap pretty soon, which could not be further from the truth btw. If you think programmers just sit in some corner and type on their little keyboard all day, you have a lot of learning to do. I suggest using a resource other than watching The Social Network to start.
Edit: Hint, I’m paid to problem solve, not just code. Also, language barrier and time zone issues should be considered
Your tone might trigger some people, but as someone who has been in tech for years, I agree with these points. People tend to overuse the term "software engineers" and forget that there is a wide spectrum of talents covered by this umbrella term. The fact that there exist some coding jobs that can be outsourced (which is already done by sweatshops like WITCHes, i.e. Wipro, Infosys, ...) doesn't mean that the entire workforce can also be easily outsourced.
>The fact that there exist some coding jobs that can be outsourced (which is already done by sweatshops like WITCHes, i.e. Wipro, Infosys, ...) doesn't mean that the entire workforce can also be easily outsourced.
The great off-shoring of American "white collar" jobs began the moment "work-from-home" started in the early days of the lock-downs. You're a fool if you think you aren't replaceable.
I forever respect Software Engineers and Quants. They are the Lawyers of the 21st century. Absolutely integral part of our society. They are responsible for fine-tuning the global online infrastructure. The plumbers of the Internet. I would also consider Software Engineers as "essential workers".
These people are just jealous of software engineers. If I don't suck at math, I would study CS. Much more meritocratic and better WLB. In finance, it is super competitive because even high school students know how to use Excel and make pivot tables.
In tech, it is easy to differentiate between good software engineers and bad software engineers. No one cares if you are good at networking. Can't code? You are out. Less replaceable. Less office politics.
There's a reason why a clear distinction exists between quant-type roles and SWE. One requires math, the other very little math (no more than finance requires).
Fools!!! Tech is finance, and finance is tech. Its already there, you just don't see it yet.
The majority of this thread does not understand how the world works. Dig deeper friends, and you will eventually see the light.
Yes AI is the future, but pretty soon AI will be doing all the programming. So not much point in learning rn
I never understood how people can take this seriously. The level of AI that would be required to genuinely replace software engineers (not just write some code as a proof of concept, but actually replace engineers) would be substantial. Once we reach this level, a lot of other jobs will be replaced along the way. Finance would almost certainly reduce headcount sharply, as models and decks could be generated by AI.
In this scenario, dont you think the people with the best understanding of AI, and the ability to tweak it for new use cases, would have the highest job security, not the lowest?
Sure, some software engineering roles may be replaceable with a certain level of AI - but a) other industries will see a sharper rate of job loss than SWE when we reach this level and b) on balance this level of AI would likely increase, rather than diminish, demand for engineering talent as companies race to adjust to the new competitive landscape.
The exact definition of software engineers is “the people who build AI in the form of a software”. So what you said won’t be realistic until AI are capable of building new AI themselves ( By then AI will probably rule the world and mankind will be living on Mars … )
You must be joking right?
Most of what I could comment on has been said with "Quant in Research - Other" I agree with the most about remote software development.
For those interested the two key factors to any successful outsourced model of software development 1) How technically complex is the product are you building? 2) If you have the right product to build, is there a really really great tech lead at the outsourced location that can translate business concepts to technical requirements.
First, a highly complex technical product cannot be executed well with the expectation that the software developers in the remote location does the architecture/design tasks or really anything mission critical. That is not saying it hasn't been successful it is just that that team would need to be extremely good. But, the more complex a product the arch/design needs to be centralized near the business/product group. Remote developers would do the simpler coding tasks aligned with what is called a software engineer in test at google. Generally the entry point to most large etch organizations. Write automated tests, given a bug list to work, repetitive updates for content, etc...
Second, when you have the right fit of project you need a strong tech lead in the remote location to communicate with the business/product team to translate their vision to code. I would guess WallStreetOasis has that person that Patrick communicates with continuously as they have worked through the recent changes. Building a content system like this product that is a low risk system that is perfect for outsourcing. If something breaks not that big of a deal. If you were building a AI driven option pricing / purchase system the risk is much higher.
In terms of finance or tech, where I would work at in a start up if I would do it again? I've worked in about 4 failed start ups as tech management and product management. Came close one time with IPO but we pulled back 2 months before due to market turmoil. Did not try again as we lost a couple key clients and then got acquired. You know who is the guy who always landed on this feet with these? The CFO. In all these companies the CFO was working with investors/partners and when things went south they had the connections for the next opportunity and sometimes much better. With the acquisition the CEO and first level executives walked away with anywhere between 2-5 million. The rest of the company? Basically pennies on our options.
Moral of the story from my perspective to Finance people looking at tech/programing is startups/fast growing companies are exciting, but being in tech is not where I'd be if I would do it all over again. Staying close to the $$$ is what I'd recommend as there are very few tech unicorns where the product owners/programmers options paid off.
I would say quant/analytics is the future.
SWE, PE, HF are all strong and growing rapidly, while IB has been somewhat stagnant. Still a great career path, but not quite keeping pace with the other three.
Bottom line is every job will be effected by machine learning/AI, that much is obvious. Truck drivers, cashiers, even teachers once edtech becomes more sophisticated. We can get as sci-fi/dystopian as we want on this topic, but as the algorithms become more and more sophisticated in the coming decades, it's very evident that the job landscape will drastically change...likely within our lifetimes. Investment banking will no doubt be effected, as will many facets of our lives. Things will evolve, but to stress out about what the future may hold is beyond our immediate control. Focus on the foreseeable near term future, anything else you're opening up a can of worms.
why are people so insecure and debating about this these high-end jobs? My guy whether you land ib, hf swe you are making shit ton of money compared to the majority of the world so be grateful instead of debating and work on advancing your career,
This is such a useless thread lol just do what you want and be good. Bunch of finance guys rationalizing why they are superior screams insecurity—if you like your job you don’t have to try and defend it
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Contrarian point - I think tech has peaked 2010s. Tech growth was fueled a lot by cheap capital, which is now drying out. As discount rates rise, investors will be more picky on what projects they fund.
Finance isn't going to return to the 2000s heyday any time soon, but it's Lindy. Throughout history, people who manage money well always have had power.
Another thing with tech is as more people learn to code, they're going to devalue the labor force in that space. A lot of tech work from home jobs are going to become work from India.
Edit: One additional thing, I can get where OP is coming from if this is a general discussion on high income careers, but I don't think this is a good way necessarily to plan your career if you're just looking at pay opportunities. There are lots of jobs that can pay well, but also not necessarily play to your own personal skillsets and interests. If someone is chasing tech because it's the cool new thing or paid well, that reminds me a bit of kids in the 2000s chasing IB because it was "prestigious." If you like tech and coding then great, I personally resonated more with finance so that's why I'm here.
Interesting take. I completely agree with your “Edit point”. Do what resonates most with you.
People have been saying tech jobs (and others) will be outsourced since the 90s. There’s large barriers why it’s not more profitable to do that all the time. I hypothesize because we focus on hyper growth, not always cost savings, hence the need to find the “top devs”. So I don’t think every WFH job will be outsourced (inside and outside of tech).
Essentially I think they’re both great, high paying career paths with lots of upside opportunity and a high degree of job security relative to the pay.
Actually yeah that's a good point about top talent. It's like how in banking, we're not paid to make a spreadsheet. Evalueserve can make a spreadsheet. We're paid to build relationships with clients.
People are pretty quick to forget that EE was the shit back in the 80s, as CS is now. Technology evolves in unpredictable ways. There's no guarantee that this generation of SWE will still be relevant in a non-managerial capacity in the next wave, whatever that may be. Sure you can adapt and continuously learn but you're constantly fighting for relevancy as you go on in your career.
While that's not to say that finance won't change and evolve but its base functions will always be the same- to support the growth of businesses in a advisory and financial capacity, and I don't think it's a controversial take that this core is unlikely to change as rapidly as the growth in technology.
EE is still the shit nowadays. Look at how much TSM (Taiwan Semiconductor) is paying their engineers. 1.2M TWD per year (top earners in Taiwan). It is not much in USD, but living cost in Taipei is extremely low compared to NYC. But with the recent semiconductor slump, there is a lot of uncertainty in that industry right now
EE is still the shit at top companies too. More so embedded systems engineering, which involves some level of code and computer networking. That’s basically the backbone of the IoT industry.
People learn more and evolve, it’s how we generate that infinite economic growth we’re so addicted to.
but how much do those TSM ee engineers make in like 10 years? starting salary is really good but the ceiling ...
I like your take on the finance won't change/evolve base functions as you can apply those functions across companies. The added value is knowing enough tech/product/busdev to participate in the decisions on product direction rather than just being a finance guy doing budgets/forecasting/etc...that will help you in discussions with partners/investors and open doors for better opportunities. As I noted in another comment above if I would do it again, I'd shoot for the CFO/Finance person, rather than tech/product role in the tech companies while working in the technology industry. At least you won't get the calls at 2 am in the morning to say this client implementation is in jeopardy and they are going live tomorrow and your needed on a call now.
Computer science is the future and no one denies that, but there will always be a place for finance.
The human touch is necessary for extracting value - if a computer could solve it, things would be perfectly efficient and someone would be a trillionaire already. Don't reply with Jim Simons either, as it was recently found the majority of his gains were from hiding money offshore to reduce his tax liability which massively inflated his returns.
Computers can't do everything, but they can be synergistic with finance to make people far, far more efficient. I do see computers making some positions obsolete, basically the positions that are the biggest waste of human capital (accounting, IB analyst roles, S&T)
They still need to come to finance bros to beg for money/ investment funds.
Most VCs worth their salt are technical and are former engineers not "finance bros"
Pfft, everyone knows rubbing 2 sticks tgt to make a fire is the future
Kinda why I ditched this whole IBD job hunt thing to co-founding a startup now backed by a pretty well known accelerator.. good thing I didn’t become an excel monkey lol
You mind giving a rough idea what your startup does? How hard was it to get backed by an accelerator?
Money, and future money, shall be in many areas, AI obviously is one but I believe other areas like geneticts and non fossil fuel energy are going to be big as well.
I disagree Finance is an age old industry who knows how far back this industry goes it will literally never die unlike tech which is literally a new Engineering? industry.
Point is Tech will be replaced by something the same way tech has slowly evolved from mostly web development to software development (we’re now moving to AI) the tech industry is evolving so quickly it’s kind of hard to keep up I prepare finance because of its slow boring pace.
This is the equivalent of someone saying in 1990 that Excel will be the future of finance
I feel like it's true to some extent, but I still can't bring myself to learn to code or anything tech related.
I would have to admit this is truly the case. With the pace of adoption of technology in literally every nook and corner of the financial world it's apparently inevitable that mastering some from of tech space skills should be a top priority for literally everyone.
wrong, death & annihilation is the future. just have some sex, get outside, travel the world, and have some laughs until you become mushroom food
also this is a false dichotomy tech can be the growth industry of the future without finance dying, banking is way more lindy than computer science and doing data analytics for a biodegradable water bottle company or some shit
Hi brofessor. Could you recommend some travel destinations? I love your philosophy on things and was just wondering what inspired you.
what inspired me to travel? initially it was a family trip to england and ireland when I was in middle school, I just love getting out of my comfort zone and having experiences that I can't get here at home. as I've gotten older I've also begun to appreciate the perspective it gives you and has influenced how I arrange my life. seeing people in europe with small flats but still a family of 4 and wondering why we need so much shit to try to be happy when people elsewhere are equally as happy/miserable as us, stuff like that.
I'm not as well travelled as I'd like to be. only been abroad a little over 10x and never been to africa, asia, south america, or australia, so idk that I can say for sure. just watch travel shows like bourdain, phil rosenthal, etc., and see what looks interesting. also, there are plenty of lists online, I'm sure you can find something there.
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