In an AI world, is finance a better career choice than tech? Asset accumulation is what matters.
Yes, the finance vs tech debate has been debated to death on this forum. However, AI is now able to replace junior level engineering roles well enough, and software and tech look like they're going to be eaten by a few Gen AI companies (eg ChatGPT could make agents that could book an entire trip for you, disintermediating booking platforms for hotels, flights, etc. Maybe these companies will exist in some form because of their installed base/data but the margins are definitely coming down as more and more people use AI as the starting point to do things.
As a SWE, you could join a promising startup and get rich, but it's unclear how wise being another GPT-wrapper will end up being, as Gen AI picks up more and more use cases as it gets better over time.
In the age of AI, your time/labor also is much less valuable as AI can do an okay or even better job than you. So owning assets/capital is what matters, and by definition that also means you have to know which assets to buy/invest in. In such a world, does during finance/investing make a lot more sense as a career path than tech? I have a high school friend who is considering whether to do SWE or finance.
Do what you are passionate about.
Something finance does absolutely nothing to help you with. Assuming you don't ascribe any value to doing something you enjoy or find rewarding (you don't seem to, so I'll roll with it) you should optimize for career earnings. I don't know which path helps most with that, but I think it is categorically true to say that finance doesn't grant any insight. Probably the opposite. Working in the most risk-averse sector in the modern economy is not great training for spotting new/exciting investment opportunities.
I said I asked this question because a high school friend of mine asked me the same exact question lol. How does being a financial analyst and doing investment research NOT train you to invest in good assets lmao?
Also, while sheep-like thinking is common on Wall Street, it's also very prevalent in tech. All of these founders who dress the same way and chase the next trend, whether it was pizza delivery apps, shitty ecommerce sites, or LLM wrappers, etc.
Because being able to read a financial statement is only one part of investing. You can be the most financially literate person in the world, in the sense that you can read a 10-k faster than anyone and bang out a DCF model in under a minute, but if you cannot evaluate risk, then really you've got nothing. And fundamentally, I don't think it is possible to get good at evaluating risk until you're actually risking something.
Wall Street is the most risk-averse place in the modern American economy; the entire compensation structure is fundamentally broken, because for the most part it privatizes gains and socializes losses. Most Wall Street roles aren't buy side. And even the ones that are, you're using other people's money to do the buying. I simply do not believe you can learn appropriate risk mitigation when you yourself have no risk, and that's pretty much the definition of intelligent investing (mitigating risk, that is). Finance in general encourages group-think, encourages risky behavior, encourages asset bubbles, because at the end of the day modern financiers are sitting in a casino, staked by other people, and told they get 20% of what they win but don't kick in when they lose.
Yes, and there is a reason there is so much commonality of purpose and interest between venture firms and finance firms. I don't think tech is the place to be, either.
Both finance and tech represent fields which have relatively many jobs that pay a relatively large amount of money on a W-2 basis. You don't have to take a risk to get there, you don't need to be an entrepreneur, just sell your time for pay. Nothing wrong with that!
On a cost and risk adjusted basis welding is mathmatically better.
Any "finance" guy should know that the real road to wealth is about equity and ownership. Ironically, the finance world is dominated by W2 income, while tech has its roots since the 1970s in providing equity and ownership in the comany you're at and building. It's a no brainer to me.
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