The growing jealousy towards Tech on WSO is getting ridiculous

Hours:

I have seen numerous posters (especially after the Takeover of twitter) hoping that tech people will start working 60, 70, even 80+ hours a week. Hoping for more hours for someone else is a clear sign of jealousy. Not just that, but the difference between 40 and 80 hours is the difference between an SWE dad getting to his son's soccer match or grinding away in some office. Nothing they do is inherently important and most of the jobs aren't time-sensitive enough to demand that sort of workload.

And I say this is jealousy, because it makes very little business sense. If you have a guy solving complex problems, and writing a lot of code that needs to be tested, you want his mind to be able to think intelligently, and clearly. A drowsy SWE is going to make a ton of mistakes that will come back as glitches and bugs that will cost the company even more money. It doesn't make financial sense, but out of pure spite people on this forum would rather have the worse option

WFH:

I have seen other posters wishing for the end of WFH for tech workers. Ever since the mainstream adoption of the Internet, tech has always been a job that didn't require a lot of capital. Yes, you may need servers and so forth once the company scales, but these could be accessed remotely. The point being, SWE's do not have much to gain by being in the office. This is not a client-facing industry where in-person work matters and is not  fast-paced (such as trading) where immediate, clear communication is necessary. It's not manufacturing where a physical product needs to be built on a plant. 

Office space is more or less a waste of an expense, and while I know CRE leases are for a longer period, it makes sense to severely downsize if not completely eliminate the office with some meetings/dinners here and there. Despite these financial benefits, it is clear that people on this forum are jealous that tech can work remotely from a beach while they work in a job that requires going into the office, and it shows.

Salary:

Again, I've seen numerous people advocating for and hoping for salaries in tech to crash. Tech companies are for the most part doing well. Yes, there has been a slight contraction back to pre-Covid norms, but by and large, these companies are making money, and it's clear that the quality of their product is coming from the talented and smart staff that they have. But despite it being a smart decision, finance people on here seem to want to cut costs as low as possible and make employees suffer even if means the business loses money by losing out on top talent. Again, this is driven by jealousy not by business acumen. 

Attitude:

I've seen many people on here try to write off tech people as "arrogant", "entitled", and a whole host of other insults to attack the supposed "character" of tech people. It has very little merit in my opinion. Their salary and WLB expectations are simply in line with what the market provides. 

Societal Value:

People on here try to argue that tech offers no value to society, but that IB and PE does. I'm not defending Big Tech and for sure there have been numerous data privacy breaches and unethical things that go on. Hft/hedge funds are a mixed bag when it comes to ethics. But to act like off-shoring jobs, diminishing the quality of a product, and making everyone work to the ground (which occurs in some PE firms), or consolidating the market and firing workers and raising prices to achieve "synergies" (some large market-cap M&A deals) is helpling society is intellectually dishonest. The "societal value" angle is coming from people who often make their money off of making society worse, and is said out of jealousy rather than merit.


To be clear, I am not against the tech vs. finance threads and actually find the cringy debates to be humorous when someone gets clearly emotionally invested in one side. There are plenty of legitimate discussions such as Bay Area vs. NYC (if not remote), lifetime potential comp, risk, etc. But I've seen a lot of recent comments simply driven by pure hate and spite without any real logic and it's extremely poor form.

TLDR: WSO user annoyed with the shift away from comparison by tech driven by logic to remarks against the tech industry driven by jealousy.

 
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Being some idiot who's spent over a decade in FinTech, I definitely want to address your points. Because they're well  thought out and constructed.

1) Hours - Even in Fintech (I'll stick with what I know vs larping as an AWS engineer or something because I actually appreciate honesty and quality), there are weeks where it's very much 80-90hrs at a time. And I legit mean you don't go to sleep but for three hours out of those 72-84hrs mentioned. On call, expected to work at 3AM with China or India, the Island of Mauritius of all places, etc. Let alone drive to a client's office at 2AM in order to be hands on. Been there, done that, literally have the t-shirts to prove it.

2) WFH - This can be a minefield because while you want to get *ish done, some teammembers don't give a flying "you know what" and leave you holding the bag just because they want to go chip some balls at the driving range vs addressing actual issues that'd take all of four minutes. Let alone being professional enough to at least say "I got your message. If you don't mind, let me do some digging and get back to you, ok?" The other side of the coin is as soon as the client hears the kittens on your Zoom call, you do get the Baby Yoda meme of "I would like to see the baby!" So swings and round-abouts I suppose.

3) Salary - Depends on what stage of tech company you work for. I've been  at a couple that dangle the carrot of ESOP as a major factor of comp, vs other more established firms that simply say "We want to pay you 10% over market. How you spend it via HSA, commuting, celll phone bills, etc is up to you!" BTW, if they're too chickenshit to provide their own company phone to use and expect everything to be done over Zoom while listing your own personal cell in your email signature as the contact method? Nuh-uh. That's a flag.

4) Attitude - This one hits hard, because I agree with your take and it entirely conjures the idea of "confession through projection" from those detractors. And that's not a good look folks. You want to write off tech folk? Congrats on not meeting your SLA or other KPI because you're too busy with your arrogance to have a glass stomach installed due to your head being that far up your own ass. Say it with me folks, Relationship Management. Means way more than your skill to punch Excel without touching the mouse. Don't get me wrong, that's impressive in it's own way, but that's not how you sign deals with F100 banks. Ask me how I know....

5) Societal Value - This is a good one. Reallistcally, if you were to sample at least 100 to 1,,000 rando people on the street, they'd sprobably say PE/IB are vultures and are way less value add than some generic SWE gig at a place like Adobe. They'd think you crate your dog on the top of the car like Romney, are only in it to axe thousands of people for a pittance of a performance bonus, and ultimately treat you worse than the backlash from an Aziz Ansari date. Even if you played by the rules like Aziz actually did. Sure if we might agree that was uncalled for from her, you ain't getting a callback either though. Then again, we'd rather see you get a callback from the VP/MD for a second/third round interview vs their washed out daughter callling anyways. Unless you're into that kind of thing, but there's also OnlyFans for that.

Tech is happening folks. Work with it, not against it. Being in FinTech, it's a pretty damn big deal. I've spoued off about SEC reporting before and how crazy but tech heavy that gets, or down to how tech heavy it is being on call to run payroll/benefits for 10k+ employee companies overseas on any given day that ends in "y".

The poster formerly known as theAudiophile. Just turned up to 11, like the stereo.
 

For 1) I made the important caveat of non-client facing tech. Of course if you are trying to get into say e-lending and you want to be ahead of 10 other emerging startups and be at the forefront of partnering with major banks, then yes the hours are going to suck because time to market is a crucial part of the business 

That’s not applicable and moreover the hustle culture is counterproductive  for established firms such as Big Tech. Think about Twitter and how the blue verified check idea went south due to poor implementation.  Quality of the product (speed, lack of glitches/bugs, security, clear interface, etc.) matters far more once you’ve already established client relations (which have not been established in early stage startups) and the grace period of the beta version is over.

2) To me that sounds like you have a bad employee rather than anything else. That same dude is going to be the guy using the restroom for 1-2 hours a day (on his phone most of the time), takes an hour after entering to start working, takes an hour to eat lunch, and then spends another hour “networking” and playing office politics so you can’t get rid of him if you bring him in person. It’s misguided imo to think that bringing someone in-office is going to take a lazy, worker who ghosts you into a productive machine. Bad apples exist in every industry and profession but shouldn’t be used as an example to punish everyone. It’s the same line of reasoning that people use when they say to “defund the police”. If there is a systematic issue with WFH, then it’s a fair point. Given that a lot of successful startups are fully remote, it suggests that WFH is in fact a model that works.

3) Of course early stage startups offer more equity benefits (and hence carry risk) but it still will be good money, even much better than a FAANG gig would be if the startup does extremely well. You sort of downplay the variability in the comp which for risk-takers makes it lucrative. It’s still an attractive package and hence ties into my point of getting good talent.

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1) I didn't see you explicitly saying anything about that divide, but I'll give you that benefit of the doubt, considering I made sure to lay it out that my first hand experience is with FinTech vs something like forking MySQL for some startup or being another one of those lameduck Twitter SWEs. So I will concede in some possible "loss in translation".

As for the leeches like that Twitter Twat mentioned above, we agree completely (thanks for serving up that simply perfect example btw). For relationship management, how else do you think you'll snag those first few customers? Or keep them signed on during that beta phase and turn them into raving fans that wind up doing well over half your advertising and marketing work for you? I'd also throw back that you have the opposite effect happening with certain places like SAP or Oracle where people buy contracts with them just because they know the name after seeing their commercial during a golf tournament and going "Oh yeah, I know that name! They've been around for donkey's ages so there has to be something there and I'll definitely talk with them to see about moving our FP&A or AP/AR team over to them on Monday (so I can look like some kind of hero for the company)". Even though no actual product improvement has happened in half a decade. Let alone things like zero-day exploits lingering for six months before someone actually patches it. Again, I've lived that life. EG: When I spent an unfortunate stint there, I watched MSFT sit on zero-days for ages because some alphabet soup agency told them to not even touch it so they could exploit it instead.

2) Agree and disagree. Yes, there's always going to be those chumps who take hour long bathroom breaks to just sit there and watch TikTok stupidity. But there's also others that simply suck at their assignments and you spend two hours for every hour they put in just correcting their work. So in a weird way, you'd prefer some of those kind take that "bathroom break" so you can actually accomplish something in spite of them.

The idea about being in-person is that if I run into something, I can just tap you on the shoulder and mention "Hey. I heard you went through something like this last week. What was the fix?" VS WFH where you can spend literally half a day waiting for that coworker to actually respond to your Slack ping. I guess the root is about accountability, which feeds into expediency and proper collaboration.

Bad apples definitely exist, no doubt. "Defund the police" is another good example you mentioned. WFH can..."work"....only so long as your coworkers actually believe in the W part of WFH instead of "getting 'hands on' with their work" in their bathroom in the middle of the day if you catch my drift, and dodge your emails or leave your clients emailing/calling you asking "where the hell are they?"

3) Another agree to disagree but again for opposite angles of approach towards the almost same idea. I'd change the will in your statement to can. Seen enough IPOs crater unfortunately to back that up. Definitely can make some money off equity and stock grants, but it's not any kind of secure money and is entirely built on the faith that the company will succeed. Could be organic growth, buyout, merger, whatever. Doesn't matter.

My argument is that in certain established companies, the security of an overall higher W-2 is mentally and emotionally worth more than the potential risks of ESOP/ESPP or potential of a Series C/D round of funding coming in for example. To keep it WSO friendly and adjoined, I'm talking about the PV vs FV of that stack of cash you get depositied every two weeks or twice a month vs getting XYZ amount of shares that "could be" worth $20/sh to start, and go up or down from there.

Worked with plenty of older folk who look at it as simply "I want a stable paycheck, because I got college tuition to pay,. a mortgage due." And who knows what other bills on top of those? I have some lament for those who sit in the same cubicle for 20 years and going, and I don't ever intend to wind up like that, but I respect the appreciation of security.

The poster formerly known as theAudiophile. Just turned up to 11, like the stereo.
 

I don't think tech guys are entitled.  40 hours a week of writing code is exhausting, a lot of work for a good pay.  I think on the other hand it's finance guys who have stockholm syndrome with their heavy work weeks and want to drag everyone down to their level.  I have seen how bitter and jealous they get about how many hours they spend at work compared to others, both on here and in real life, and the various ways they cope with it.

 

I used to work for a tech company, but have always been on the finance side. I never wanted to be a developer or code as I generally dislike that type of work.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

I think it is foolish to think of this as jealousy. Yes, some tech workers make a lot of money that some people may believe they don’t deserve. But are they jealous? You can think about it this way: are you jealous of the cousins of politicians who get paid six figures in useless jobs? If you are simple-minded you say ‘of course you are jealous of their easy money’. I would instead say that I do not care about their financial situation as I personally make all the money I feel I need, but I am concerned with the clear misallocation of funds and if the news ever came of that guy getting fired and having his assets seized I can’t lie and say I wouldn’t smirk. Tech is similar, but not all tech. When I shit on tech I picture that twitter engineer who was tricked by a girl posing as a tinder thot who then recorded their date in which the guy admitted that he worked 2 hours a week despite making multiple six figures. Are you jealous of him? Are you jealous of a guy who has no purpose in life and is basically a drain on twitter shareholders? Well, not anymore as he was probably top of the list when layoffs arrived. I want to see tech purged of people like him, not destroyed. Why? Because I see myself in 10-20 years as a CFO in one of these very companies which means these parasites will be a drain on my share value. They can all get fucked and I hope that tech cos are being very strategic with who they fire. Fire the parasites, retain the value creators.

 

the world will always have it's "big heads" (referring to guy from HBO Silicon Valley). Tech is unique in that it has a lot of factors which make it easy for employees to hide in certain orgs and comp is extremely high for tenured SWEs. 

Plenty of people doing jack shit in corporate in many industries. For example, had a good friend at a media company think HBO/Showtime etc, some of the directors there were pulling in ~$500k and doing basically no work and had no direct reports ("director" lmao). 

FWIW I really don't think it matters how many hours you work, or even if you are milking the company you work at if you are not being deceptive. You have a relationship with your employer, and depending on what that agreed upon relationship is - all that should matter is you're honoring it. You worked 10 hours this week and you're an SWE making $500k? Cool, as long as you weren't doing anything shady good for you.

 

I agree on your second point. A lot of time there are small but sensitive jobs that you just want someone really close to you to handle. Because they are a close personal friend, you overpay them, and what you get back is a trusted person handling the process. If you’ve ever met the people who handle the charitable donations department at a bank, that is a good example. Put a random Joe and that guy is probably gonna try to embezzle your money, so put cousin Greg in and pay him 500k with a fancy title so he feels satisfied. But trust me, in the case of tech this is NOT what is going on. Modern tech culture emerged from that old silicon valley start-up culture in which you give everyone a fat paycheck which includes fat stock-based comp and you trust them to be basically independent innovators that will create value without needing a manager. They’ll just create. This is the mistake modern tech companies make. Let’s go back to the guy from twitter. He likely passed the typical technical silicon valley interview which means that guy is smart! He busted his ass learning big O notation, algorithms and data structures. But that’s all! Tech companies are mistaking that knowledge with value creation. The reality is that a relatively smart person could learn those things in a few years (CS degrees are 4 years long and these can be learned in 1-2), pass the tech interview, and then never do anything again just cashing in their checks. Modern tech companies NEED more managers so that these people can get fired immediately once they are found to be the useless kind. The model of just hiring and expecting everyone to be an independent innovator is misguided. Nowadays EVERYONE knows tech makes easy money, so now it attracts the lazy and stupid. It is not the 70s anymore and tech companies have to adapt to this changing environment.

 

Tech isn’t what it used to be. 2-3 years ago it was heaven-like. Now it is deteriorating in matter of days.

Just yesterday, Google introduced 10% mandatory fire quota and those quota are being pushed to new joiners by middle managers. It’s real, Googlers are talking about suicide after hearing this news. Microsoft wlb gets way worse than before. Elon is sending code review warning to employees at 3am. Metaverse is a total failure. More layoffs yet to come next quarter.
 

Every leader in tech is ready to follow Elon’s plans of 80 hours work week and Bezos’ evil tradition of mandatory pip quota. Tech unicorns are dying like flies, valuations of Roblox, Coinbase, DoorDash etc are going nosedive. The death of tech has officially begun.  
 

 

Elon’s begging only goes to senior stars whom Elon unwisely fired. 99.9% of coders are not stars, but coasters. Elon is expecting people to code at 3am. Google is introducing support check in (SCI) which is a renamed version of Amazon pip. The Amazon toxicity spreads like virus and now infecting Google. It’s just a matter of time before the Elon madness infected the rest of tech companies.

Tech is falling off cliff. The ivory tower is collapsing. The babies in ivory tower soon to be ripped apart by Elon’s hounds

 

I’m going to disagree with you here and state that what we are seeing is a market correction rather than a crash.

A lot of companies forecasted out with the idea that Covid levels of demand would hold steady or even grow and this caused valuations to be too generous. It turned out that once the pandemic eased people returned to in-person shopping and experiences at an unexpected rate. Hence the decline of companies such as Amazon or DoorDash that thrived off the pandemic.

Facebook is going downhill for its own reasons outside of the market (lack of confidence from investors in Metaverse). Coinbase is obviously related to the FTX bankruptcy and the lack of confidence in crypto. 

Google has been getting a lot of pressure from investors to “cut costs”, without real merit imo. Only time will tell how that plays out but creating a workforce where people trample each other can open up to workers intentionally sabotaging the code or purposely letting bugs get through to bring other team members down. We’ll see how it shakes out in the end though.
 

When the dust settles, I expect we will return to 2019 compensation which is still really good but not as crazy as the stock compensation seen during the pandemic. 

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This is a website that deals with high paying careers with many college kids at the crossroads. Primarily Wall Street jobs are the focus but it’s inevitable that people will talk about consulting, B4, tech, etc. 

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If I had a dime for every cringe engineer that feels the compulsion to post/comment on this site how much better and more fulfilling their career path is compared to banking/broader high finance I wouldn't need to work anymore. So many engineers are little more than your generic factory worker that's slightly better at solving problems and can work from home, yet so many seem to think that they're some impressive technical mind because they work in the customer success dept. fixing UX bugs for a startup that just raised their 2nd or 3rd round of runway.

How about everyone just stops jerking themselves off about work? Because if your only point of pride is what you do to pay the bills you probably live a pretty empty life that no one should envy. 

"The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly" - Robert A. Wilson | "If you don't have any enemies in life you have never stood up for anything" - Winston Churchill | "It's a testament to the sheer belligerence of the profession that people would rather argue about the 'risk-adjusted returns' of using inferior tooth cleaning methods." - kellycriterion
 

So many engineers are little more than your generic factory worker that's slightly better at solving problems and can work from home, yet so many seem to think that they're some impressive technical mind because they work in the customer success dept. fixing UX bugs for a startup that just raised their 2nd or 3rd round of runway.

It does sound like you’re jealous here because you are intentionally downplaying their job and intelligence level. I do not work in tech and I’m not smart enough to be an SWE, but I still will acknowledge that they are significantly smarter from an Intellectual standpoint without feeling my ego bruised. Now for things such as EQ, the finance bro almost certainly wins

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IncomingIBDreject

It does sound like you're jealous here because you are intentionally downplaying their job and intelligence level. I do not work in tech and I'm not smart enough to be an SWE, but I still will acknowledge that they are significantly smarter from an Intellectual standpoint without feeling my ego bruised.

It sounds a bit like you're projecting and grossly overestimating the intelligence required to be an average software engineer. I'm not talking about the 10x top of the table guys who are going off to Google, Amazon, etc. for a few years then launch their own startup. I'm talking about the 100s of 1000s of largely unremarkable engineers working for high 5 low 6 figures in a job with good stability but low growth prospects (hence the factory worker comparison; it's basically a code assembly line). They're not stupid but they're certainly not "significantly smarter" from an IQ standpoint, they're likely slightly above average at best. Speaking as someone who has some coding background, has built internal tools in the past, and regularly works on the technical aspects of DD into software companies, it truly is not rocket science.

Now for things such as EQ, the finance bro almost certainly wins

This is also a bit of a stereotype. Just because you're a decent coder doesn't mean you have worse social skills than the average person. In fact, for mid-large scale engineer teams there's just as much if not more people management and actual instances of collaborating with peers on a project than you will see in most finance roles in my opinion. Now those 10x guys I mentioned above sure, more of those will be social oddballs than the run-of-the-mill engineers, but the only way you get away with having shitty EQ in any job is if you're truly a savant/rainmaker and your productivity vastly outweighs your inability to carry a conversation. 

"The obedient always think of themselves as virtuous rather than cowardly" - Robert A. Wilson | "If you don't have any enemies in life you have never stood up for anything" - Winston Churchill | "It's a testament to the sheer belligerence of the profession that people would rather argue about the 'risk-adjusted returns' of using inferior tooth cleaning methods." - kellycriterion
 

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