IB to Development

The career earnings risk relative to IB is enormous, in my opinion. Say you land at a shop where you get a piece of the upside in a deal (or slate of deals) that becomes a homerun and you make a lot of money. It must be understood that there is a very real and not unlikely alternative scenario where you do EVERYTHING THE SAME as in the scenario above, but rates change or the economic environment shifts, and all of a sudden you will instead see $0 of that upside, because it doesn't exist anymore. And that may very well be after 8-10+ years working towards that upside. So, there's a chance at making insane income as an employee/partner/director, but comes with significant risk. Not just risk that the deal doesn't perform, but the timing risk of spending a big chunk of your career working towards something that completely vanishes (or is drastically reduced compared to expectations). Probably several people on this site who have experienced or seen something like this. As others mentioned, the inflection point where you can make more as a developer tends to come a bit later in your career. And again, that career earnings inflection point (between IB and development) could shift even further out if the deals you work on don't perform as underwritten, sometimes (or often times) for macroeconomic reasons outside your control, since real estate is a very rate-sensitive industry given the amount of leverage involved. The base + cash bonus portion of comp (excluding promote, carry, etc) for development I'd venture to guess is less than IB, so if the deals don't pan out as expected, all of a sudden development doesn't seem quite as lucrative as IB. ALL OF THAT SAID, if you are looking beyond just comp, development is an incredibly exciting and gratifying industry in other ways, as has been discussed on this forum many times. There's something energizing about coordinating across so many design disciplines, consultants, attorneys, construction folks, city staff, politicians, investors, lenders, and internal leadership. Keeps your mind sharp, keeps you highly engaged in your work, it's honestly just very exciting. And...in the end, it's also possible you do work on successful deals that pan out well and you hit that career earnings inflection point (relative to IB) after some time. Hopefully this helps add some balance and highlight some of the risk, against the potential reward and excitement.