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Comment by flavio81 | Hacker News Reader

Here it's the opposite; i have a full degree in software engineering and over 13 years of doing it professionally, yet some Finance graduates, friends of mine, are earning much more (i.e. as CFOs of companies);

Sometimes i think i should have studied Finance instead!

The reason i do this (all software related activities) is because it's my real passion. I see many people engaging in "coding" bootcamps but only because of the market demand, not because they are passionate in any way about doing it, which is sad.

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This is just about the only professional career I've heard of where people talk this way. Who goes into accounting because of their passion for bookkeeping and tax compliance?

"Generally, the Real Programmer plays the same way he works - with computers. He is constantly amazed that his employer actually pays him to do what he would be doing for fun anyway (although he is careful not to express this opinion out loud)"

-- From "Real Programmers Don't use Pascal", a classic in programmer's humor.

uhm, a lot of people do. some people love numbers.

also, medicine, law, automotive engineers, pilots, merchant marine, musicians, actors... people are passionate about different things.

maybe you haven't heard people talk about their passions in those industries because you aren't in those industries?

what a bizarre thing to have to explain to someone.

My father and my brother are in accountancy. Obviously I haven't talked to every accountant on Earth, but if that's your standard nobody can ever think about anything.

   This is just about the only professional career I've heard of where people talk this way...

In my experience: Nearly all doctors will at least claim it as part of the reason. Many (most?) lawyers. Most teachers. Most academics. All social workers. The list goes on and on.

In fact my first choice for counterexample would be your example - accountants. But in my experience they are often passionate about proving a helpful and necessary service, eve if they aren't passionate about the work itself.

Just because we don't feel any great love for spreadsheets doesn't meant nobody else does. I've only known two professional accountants but both enjoy what they do, not just the externality of providing the useful service. They like working with the numbers and rules. People called me weird at law school because I actually liked tax law. I'm fascinated by the interaction (aka train wreck) of public policy hitting financial ground truth. I would real tax cases and laugh out loud at some of the insanity. Just because something isn't popular or widely understood doesn't mean there aren't people who enjoy it.

Find it tolerable, maybe even like it? Sure. Show me someone who would do taxes on their own time for fun. I've sometimes heard it said that the main reason people decide to go into auditing or tax is they couldn't stand the other one.

For that matter, let's talk about a closer career to ours. How many people who are system administrators complain about relatives asking them for free consultations? Would that be an issue if they just loved configuring and troubleshooting computers so much? Even if you like computers a lot, what you get paid to do with them isn't necessarily fun.

Sure, I think I allowed for that possibility. But as noted, I was basing this on my own experience - I know multiple people in all of these professions. Unlike the others, none of the accountants have loved the nuts and bolts work in the same way many of the others did. Could just be sample bias.

Creative professions usually are like this. Also (more anecdotally) I find that quite a few researchers like doing some research during their free time (usually far less serious research of the form "applying techniques used in research on toy problems"). It's not uncommon, but then again, not all programmers spend their free time on more programming.

Depending on the area, finance has many opportunities for "consultant" like work where a significant portion of your income can be commissions or performance based. This is where the real money is and the people I know that are successful in this make multiples more than me and my "big 4" programming job--even at their relatively small firms.

When I ask them, their passion tends not to be "finance" so much as "helping people" in various forms. Whether that passion is sincere or not is a separate argument.

Personally, that sort of incentive one of the major motivators that's missing from the pure software industry imo. When I worked in derivatives trading as a programmer, I made a good chunk of change finishing projects early, with high quality, etc. At my current position, there's no such obvious incentive. Promotions and solid bonuses could require years of this type of work as a prerequisite and may not even be recognized at all.

Are you referring to management consultants (e.g., McKinsey, Bain) or something else entirely?

Various forms of financial planning was what came to mind. The predecessor to robo-advisers. The guys I know that are really killing it in this have a few dozen clients investing several million each with them. Their commissions from this sort of thing are large enough that they only need to have this occur a couple times a year to be well into six-figure territory.

People take all sorts of jobs because they pay better than others. I don't think there's anything sad about that.

I'd be quite passionate if I was doing finance only if it was my money and not have someone pushing me spend other people's money, I'd have to have a cushion tho.

The key to higher income is combining a useful skill (coding, carpentry, etc) with valuable knowledge and execution (finance, sales, etc).

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