People get paid so much more in finance than any other industry that I wonder why tech people aren’t more interested in those jobs.
Also the work is more exciting and challenging. And it’s better for the world, though I suspect I’ll get a lot of downvotes for that one.
1) I'd have to live in NYC
2) I'd have to use their super locked down Windows machine.
3) I would only be allowed to talk to people in my department, and would never even be allowed to associate with the people making the trading algorithms, even though the job was to build them an infrastructure for back-testing their algorithms.
4) Their company had the opposite of transparency -- everything was so locked down it would be nearly impossible to be successful at the job, which was by it's nature very cross-sectional.
At some point the money just doesn't matter that much anymore. Once you have enough to cover all your needs and few wants a year, more money has a quickly diminishing return.
Other than the vast amounts of money, I didn't see anything interesting about working finance.
Maybe not everyone has a passion for finance, but I find it probably the most interesting thing in the world. The movement and character of markets are one of the last and great unsolved problems of humanity. They are also so incredibly old and have an outsized impact on the world compared to really anything else at all that I can think of.
I only got interested in markets in my mid-20s and before then, I wanted to be a compiler writer or something like that. On a whim I took my first job in finance at a portfolio analytics company and I was absolutely hooked, the rabbit hole ran so so deep. Now after working at a bank, a hedge fund, and now currently another bank structuring derivative products in Africa, I can't think of anything else.
The math is so interesting and the programming even more so. There's no right answer anywhere you look, just fields and fields of unsolved problem everywhere you look. I eventually realized that the reason why I find finance so interesting is the same reason why I find computer science interesting: because no one really knows what they're talking about. I relish the idea that I could be the first one to come up with some brilliant hedging mechanism or some product that solves a lot of people's problems.
Also I think that managing risk and making the world money is a noble endeavor. Client's call me on the phone I tell me, "Without you guys, I would have lost a shit ton of money", or "Without you, I wouldn't have been able to make a deal in Africa", etc etc. I'm not unique, and my firm isn't unique, so maybe this isn't true. But I do my absolute darnedest to help my clients, and by helping my clients, my firm.
I'll also disagree with you about money. Once you have enough to cover all your needs and few wants a year, more money starts to get interesting, because then it goes directly into building financial independence. That's the money that will pay for you to retire, start a business of your own, take a sabattical, move to a low-paid job you love, etc.
I agree with you in theory, but even if you made $200,000 more a year than you need, how many years will you have to work at a crappy high paying job to save up enough to do any of those things?
The only way to build that kind of wealth is either getting lucky on some stock options, being rich to start, or being young enough where $100,000 will carry you for a couple of years.
In any case, i'm not suggesting you take a crappy job to get that money - my first point was that there are quite enjoyable jobs which will provide it!
I make around 23% YoY on my investments taking a leveraged high volatility strategy and let me tell you, at that kind of return, saving a little returns a big ass dividend.
In short, saving a lot can net you huge money, enough to change your life.
For all the hobgoblins and stories of bad-faith intent by big tech companies, they are still far more progressive than financial companies when it comes to things like hours, working arrangements, tenure, schooling, organizational hierarchy etc...
Find me a finance job that lets me work 100% remote and doesn't care I didn't attend $prestigiousCollege and... I'd suspect it'd end up being a tech company instead :-)
Strangely always devolves into a length measuring contest around things like clothes and income.
Even stranger is how quiet that space gets when the firm hits a couple of red quarters.
Nothing like underperformance to remind the plebes where they sit in the hierarchy of “sweet cash money” versus partners and investors ;-)
(Also if you know a tech company that will install a slide and a barber at my house, could you PM me their name? First I’ve heard of that)