Right place, right time, right skills, and sometimes the right connections.
I have 5 friends in that bucket. And none of them had the "right connection".
Some are immigrants, some are minorities, some were dirt poor and came from nothing.
But all of them had some of the highest drive and grit and sometimes intelligence out of my friend group. These guys would have done well in absolutely any industry.
8 to 10pm x 7 days a week would be an absolutely pleasure. It's hard to convey how hours longer than that weigh on you with multiple back to back subsequent years of "service".
But finance isn't special. 27 year old top attorneys make 300k. And suffer similar pain.
Even in consulting like BCG comp is not as high but you get weekends off. But you're still elbow to elbow with ambitious people.
But heres the rub. I did the math once. My calculation showed there were 4,000 private equity professions in the US. Maybe that's changed. That's an absurdly small number. How many bariatric surgeons are there? Like when you compare these very small knifes edge type quantities, sure, you see excess.
So finance used to be 7% of GDP, up from 4%, so for a period you had the ratio of people to GDP skewed so smart people rushed to normalize it. And it normalized. Now you see the equilibrium hit. But that doesn't mean sometimes the equilibrium is high. There's no 28 year old making 500k in silicon valley? Or spending 20k decorating their office?
Like it's just a matter of perspective.
Sorry for the rant. But the connection thing drives me crazy. I'm sure the silicon valley guy has really hard to obtain skills and didnt network at a bar into his top engineering job.
Edit: didn't mean for this to be combative. I've long believed humans are sort of fungible. You take a partner at an accounting firm and throw him in a consulting firm (and somehow roll back time) that same person will sort of get to the same spot. I believe when you're 14 or 16 or 18 or 20 and you sort of pick what you want to do you are so impressionable that it ends up being partly passion and partially luck.
I know I like to hire based on personal recommendation of people I trust, it removed a lot of risk for me in dealing with random people. Hence “right connections”.
Recruiting has these crazy dance steps. Unless you know in October of your sophomore year what the door knock is on this special process it can be hard to get in. But you can get in later. Its just much much harder.
I've been trying to figure out for a few years what that's called. It's not wealth, because knowing to apply is some sort of social/human capital, and its intergenerational. But I wonder like in the area where I volunteer...how much of the difference in outcome is related to just not knowing how the process works?
Some wealth you’re born with, or you come by from circumstance (many times relating to who you’re born to). Some wealth you can work on obtaining yourself.
Or you can "just" get into a top 5-10 MBA. Still hard, but at least you're an adult at that point
Also, I did not go to Harvard, which typically sends more people to the buy-side then the other top-tier programs (but is somewhat self-selection, because HBS tends to accept a lot of pre-MBA buy-side people from top firms)
[1] I think its more accurate to say that the field requires lack of significant adversity more so than "connections." The median family income at Harvard is $168,000, the 80th percentile. These kids aren't working all summer to help their parents make ends meet. At the same time, their neighbors are engineers, doctors, government employees, etc., not hedge fund managers.