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Comment by whimsicalism | Hacker News Reader

For the typical Harvard student, tech is better paying than consulting unless you are an extraordinarily successful consultant.

> It’s not uncommon for people in consulting to be making $500k-$1m annually by the age of 40

This is not "uncommon" in FANG either (just take a look at the salary charts), and if anything can be reached earlier.

> there was a golden era of startups capturing value from the old guard, but that era is largely over IMO

If I could take a bet against this, I would. That value capture is only going to increase.

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5 year EV is much lower in tech than finance for Harvard grads. I'm not sure ab consulting.

Consulting and tech have similar starting salaries, but consider finance/hedge fund engineer starting tc is about 3-4x tech for top 3 grads rn.

I would contend that 5 year EV is probably higher in tech than across all of finance unless you manage to get into only the MOST exclusive megafunds (Hellman-Friedman, Silver Lake, Bain Cap, or Apollo, as most are coming in as associates in 200-300k range) or exclusive HFs (Viking, Citadel, Elliot) and even then, you're usually on a 2 year contract or up-or-out plans. The HFs will need to see you perform well to get anything more than base and your bonus (the chunk of how you get comped) will be at the discretion of your manager anyway.

> 5 year EV is much lower in tech than finance for Harvard grads. I'm not sure ab consulting.

Based on what? This is not true in my experience, unless you're comparing finance tech to FANG tech, in which case it is true. Moreover, at Harvard, some segment of those who go into finance are "connected" with higher paying finance jobs due to their parents/etc.

Consulting salaries are lower (sometimes substantially) than tech starting salaries.

Yeah, tech has a starting salary advantage but FAANG just doesn't compare on the upside. What's the top 10% of FAANG outcomes (for Harvard grads) after 5 years? 500k, maybe? The jump to MD in finance makes 1M+ something like 10-20% of outcomes (for Harvard grads) after 10 years. I'd be very surprised if it were that common in tech (over the next 10 years, I know that it was better in the 2000s). I think quickest to MD at Goldman was 4 years.

Top 10% of FAANG is, what, around 30K-40K in raw numbers? What's the top 10% in Big Finance? I'd bet it's far lower number compared to that. So it's not apples to apples comparison. If you compare what top 10,000 FAANG engineers make 10 years into their careers vs what top 10,000 finance folks make 10 years into theirs, I'm pretty sure FAANG will come out ahead.

(for Harvard grads) is the important part there.

Is it because they have ‘Harvard’ on their resumes or is it that Harvard still admits mostly some of the smartest and most driven people in the country? Ie could a person who is in the top 2% of a flagship state school keep up with the top 10% Harvard grad or is that name on their resume forever going to hold them back?

> could a person who is in the top 2% of a flagship state school keep up with the top 10% Harvard grad or is that name on their resume forever going to hold them back?

If it's a good flagship, absolutely can keep up.

But finance is up and out. The typical Harvard student in finance is not making that much, even 5 years out. I know plenty of them.

I needed to rewrite this. I mean something like if I select an individual, uniformly at random, after conditioning on industry and Harvard degree I would expect the salaries of most of the individuals in both industries to be about the same. However, I think tech is closer to a normal distribution and finance is heavy-tailed around tech's mean.

If you do something like conditioning on a CS degree, finance probably mops the floor w/ tech.

> If I could take a bet against this, I would

Can't you, by starting or (much less favorably) joining a startup?

Betting on technology capturing value in general over "jack-of-all-trades" consultancy vs. betting on one particular startup capturing value.

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