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Comment by hailwren | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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