Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure the diversity stuff helps. People who look different can still be dysfunctional.

For me the big one is whether people in the interviews have the same mission. I went to an interview with a large investment bank where a friend turned out to be one of the interviewers. I thought highly of him, so naturally I thought his colleagues would be similar. He gave me the speil about what he does, sounded reasonable.

Then his five teammates spent an hour each with me, and they had 5 different stories about what the team does. They didn't seem to know that other teams in the same firm did the same thing and were in the news about it. Every single person gave their own version of how they fit in the team.

In the end the MD gave me a grilling about some totally irrelevant stuff, and then gave his version of the team.

I didn't proceed with the job. Caught up with my friend, and the MD is gone, along with most of the team. Friend is in another division. Another friend joined and left the group, which is yet another red flag.

> I'm not sure the diversity stuff helps. People who look different can still be dysfunctional.

It's almost as if diversity is more than skin deep.

Tangent, but having worked in the IT departments of Wall Street investment banks and hedge funds for most of my career, I’ve noticed there is a distinct and extreme lack of female SWEs, as well as women in general. The few present tend to be BAs or PMs.

This is in contrast with tech companies where the male to female ratio both in general and in SWEs seem to be much more balanced.

Pardon my ignorance. What's MD in this context?

Probably "Managing Director".

Managing Director, it's a sort of middle management role that a lot of people aspire to. Running a team, getting paid fairly decently.

It does vary, but I wouldn't describe Managing Director as a team lead. In the UK it was often equivalent to CEO. It could be the head of a business unit.

Yes, someone on the board that takes an active role in the company, or higher (The CEO)

In the context of an investment bank (I’ve worked at both US and UK ones, though they are all multinationals really), MDs would really just be higher ranking middle managers. The highest ranked would be direct reports to the C level. Some are line of business or department heads. I know some traders were MDs despite being “individual contributors” and not desk heads, etc.

Tech MDs, as with tech employees in general, we’re always lower in status than business ones.

Probably the first level of title that is actually meaningful though. There are legions of “Vice Presidents” and “Directors” at investment banks. Whereas MDs are comparatively much rarer.

Recognise the investment banking job title inflation!

When a couple of people who used to work for me suddenly became Vice President, I congratulated them on their meteroic rise. Yeah, not so much they pointed out... :)

Similar thing happened to me when I was interviewing around. My resume and LinkedIn had my title as “Vice President”. It apparently intimidated more than one interviewer at the SV tech companies I Was targeting.

I came to the conclusion the title hurt me more than helped, since I had no desire to remain in the finance industry. So I replaced it with just a generic “senior SWE” title.

> it's a sort of middle management role that a lot of people aspire to. Running a team, getting paid fairly decently.

really, 7 figures a year is "getting paid fairly decently" ?

MD in IB is the equivalent of "partner" in consulting, law firms etc. But the IB companies all went public so there is no controlling "partnership". Like "partner" it's the highest rung in the hierarchy and the distinction between them comes down to what team/desk/department they run & additional executive titles.

Does a tech MD at an investment bank really get a seven figure compensation?

Pretty sure I’m making more as a FAANGMULA company vanilla senior SWE than my old bank department’s tech MD. I know I’m definitely making considerably more than was my old D(irector) who was one level down from MD (also since departed to a FAANGMULA company and now a personal friend).

Now if we’re talking about a business side MD, especially a trader, then that’s a whole different story.

> Does a tech MD at an investment bank really get a seven figure compensation?

Some desks make more of less, but why wouldn't they? MD's at Goldman used to even have a minimum salary of 500k[1] and bonus is generally a multiple of that... I'm not sure what you mean specifically by "tech" but Quant Strat, HFT etc are extremely valuable.

> Pretty sure I’m making more as a FAANGMULA company

You very well could be, big tech has been on a tear for a decade so equity compensation is ridiculous.

[1] https://archive.ph/H9eKK/again?url=https://www.wsj.com/artic...

I was referring to tech as in general SWEs doing line of business work, etc. which would account for the majority of SWEs at banks.

I would put stuff like quants and HFT at a bank in a more rarified, elite, niche - perhaps on a tier similar to the elite hedge funds like Citadel. They’re not what I would think of first when describing “tech at a bank/finance” though. But definitely would agree their prestige and compensation is much higher.

> I was referring to tech as in general SWEs doing line of business work, etc. which would account for the majority of SWEs at banks.

I wasn't on that side of the business & it was a long time ago... If they used the same level system as the front office, I would assume you would just have considerably less MD's and the pay would be at the lower end of the range but that would still put you at or close to 7 figures.

Managing Director

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