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