How Wall Street takes advantage of very confused Ivy League graduates | Hacker News Reader

How Wall Street takes advantage of very confused Ivy League graduates

washingtonpost.com

13 pointsilamont15 comments

This article jibes with my analysis.

I worked in finance (as a proprietary trader) for 6-ish years, including several years as a VP at Deutsche Bank.

As the article says:

"What Wall Street figured out is that colleges are producing a large number of very smart, completely confused graduates. Kids who have ample mental horsepower, an incredible work ethic and no idea what to do next."

I call these folks "try-hards". These folks have knocked down goal after goal for their whole life, and they are damn good at it. The field of possibility has been constrained by their parents and their social milieu for years to reveal a very small set of viable goals at any given time. And they are talented, motivated, and absolutely crush anything in their way.

In college, these folks need to develop their own superego and internalize their own constraint set. The low-hanging fruit is right there to grab: finance, consulting, law, medicine. Each of these is prestigious, pays well, and has a relatively deterministic process by which one can enter, grow in responsibility, demonstrate achievement, and increase their pay. It's a no-brainer.

The paradox of choice is one of the great anxiety-producers of our age for the professional set. Honestly, it must be refreshing to have such a strong set of constraints guiding you toward such a bounded set of outcomes.

This is something that people like me[1] have a hard time understanding: for the try-hard, this outcome is not something to be fought or to be overly questioned--it's the inevitable, desirable continuation of a lifetime worth of achievement.

[1] - A hacker from a lower-class background who did not ride the academic achievement path

"I worked in finance (as a proprietary trader) for 6-ish years, including several years as a VP at Deutsche Bank. - (I am a) hacker from a lower-class background who did not ride the academic achievement path"

Very interesting. So how did you get to be a wall street trader,( without the academic credentials)?

I went to a large state school, and I have several friends who ended up at investment banks in NYC. You Don't have to be an ivy league rockstar to get in, just a decent education from a reputable school, show a work ethic and decent social skills. Banks hire tons of people every year, lots burn out after the first year or two (either because of the 12 hr days, or they didn't make the "up" in "up or out"), so the bank hires more next year.

Yep, didn't mean to imply otherwise.

It does vary a lot between disciplines, though. There are a lot of successful people in support roles: technology, "back office" (operations, settlements, legal), human resources, etc., from many backgrounds.

Sales, research, trading, transactional M&A, wealth management and capital markets desks have a higher percentage of Ivy/prep school folks, especially for folks in the ~VP - younger MD range.

Re: try-hard-ism: For example, Goldman derivatives trading struck me at one point as being made up of the lacrosse team captains from each Ivy.

A lot of the older folks are "Brooklyn smart" whereas the younger folks are mostly "MIT smart" or "MBA smart".

I had an interview with a private equity firm who told me re: their analyst program: "We hire only 24 year olds who went to private school, then an Ivy, then did a two-year program at a top tier investment bank. We find that if everyone we hire is the same person, it's easy for them to work together, and for us to work with them. We took a risk one time and hired someone with a different profile once, and it didn't work out." (Basically verbatim.)

Wall Street seems pretty meritocratic in the sense that they will try out anyone who seems promising and just fire them if they suck. (For anywhere besides Goldman Sachs and D.E. Shaw, that is.)

I had an easier time getting interviews on Wall Street than in Silicon Valley. (but the Wall Street interviews were harder)

Depends on role. In sales / trading / research there is way more demand for jobs than supply, and a lot of talented unemployed people floating around out there.

For example, here in SF, one PM told me that he was going to interview one candidate per day for 30 days and then make a decision. For a junior trader / analyst position. Granted this is a C-list at best town for finance, but that struck me as indicative of a huge imbalance.

Maybe finance firms are just more together with interview scheduling. I realize your comment meant there are few positions in finance, but I've never known any startup sized companies to do something like that, even though everyone says they are desperate for talent. The interview process is usually super disorganized, and people just get called in if it's an employee's girlfriend's roommate or other arbitrary criteria. It's usually like 2-8 people interviewed in a month, not 30.

Both D.E. Shaw and Goldman are happy to interview you once you've authenticated by working at another firm first. And both of them are pretty fair once you get the interview IMO.

I have no problem with Wall Street recruiting the smartest. Naturally, people will go to where the money is, and the money usually resides in the industry that produces the most "value" to society.

What I have a problem with is that Wall Street has already proven it doesn't provide as much value as it warrants (20% of GDP or so)... but we artificially pump it back up by bailing out firms. The fall was going to happen, but the government interfered with things, which irritates me.

It's like spending hours and hours climbing a mountain, then when you reach the top, a deity increases the mountain twice as high to piss you off.. What the hell?

There is a reason Goldman claims to be doing God's work on Earth...

Seeing my analytically minded friends (physicists and mathematicians) go into banking and finance really pisses me off. I really hate the "it is just a job" mentality.

You have your life before you. You can do anything you want. Instead they lure them in with the six-figure salaries.

In fact I have made it my life mission to do something about it, because I feel that if we cut out the lifeblood (the new recruits) of "the system" then it will crumble.

You can do anything you want. But you can do anything you want better, with a big salary.

Not if earning the big salary takes so much time that you can't dedicate yourself to something else. Like being in the lab researching cancer.

Not knowing what to do next =/= confused.

The article makes it sound as if Wall Street is preying on or exploiting hapless, vulnerable graduates. Isn't it possible though that many Ivy Leaguers take these jobs because they pay well, are high status, and don't foreclose future career options. And if that's true, it sounds more like a reasonable exchange rather than a predatory relationship.

It's interesting that "Excel" is listed as one of the valuable skills students learn in their Wall Street internships.

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