Hacker News Reader

Comment by ishtanbul | Hacker News Reader

Investment banker here. The culture of software/tech better valuing work life balance is alluring. Whats described in the article is pretty alien to me. I typically have 4-6 hours of meetings a day (client calls) and am also expected to do 6+ hours of document/email work a day on top of that. I have to do somewhere between 2-10 hrs of work every weekend. It is impossible to keep up, so i am always disappointing somebody and i just live with that. The compensation is excellent (I’ve earned up to 720k in a good year) but i feel like this job will kill me. I actually want to get into programming and robotics and actually build something. Im worried its too late to switch and ill get knocked down to a much lower salary as a jr dev at 35yrs old. Its hard to walk away from that paycheck. Ideas?

View on HN

I think solutions to this are more likely to come out of introspection of what you actually want in life, rather than a clever hack that gets you a high-paying programming job straight away.

Some questions that might be interesting to ask yourself:

- How much money do you actually need? - Are there things beyond money that stop you wanting to be a junior dev (status, networks and friendships, parts of your identity)? - Could you afford to take a year or more off work? If so, would a job where you have a junior dev salary be strictly better than that, financially? - Are there ways you could "actually build something" that would be satisfying to you, that don't require a career jump? For example, maybe there are roles or companies in your current industry that offer better work/life balance (at the cost of some salary) and would allow you time for hobbies. - You don't have to be a developer to work in tech. FAANG are massive companies with all sorts of employees (lawyers, doctors, investors, finance people). Are there roles at the big tech companies that would fit into your existing skill set, where you wouldn't take such a hit to salary? Would those satisfy you, or are you more concerned with changing your day-to-day work?

The obvious play is to transition to quant dev at your current place. You'll already have a bunch of software engineers who do their best to guess what the bankers are talking about. Sell your supervision structure on the idea that you work more closely with them with an eye to transitioning. That may take some salesmanship.

If you manage to cross over to quant dev you'll be able halfway to a sane working environment (it'll probably feel very relaxed to you) and at maybe half your current compensation, assuming you get somewhat lowballed while moving. Spend some time there.

You're now a professional software developer. Optionally cross over into a less mental industry to move the work/life balance curve further.

Hopefully you haven't burned everything you've made so far - investment banking is prone to a run of bad luck turning into unemployment, so if you're living paycheck to paycheck you've got an easy way to shed stress by not doing that any more.

Good luck

> Ideas?

You're making about 3x+ of a senior software engineer (sure there are exceptions but they are not the norm) so if you can hold on to that for ten years you've done a whole lifetime of software engineering income.

Making that much money I would expect that you can take almost any career risk you could imagine. I understand that you're basically millionaire at 35 years old, you're basically set for life and can focus on doing things you find more interesting, such as learning about robotics without any monetary pressure. That's a pretty luxurious and safe situation! Maybe take some time off can help you realize how insanely far ahead you are from any other worker trying to save money.

Somehow that doesn’t work. For most people retirement money (or “can take any career risk” money) goal post keeps changing. Often involuntarily.

Lifestyle inflation is definitely a thing, especially with a partner and kids. You're not going back to living in a crappy apartment with non-related roommates if you have a choice. And you don't want to give up nice trips and meals out.

Stepping off a well-paid career trajectory is also hard to do even if you're pretty sure you have enough savings to comfortably cover your annual living expenses. It can be hard to get back on if things don't go as planned. I've definitely known people who ended up pushing semi-retirement out a bit because work wasn't getting in the way of life too much and why not stash some more money away while the stashing is good?

If you don't already know how to code, then it wouldn't be easy. Development isn't just another kind of job you can get trained for (unless you make very little and do things that would get outsourced). It's a skill that takes time and experience to grow into. That said, it's never "too late" for anything in life, if you find it interesting then try contributing to various github projects or even start your own.

I think software development is probably relatively easier to slide into than deciding you really want to become a mechanical or chemical engineer. As you say, it's something you can potentially do a bit on the side.

That said, per another comment, as long as the pay is ridiculously good--which odds are it won't actually be by starting over with a tech company--waiting it out and avoiding lifestyle inflation isn't the worst plan. One of my classmates in school retired from investment banking in his 40s and travels and teaches a bit on the side.

I don’t see software/tech valuing work/life balance better. It might just be that software/tech is more remote and more flexible. But tech can punish you just like investment banking.

I was asked point blank by my tech CEO: “how much do you work” - first time in my career and that’s having come from NYC finance. Don’t believe the hype!

With all that salary, keep the job and hire a team of outsourced workers to build the business of your dreams on the side.

700 on a good year is probably 400 after tax and misc breakage. Reasonable dev in cheap country is maybe 100 a year all in? Not obvious to me that any sort of "business of your dreams" can be built by two or three outsourced developers.

Learn Python, automate your work.

Develop a relationship with someone that knows Python, have them automate your work.

Alternatively, learn VBA if you live in Word.

Alternative 2, just learn to be more proficient with the tools that you use.

If there's something that I have discovered it is that many people's office jobs could be automated—or at least much more efficient—if they were developers.

Any task that you do that involves any kind of data, developing reports that can be templated, Excel, could all probably be automated.

How will python help him with meetings and emails? This doesn't sound like a technology problem. Not only that, but he's already working crazy hours. And you're suggesting that he spend more time on work?

He's asking for ideas on how to make a career transition with the understanding that his salary will most likely get reduced by 90%.

Im looking forward to the msft copilot integration in office that can answer my emails and write transcripts of calls with to-dos. It will save time, but i think it will just up the ante since the culture is what got us here. And the risk of deals failing means you have to work on many at a time and accept as much as 100% swings in comp year to year. I would love to learn python, i figure with chatgpt i can learn it quickly. I learned vba with it and built bigger, crazier financial models but i still work the same amount… even my boss who is 50 is doing the same hrs.

With ai is it even worth it to try to get started in software or robotics? I feel like i will not be able to get a job bc these systems are advancing so fast, they will take the jr jobs first.

Value in my industry is really created from relationships (origination). The modeling and analysis work can probably be automated away with ai in a short time. I’m trying to bring the firm in that direction so that i can manage that.

If we started having chatgpt respond to emails in my current job, I would bet that we'd lose all of our clients. I can't imagine automated communication in the context of personalized and nuanced interactions, especially when money is on the line. I'm sure somebody will tell me I'm wrong though...

Yeah, i think about 50% of them require a ton of thought and context. But some do not. If it could draft and just let me approve, i could save hours. This is just jevons paradox though.

As you say it's the culture of investment banking, Big Law, and some other subsets of certain industries. Those subsets pay extremely well but things like weekend work are just part of the package.

I'm not at all convinced AI is going to radically change the culture of most industries in the relatively near term. There have been enormous changes to the tooling for all kinds of tech over the past few decades and I don't really see big changes to the work culture--other than the pay for software development at "tech" companies often increasing relative to other types of engineering. (It's not clear to me that sort of differential is sustainable.)

At $500k+ annually, you can hire a secretary.

(It sounds like you're in a position where you feel like you're compensated well enough that you'd be open to taking half the pay if it meant you could maintain the same return on investment: i.e. put in only half the work.)

By bringing up Copilot, it shows that you're already dabbling with adjacent ideas. Would love to know if/why you haven't considered this already and more about your work, including what parts, if any, make it a non-starter.

The secret is automation that does things while you're doing other things. Parallel not series. I've even seen people secretly hire foreign virtual assistants to do their low value tasks for pennies while the employee focuses on the higher value tasks.

So I'm assuming that your comment is in reference to me casting doubt on the usefulness of automation in meetings, emails, and other forms of communication.

The point is that there's plenty of high level, technical, and nuanced communication that can only happen between experts. The expertise isn't documented anywhere (unless you count previous email exchanges), it's not somehow represented in a database, and often times decisions are highly specific to one particular situation. Asking a non expert to fulfill this role is difficult enough. I'm not convinced that this is a problem solved by technology.

I'm honestly not sure what I would use an admin for if you gave me one. A lot of what an executive admin does is dealing with the calendars of people who have far more demands on their time than they have time. And getting the status on various projects from people. Generally speaking, other than travel sometimes, I don't really have a lot of "Make it So!" tasks that I could delegate to an admin/assistant.

There are things that I'm not good at that I'm better off not spending time hacking at to do a mediocre job--e.g. web stuff generally or design--but that's really something else.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com