Now you go for big tech (and startups). The cliche of the young "banker" personality type is now the "tech" personality type, and is coming soon to an Ai startup near you.
There was a mad rush between mid-1997 and mid-2001 to get into tech, then the dot-com bust happened, but that only lasted about 2 years before things ramped up again. That was 20 years ago.
Suggesting that the first decade of the web didn't flip the bit from finance to tech is ahistorical.
The big tech firms finally started doing RSU's insteda of stock options in the early 2000's, though most startups still were (and are) lagging way behind.
"Big Tech" had not been assembled yet. Microsoft was the only tech megacorp in town, and they were _hated_ back then. Apple was still recovering from shambles. Google was a startup nobody heard of. Facebook wasn't a thing yet.
Tech investment money wasn't on the same scale as today. Money was measured in millions instead of the billions today. Most of the money I think was still towards finance at the time. If you look at the public companies with largest market cap before 2010 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by... ), you'll see there's quite a couple banks on the list.
You're absolutely correct though that this trend was foreseeable in the 1990s. Which is kinda why the dot-com boom/bust happened -- everyone knew it was the future, I guess people were just a bit too excited for the future, and the companies who'd actually create that future weren't even founded yet, leading to all the mis-investment and subsequent bust.
I think the big difference was that big tech was mostly on enterprise. The big shift to consumer focused big tech made a lot of the big tech more intersting place to work
This is not true in the early 2000s - I remember people at school (UK) using Google in the late 90s.
I also discovered Google in 1999, and then worked there a decade later. I remember listening to the earnings calls around 2011-2012, and my coworkers would express disbelief in the questions that financial analysts would ask, because they totally missed the key drivers of our business performance. "It's simple," someone older and wiser told me, "they assume that the Internet is tapped out, no more people are going to go online, and so the only possible driver of higher revenue is higher cost per click." In reality, search queries increased 4x between 2009-2012. Large numbers of people were still discovering the Internet for the first time in the early 2010s. Hell, large numbers of people are still discovering the Internet for the first time now - Google still has a "next billion users" initiative (largely focused on India and South/Southeast Asia), and only about 35% of the world population are Internet users.
If you wanted to be on the bleeding edge, you would be applying to mobile phone operators like TMN, Vodafone, Optimus, and then code over a remote telnet connection to HP-UX 11 server.
We had a brief window in the mid 2010s when folks started to throw rocks at the tech buses where I thought people were starting to realize it. Around Bernie's presidential run - which makes sense because he preached wealth inequality. But somehow during COVID tech slithered back into everybody's good graces.
* I don't condone people throwing rocks at the buses for both the humanitarian reasons and the fact that few if any executive or social changes could result from that behavior. But it struck me as a microcosm of the prevailing sentiment towards technology workers.
Refreshing to hear that stated so clearly.
On your general point, I don't know if I feel the same optimism at this stage, much as I'd love to be proven wrong. Populations seem to never tire of jumping from one tech fairy tale to the next.
Developers seem to never tire of burying their head in the sand either, and I sometimes wonder if the two are correlated.
Why do you think this recent AI push will be the straw that breaks the camel's back? What if the camel just keeps plodding along?
That's a good start ^^. It was true before Trump too, but it's still better late than never
Is that inherent to the technology, or is that just inherent to the way we've chosen to organize society? Really, any technological paradigm shift going back to the industrial revolution has mainly served to enrich a small few people and families, but that's not some immutable property of technology. Like you say, it's a tool. We've chosen (or allowed) it to be wielded toward one end rather than another. I can smash my neighbor's head in with a hammer, or I can build a home with it.
At one point in the United States, there was political will to update our social structures so that the fruits of technological and economic progress did not go disproportionately to one class of society (think early 20th century trust busting, or the New Deal coming out of the Great Depression). I'm afraid we find ourselves with a similar set of problems, yet the political will to create some other reality beyond further wealth concentration seems to be limited.
But it also means that yes, tech intrinsically enables capital to do more with less labor, thereby shifting the balance of power towards capital and empowering those with more capital.
What ‘we decide’ to do with that is another largely unrelated matter.
Nevertheless the "parasite" "no societal value" reputation of Banking remains. I would suggest however, that doing M&A is less parasitic and has greater social value than any ad-tech.
I do support the notion that tech monopolies have killed a lot of the software industry dynamism by subsidizing anti competitive products. Like Android being free where Windows Mobile needed to make revenue from OEMs.
That was the end of techy swag wearing for me.
People see their cousin's uncle's neighbor's roommate making $400K at Meta and just assume every single employee there makes that much. Or they point to those salary sharing sites where people self-report their best salary + highest possible bonus + equity as if every year was 2021, and think of them as representative.
Every single employee, no. But the average L5 really does make over $300k in total compensation. Yes some of that is stock, but the companies are now stable enough so that doesn't cause a ton of variation.
Household. A married couple both making that are 98th percentile.
In what percentile of your social class do you sit with $300k? Probably not very high.
I was not at FAANG, but a unicorn startup back in mid to late 2010s, and I was making 150-180k in that time, but not in SF.
Rent back then for a 2br was like $2400.. Today, that same apartment goes for $4900.
I am pretty sure the base for the same level today is probably more like 170-200k, but literally everything has also become doubly expensive.
Also if you're in SF you either need to allocate another 300-400 a month for parking, or sell your car. I was paying 130 per month for my garage parking spot (again, not in SF), and when I moved to SF some time ago I sold my car because it was going to cost me a lot to use my car.
And unlike FANG, where you can either hold and double every 3-4 years if lucky, or sell immediately with taxes, I walked away with 10x or more..
I don't have a car, but I feel like that's one of the biggest privileges of living in the city. Maybe the calculus changes if you have kids, though.
I have cats so I need my own place and they need their own spaces :3
Getting rid of the car has been an awesome change though.
I’m so cheap now it’s crazy. Only spend money on food and cat stuff haha.
He has a child on the way. His wife also works. Their rent is 7k a month (home in a good school district - important to us Asians) because they aren’t going to share an apartment and have means to live in a bigger space. They could rent a house for 4k and risk getting shot in Oakland, or live closer to work and have a decent home for their family.
He is always complaining about finances because he spends like 10k a month on just living. If he buys a home, it’s like 2 million at least for something decent in a good area.
I think Bay Area is mad expensive. You really need to make a lucky break to thrive here. Most people sell their vested stock immediately, so those guys who made millions etc are few and far in between because they held for a while.
I think it's true both ways:
A lot of people assume it's like finance money, but it's not.
And on the flip side there's a lot of people coming from normal company or startup land, and assume that the $400k + average performing L5 is a myth, when that's pretty typical for big tech.
And I definitely agree with sibling here: $300k or $400k is good money, but in a place where the median house costs $1.5 million or something insane like the parts of the bay area that have a <45 minute commute, it doesn't go as far as you'd think. And it's incredibly risky, because now you're tied to always getting that level of comp for decades or you'll get evicted. (And while $400k + L5 Meta comp may be typical at Meta, it's not exactly trivial to maintain, or nearly as relaxing as a software gig you can do at other companies)
> but they're not casually making $2M bonuses like the investment banker types over at Goldman Sachs are