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"Meanwhile, tech industry execs are screaming over how high (!!) engineer salaries are..."

A couple of recent surveys were very eye-opening. Salaries seem high compared to the national average in silicon valley, but if you look at compensation in other fields in in high-cost areas like silicon valley, it doesn't appear that software developers have particularly high salaries.

The first survey is from sfgate (the sf chronicle)...

http://blog.sfgate.com/gettowork/2013/12/17/what-the-most-co...

According to this survey, registered nurses in San Francisco earn $112,140 a year. "Software Developers, Applications" workers earn $110,950 a year. System software developers clock in at $112,260 a year. Lawyers earn an average of $165,740 a year.

Software Developers get the best job title on US News And World Report's rankings

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/rankings/the-100-b...

But the top jobs in high paid regions tells a similar story. In San Jose, as with San Francisco, Registered Nurses outearn software developers. In San Francisco, dental hygenists earn $106,700 a year, so about 4k a year less than these wildly well paid software developers.

http://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/dental-hygienist/s...

My point here isn't these aren't important fields worthy of good salaries. I'm really glad that nurses and dental hygienists are well paid, they absolutely deserve good compensation. But why do we talk about software developers as if they are this astoundingly well paid group of workers with runaway salaries? It seems that they make fine salaries compared to other well educated workers. More than some, less than others.

These two particularly resonate:

> 1) Academia - Potentially interesting work. However, grad students are underpaid, overworked indentured servant in a vicious dictatorial status hierarchy (do what the PI says or you're out). Very poor career prospects, guaranteed negative return on time invested. The road to PI is guaranteed to destroy your love of research.

Potentially interesting work, massive opportunity cost, and starting at the bottom of a ruthlessly competitive advancement pyramid. I love academia, and very much intend to stay in it, but it's not exactly a rational choice.

> 3) Professions (Law, Med) - Enter at your own risk. Savagely competitive and draconian entrance requirements, incredibly expensive education, inhuman hours, constant stress at every milestone, and a never-ending barrage of standardized tests. However, if you endure, you can start your own practice and potentially have a comfortable life.

Bimodal incomes that mean mainly these jobs come with a huge amount of debt for what is, for many people, a comfortable upper middle class lifestyle, but no more than that. You're not going to get rich doing either of these, because your income is capped by the hours you can work. A hedge fund on the other hand, if you're doing your job, is making money all the time.

Although I'm not sure whether I'll stay in it, I haven't found CS academia as bad as the stories about Big Science academia. At least, if you look for a job outside the top-20 "R1" schools, which are more focused on big labs and big grants to support those labs. Industry hires away a lot of PhDs, and there are a lot of small to medium-sized CS departments, both of which improve the supply/demand situation and working conditions compared to areas like biology and physics. Things in parts of Europe are even better (which is why I took a professorship in Denmark out of grad school, rather than in the US), but there are a lot of small CS departments in the US where you can work on your research without having an insane life. It does require that you have the kind of research that doesn't need huge funding and huge labs (if you need >$1m/yr budgets, you more or less have to be at an R1 and play that game). And you should at least somewhat like teaching. But if those things are true it can be an ok job with some freedom to decide what to work on. And the odds of getting a tenured position at a smaller school aren't 1000:1 like trying to get to be a tenured prof at MIT.

One of the suggestions I've seen for how happy people are in their field is how readily available the "Eject" button is for leaving your field if things don't work out.

For CS, and some parts of math and physics, it's fairly close. For many other fields, even STEM fields, being able to bail out is a much more distant prospect.

CS doesn't really suffer from the same issues.

You're not going to get rich doing either of these, because your income is capped by the hours you can work.

This is true for a while, but if you're smart about it you could expand your business and hire others in the same profession, and eventually become rich.

This of course also varies on your definition of rich - you can certainly manage "rich" in the traditional sense, but not to the scale that you'd talk about for finance.

I can't reply to your comment, but pretty much yes, I'm sure. Doctors and lawyers are actually the canonical example of lucrative but labor limited professions. And being able to build a practice exponentially is vanishingly uncommon, enough so that no one should bank on it, whereas compounding is a fundamental trait of finance.

Are you sure? For example I could imagine see a dentist eventually hiring other dentists, and then more and more, exponentially expanding their business everywhere and growing a brand. It's not easy, obviously, but feasible.

What I've seen happen, at least with doctors, is a bunch of them get together and from a group/partnership and then the group negotiates with hospitals. This has the advantage of increased leverage as a group and thus much better conditions than just an individual working for a hospital, but you aren't getting high-finance rich with that arrangement.

I think the biggest thing missing from this conversation and thought process is the change in the value of money over time. Basically - it is a lot different to have lower relative purchasing power these days in terms of quality of life tradeoffs. Once upon a time, an "ordinary" job afforded tolerable income, reasonable area, reasonable commute. Think about silicon valley in the days of wozniak. Imagine the live choices made by Jobs, and look where he landed.

Now, you need a top 10-20% income to live in a decent neighborhood within 30 minutes of a major metropolitan era.

Rather than make quasi-totalitarian statements about "what people should do" in the face of otherwise rational choices, perhaps we should instead wonder about what kinds of government policies have been made (fiscal etc) that put pressure on people to feel they "must" make 100k or else.

If people have greater freedom to accept an opportunity, without fear that the change in pay will lead to a material change in living conditions, then this problem may well solve itself.

This is one of the best posts I've read on HN.

There is one negative to hedge funds: they tend to have long hours. But the stereotype is worse than fact; it's generally 9-to-7 (with some fucked-up sweatshops out there that go longer) and the work is interesting enough (usually) that you don't mind it.

Compared to the (accurately stated) ills of the 4 paths you listed, that negative is pretty mild. And you certainly can find hedge funds with reasonable hours: you're just not as likely to become the $5m/year trader working 9-to-6/7. (But you can go into VC and work 9-to-5 making 500k+.)

I'll probably go back to finance in my mid-30s, because it beats being VP/Eng at some dodgy startup not because I want to manage but because it's the only way to justify age-appropriate comp. The problem I run into now is that, after some startup dalliances (and a 6-monther at Google under a psychotic manager) I ended up with a "job hopper" resume. That doesn't hurt you so much in tech, but hedge funds are terrified of IP loss and auto-reject people with "too many" jobs.

How does one, after a couple of startups, move to a hedge fund? What skills are they looking for? Any good reading out there?

I don't think it's hard to get into a good hedge fund, if you're in the right location (New York, possibly Boston or Chicago).

If you keep building your tech skills, you can get into a good hedge fund job after a few years. Just treat it the same as interviewing for a good tech job. Hedge funds more selective but also more meritocratic and predictable than Valley firms. The problem in the Valley is that, although it has as many smart people, pound for pound, as Wall Street... the Valley has more stupid people (and fewer smart people) in decision-making roles.

Startups aren't inherently damaging. The problem is that they're volatile and experience constant reorgs. Your job might be totally different in 6 months. Or it might not exist. This leads to a "job hopping" pattern that, from a more conservative finance perspective, makes you look bad. Banks and hedge funds are more stable so it's rare that someone is that unlucky as to have, say, 6 jobs in 5 years through no fault of their own. But it happens all the time in VC-funded startups.

I had a colleague in a past job that went from aeronautical engineering to a hedge fund. His career trajectory was MIT masters in aeronautical engineering -> ~5 years in aerospace -> 2 years at a financial software startup (where I worked) that was somewhat desperate for people -> hedge fund. Basically he could demonstrate a solid grasp of math from his past career, managed to find an entry-level position at a financial software startup (taking a pay cut), parlayed that into some knowledge of finance and industry contacts, and then jumped ship once the opportunity arose.

This is good comment, everything is ok but the hedge fund stuff. However, the hedge funds have entrance requirements that are based on perception of institutions.