Talent Wars: Silicon Valley vs. Wall Street
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
I think tech is a great place to be right now for anyone who can get a job in it. But my advice to new graduates is to be strategic in your career, i.e. look ahead 10+ years when you'll be more senior. Go in a direction where you'll be valued.
Optimize for having the best coworkers (and manager) you can find. You can never start too soon.
At Morgan Stanley, for example, no one on the operating committee is focused on technology. I would have expected at least a CTO, but no, nothing.
http://www.morganstanley.com/about/company/governance/operat...
Source: I work at a large investment bank.
Bloated sell side firms are seeing how much money the leaner tech-oriented buy side shops are making and are taking note. Several large firms are hiring big names in tech, such as Morgan Stanley recently hiring Bjarne Stroustrup, the inventor of C++.
I think the main difference between Silicon Valley and Wall Street is that Wall Street is unapologetically and obsessively about nothing but profit whereas Silicon Valley companies tend to have more holistic and varying business goals.
Back toward the end of the dot-com boom, investment banks were grumbling how the dot-com boom had loosened requirements for IT to wear suits to work, and how with the bubble coming to an end, maybe they were going to try to bring the suits back. Sticking to that dress theme, what were financial analysts talking about when Facebook was doing its IPO road show two years ago( http://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-takes-heat-for-hoodie-on... )?
While some unbehagen is felt with these sartorial changes, the real threat to traditional Wall Street comes from hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies, which hires no financial people, yet has spectacular financial returns, pushing Jim Simons up to #34 on the Forbes richest list. Renaissance hire astronomers as well as people like Peter J. Weinberger and Leonard E. Baum, but no traditional financial Wall Street people. Tossing the usual nonsense has led to spectacular success, meanwhile banks like Lehman Brothers go under.
Other companies of a similar model have sprung up such as D. E. Shaw. Many of these hedge funds are under the radar. I noticed Andy Lutomirski of AMA Capital Management on stage at Linuxcon this weekend along with Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, Greg Kroah-Hartman and Shuah Khan. These hedge funds are popping up and well-financed, and the traditional investment banks are beginning to build out in-house clones of these successful hedge funds. But the culture hurts it - at Renaissance the quants and computer scientists are the profit centers, at traditional Wall Street investment banks they are still considered cost centers who take orders from the "financial people" in other departments. How many people who start as programmers or systems/network/database/etc. administrators in the IT department at investment banks versus those who start off in sales or investment banking? It's a sign of how things are that so many of these hedge funds are popping up outside of investment banks. It's not just due to regulations.
One nice part of working at a large bank is they are global, and a software change you push out can go to London, New York and Tokyo, and be used by people worldwide, within a massive software, systems and network architecture and IT staff. But you can get that experience working at Google or Facebook or Amazon as well.
There's not much going for you if you work IT at an investment or commercial bank. There are sinecures here and there, but usually you're better off at a technology company where you're seen as part of a profit center, not as part of a major cost center. Banks are being forced to change due to outside pressure, but they are resisting the change from within. If you like dealing with bureaucracy more than technology, working at a bank may be for you. Otherwise you're better off working at a technology company - or at least a hedge fund.
Life in the valley will be great for some, but crap for most. Equally for wall street.
That said, I have been apart of new graduate hiring processes, but the most success I've had with those was bringing in multi-year interns and that process was a hedge against the up times in our industry.
[edit] Reading this it might seem like I'm implying that the current norm for people to consider SV vs WS is good. I don't mean that. I actually think that new developers would get the most bang for their buck developing "in the enterprise". There are lots of big companies that are not IBanks that can afford new grads and you would learn a lot working there (which should be the goal of a new grad).
New Yorkers take pride in their reputation for toughness. New York is about projecting strength. New York is about old money. Tech people, not in all cases but I believe the majority, take pride in their intelligence, ingenuity and adaptability.
The west coast is about doing things your own way. The west coast is about not being afraid to be different. The west coast has a reputation, deservedly or not, for embracing unique individuals and that appeals more to tech people than New York's toughness.
New York just feels like the past to me; the old world where with old money where I'm likely to find people with generic backgrounds.
The West Coast is pushing the world forward, and I feel like I'm more likely to find people with the variety of backgrounds necessary to make a start-up successful.
> New York tells you, above all: you should make more money.
That's very true, but ironically not in the sense that the author meant it. New York is just annoyingly expensive city in the real estate sense. So living in New York directly tells you "you need more money to pay your rent / pay off your mortgage, etc".
Another area of finance dominated by talented people would be high frequency trading. It's one of a few industries where system latency is often more important than system throughput, which leads to some very interesting low-level problems.
And at that point, I realized this article was yet another rehashing of the same old cliched technology meme: the under-appreciated tech prodigy cursed to a Promethean existence of 3000 hr work weeks where he/she's forced to calculate all the firm’s debits and credits to the penny on an Excel spreadsheet using Visual Basic, due 3 weeks ago. Yes, of course you must throw off the shackles of those dried up old Luddites, grab what's left of the embers of your once blazing digital inferno skill set and head off into Gault's Gulch where the only true intellects of our era have gathered together with the sole intent doing serious business, solving only those really deep and meaningful problems we all face in life - you know, web search, email and social networking....all from the comfort of a well-worn hoodie. Meanwhile, the reality is the rest of us who've been around for a bit of time are doing all we can to corral their ignorance and naiveté into a safe corner where it can be used as nothing more than a perfect example of what not to do when working on something complex with real money at stake. While we'd all love for you to be the next Wozniak and actually take some of the burden off our backs, we're pretty much resigned to accepting the bare minimum - that you don't (on average) require more explanation time than the task itself would take to complete and that you don't break things which we will later be forced to fix. Usually, however, we're forced to accept some useless seat warmer whose sole contribution is logging bullshit work hours, providing meaningless status updates and generally just making sure all the various interweb news outlets are still accessible and producing the same sort of nonsense this article spews.
There is some very real technology talent on Wall Street - it is the nexus of money, afterall. But it varies greatly and often the situation is more like a desert of tedious, exhausting work only sometimes alleviated by the few oases of tenacious talent encountered along the way. But ALL WORK gets boring at some point. You're absolutely delusional if you think that all or even most of your work will be interesting enough to feed your desire to complete it. I still remember one night over drinks with some co-workers where we were lamenting one especially dreary and monotonous phase of a business wind down and were trying to get to the root purpose or meaning of what we do. I'll tell you it did sort of take the wind out of my sails when we reached the conclusion that every single software development project we have been or will be involved in boils down to four high level sub-tasks:
1. Data acquisition 2. Data transformation 3. Data presentation 4. Administrative work
And then we each went home, slept and got up to repeat the same monotonous cycle the next day. But that's it - pretty much your entire career will be doing those 4 things, with only #4 pretty much consistently increasing in percentage of time spent with the maturity of the business. Does that sound so earth shattering? Do you think it's any different at Google or Facebook? Sure, you can probably engage in fierce debates with your coworkers on the technical merits of third world internet access provided by balloons over autonomous planes from the relative safety of your respective bean bag chairs, but Spotify or Microsoft or any tech firm certainly doesn't hold the monopoly on inane, geeky chit chat. Do you really need your firm to allocate 20% of your time to "personal projects" like Google (and expect that will continue without anything to show for it) or can you simply focus your energy on becoming a multi-domain expert and perhaps apply that expertise to your own projects on your own time, like an adult. Because at the end of the day, we all work to get paid on the premise that your work produces more revenue than you cost - and the minute that comes into question, so does your job along with the respect of your colleagues.
All the PR fluff about work atmospheres and exciting new projects spouting from the likes of modern technology companies is a pipe dream - a marketing ploy to make you believe only at that firm you'll find a laborer's nirvana, where every day you love what you do AND get paid lots of money for it (and get a sweet $600 smartphone as a bonus, data plan not included). Meanwhile, many of these firms won't even discuss compensation numbers until they're ready to extend an offer - a process which usually takes a number of months of you jeopardizing your current job while sneaking off to interviews involving pointless bullshit technical interviews with whiteboards and questions like "Let's say we have a subway car that we need to fill with ping pong balls - what would be the most efficient way to determine how many it would take in the absence of exact measuring tools?" Yeah, you really get the sense that such firms are going to make a profound difference in this world. Pay no attention to the fact that they keep offshore revenues offshore to avoid dutifully paying the trillions in taxes owed to the sovereign entity enabling and protecting their commerce. Or the fact that they collude to collectively pull all your wages down, demeaning you behind your back while they sock your stolen wages away in some Mumbai cost center so their bottom line gets juiced by investors. Even better, how they do so while simultaneously lobbying to increase the number of work visas so they can, as one managing director put it to me “more closely manage the benefits that come with a 50% productivity reduction at a 70% lower cost”. Move over Aristotle, you’re getting in the way of really progressive morality! And don't get me started on the absolutely nauseating arrogance that has permeated Silicon Valley, spreading to every asshole with a smartphone, an SDK, an internet connection and a life of largely "soft landings" provided by their overly coddled upbringing. You do realize that everyone outside of "the club" sees nothing more than a textbook inferiority complex in dire need of the inevitable ground shifting setback that life tends to throw at you when things are so far out of balance, right?
Wall Street is certainly no eden but working in finance can definitely help one grow out of this sort of lame childish internet tough guy breeding ground. You are forced to work on large, incredibly complex systems with very tight deadlines often involving a multitude of technologies. You must become an expert not only in technology, but also in business and finance and all the subtleties that come with that, like office politics, team work, tight timelines and budgets, unforeseen emergencies, etc. Given the aggressive atmosphere in finance, you’re almost certainly forced to put yourself in check as the complete lack of whooshing sound from the blades of your helicopter parents flying in to save the day can be intimidating – THAT IS A GOOD THING. There are no fucking sleep pods or free bottomless paleo feeding troughs – you work hard and produce and must often do so in adverse mental, physical and social conditions if you want to get ahead. Though you can certainly neglect to break a sweat and resign yourself to being a cog in the machine and subsist quite nicely for decades with a wife, kids and dog in suburbia as the majority of people in finance do. But either way always remember you’re young and naïve and just about everyone around you knows more, has accomplished more and can teach you more than you could ever do for yourself, from the CEO to the group admin assistant to the janitor. Shut up, listen, learn and bust your ass – be critical of yourself and work with the sole intention of performing your best to a degree that it becomes objectively undeniable. You only get to participate in the really interesting, highly challenging technical projects once you’ve had a number of successful production innovations and releases. Do you think this pathetic, 22 year old know-it-all with 10 months of internship douchebaggery is going to be invited by Zuckerberg to head their deep learning initiative?? Fuck no – at best, he’ll be some bullshit “site reliability engineer “ (read: production support or QA) because dumb schmucks like him have created this fantasy aura around these firms that they have no problem easily staffing overqualified developers in utterly dead end monitoring/testing jobs, which is to them the equivalent of taking a gun to knife fight when in fact it’s more like burying diamonds in a coal mine.
I know all this because I not only working in finance tech and have been recruited by most of the big tech companies (among others) but also have a large number of current and past colleagues who have left those firms. The main reason: money. The second reason: it’s pretty much all the same shit anyway. Sorry to burst your bubble, but there’s no moral high ground to speak of when dealing with companies that steal every bit of your private information whether you like it or not OR companies which peddle adjustable rate mortgages to individuals who find difficulty calculating the cost of items on the dollar menu at McDonalds. Both eventually merge into the realm of “necessary evil”, or at least that’s what we all tell ourselves when we get up in the morning.
The grass is rarely greener on the other side – get to the point where you can thrive no matter the substrate and then it will be clear that there are no shortcuts. Because your will comes from within and your destiny must be earned, preferably the hard way.
They couldn't have chosen a more misguided and uninformed kid to interview. If this article is indicative of the current collegiate generation's mindset (which I'm pretty sure it isn't), none of them understand how Silly Valley or Wall Street works. Actually, most of Silly Valley doesn't even know how Silly Valley works, so I guess that's fair...