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You can't make much more in finance
No free food in finance
Finance is a sweat shop. I would put it this way. Finance is a services industry, so you're always at the mercy of your clients Second, there hasn't been any significant innovation in finance that allows for greater scalability. Imo, leveraged finance, including things like mortgaged backed securities sparked a golden age in finance where everyone was living lavish lives and enjoying monopolistic competition. However, that Era has mostly ended and with lack of innovation and thus differentiation, firms can only compete on cost and working their employees harder. Basically, I feel like finance is moving towards perfect completion rather quickly and therefore, is not a great place to be.
There are way more high pay positions in tech. The bar is lower (since there’s pretty much only the technical bar and some amount of school prestige as a new grad), finance has the “artificial” hurdles of school prestige, networking, soft skills, etc. The pay band in tech is also broader. Note I’m considering finance roles in general. Roles like quants and traders are basically fully technical too though school prestige is still a huge deal. That said if I went to a top school I definitely would’ve gone for finance instead of tech.
TC?
Tim Cook. We have lots of apple fan boys here Jk: 65k
Because you don't simply earn much more in finance.
I thought compensation is higher there?
why?
Finance has a lot more gate keeping. If you manage to break through that you find out that a lot of the people there got there because of something their daddy did.
So, connection is important? Isn't it the same with tech? People are constantly asking for referrals.
That's not been my experience. Furthermore tech does a much better job of finding signals and I'd guess that referrals are not a high signal to noise
Wrong re: finance. Not wrong if you’re talking about being a SWE at a hedge fund. Openings are few and far in between and they are much more selective than FAANG.
A small percentage of finance people make astronomical comp but the median person in finance earns under 100k.
Only top jobs are great in finance, else Tech is better and safe.