tldr; Tech people can ogle at finance salaries / comp - just remember, it's a deluge of mind-numbingly dumb spreadsheet crunching and slide checking with incurious people who will make you wonder how the financial system is still standing. Oh yeah, and they glorify spending 70+ hours a week in the office.
Source - tech guy who's lived with finance bros in NYC for more than a year.
Just curious, but any perspective on Finance compensation? I can't really find anything impressive short of head of hedgefund makes lots of money which isn't really a surprise.
So think far dumber than hedge fund maths, AI, anything "trading". What's also counterintuitive is people who hang around at investment banks for more than 1-2 years are usually less skilled / motivated. The play in finance is generally if you grind out the corporate game long enough, you'll see impressive pay. The work is just horrifically dull, you're always at the mercy of your superior nearly 24/7 and it just takes time.
First year analysts (excel monkeys), basically people with a business degree and a middle-school statistics education are getting paid easily $110k base with $90k bonus (this is MIDDLE of the road). I live with people who are 25, have nothing more than a finance degree from the university of Florida and have made "associate" at second-tier firms like Lazard and RBC making $220k base and easily $110k bonus.
The stuff traders do with spreadsheets is actually insanely interesting and impressive, and the ones I have met are far from incurious.
The hours and suffer culture are real, however. Even if you’re lucky enough to work in a space with short trading windows, you likely have to spend a significant amount of off-work time making social connections with your counterparts at other firms. That part of the job intersects with a drinking culture that is no doubt hazardous for many who participate.
"Traders" in my opinion are far different than deal makers and "consultants". Sure, they're maybe the top 10% of the people doing actual "thinking" and yes I also find it interesting. However, a majority of what's going on is just delegation. Which actively incentivizes against being curious or solving problems.
The best example of this I've been given was a friend who asked an MD (someone making $1.5MM+ at BofA) whether they'd considered using outsourced tutors for their kids exam prep after spending days if not weeks complaining about quality of western exam prep / online instruction. The MD supposedly had never heard of it and brushed the idea off entirely.
banking absolutely includes being the middleman on trades, selling futures, transacting in corporate papers. I’d argue a bank executing trades and hedges against those positions falls under banking as a mere tautology.
“But that’s very different from having the latitude to wake up and say, ‘You know, it’s raining. I don’t feel like going to work.’”
Pretty much sums up the CEOs thoughts in a single sentence. People that aren't in the office don't "feel" like going to work.
I don't "feel" like sitting in an office being unproductive, distracted and running from meeting room to meeting room anymore. If your culture is keeping people at the office for 70 hours per week and you're afraid that vanishes if suddenly those lazy people don't have to sit there anymore... then maybe your culture isn't worth much.
Kind of telling that the employees really do not like working together: "employees could resume working together in person, as Solomon emphatically wants them to do, without further shutdowns. Yet as of late morning on that Tuesday, only about 5,000 of Goldman’s 10,000 HQ workers had shown up" I'd bet the number was closer to 4k if anything. This is clearly a structural cultural mismatch.
Might not even be cultural, i love going into work but in order to not blow my paycheck on renting a shitty apartment, i live a bit further out so commuting 2 hours each day through rush hour traffic when i could be spending that time with family or exercising just doesn't seem worth it to me. Hybrid model is good but even then if you choose a day when the majority of your team mates are not there, what good is going into work.
When I worked at GS in London in 2019, they were moving out of three different (and rather nice) buildings into a single (and rather depressing) office. During the time that construction took place the presence in London had grown significantly, resulting in there being too many people for the available space.
So some teams were told that a certain number of people had to work from home several days a week, and everyone in Engineering was hot-desking... so you might not be sat with people you are working with. Couple that with the fact that most people are working mainly with people in other regions (or just on other floors - it's a big building) over Zoom, and it's hard to see much distinction between in-office and remote.
I had to hot desk once, the hot desk area was placed in a dark and windowless area next to the break room and was shoulder to shoulder. Also it was about 75 meters from my co-workers. Luckily no-one else bothered using it so I didn't have to sit with someone else 10 cm away from my elbow. But it was still pretty demoralizing.
The constant break room noise was horrible. The smells from people microwaving Erdrich horrors mixed with the scent of fried foods. I was so far from everyone that no-one would bother visiting or even know I was at the office unless I wandered over and said hi. It seems inevitable that hot desks are always placed in the most horrible locations.
Whoever came up with the concept of "Hot-Desking" should be launched on the next solar probe as heat shielding.
I've had a great experience with hot desking, where every team in my building at Google had a hot desk at the end of the row. This allowed every team to have one person in from out of town all the time, and when you had more than one, it was likely that one of the other teams within spitting distance had a spare desk. Those desks got like 75% utilization, which was pretty impressive.
Honestly, for the IB work that GS does, I can definitely see why Solomon would want everyone to show up. Given my zero hours of experience in that field, they could probably execute deals remotely, but managing a hybrid environment in this situation would be a fiasco, especially from a cultural perspective. I can also see him thinking about this from a fairness perspective; either everyone is remote, or nobody is.
That said, it's a worker's market right now in many industries, and many companies are going remote. Honestly, I think this puts GS in a vulnerable position, as other IBs could just double-down on remote/hybrid work a thing and steal employees that way. Unless the industry agrees with GS in that everyone should be on-site, no exceptions.
IME the type of person who wants to work in IB also wants to be in the office. The entire culture revolves around social interactions & soft selling. You can easily spot the IBs around the office, they just look confident.
Engineering is a different kettle of fish. We need quiet time to concentrate.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 63.6 ms ] threadSource - tech guy who's lived with finance bros in NYC for more than a year.
First year analysts (excel monkeys), basically people with a business degree and a middle-school statistics education are getting paid easily $110k base with $90k bonus (this is MIDDLE of the road). I live with people who are 25, have nothing more than a finance degree from the university of Florida and have made "associate" at second-tier firms like Lazard and RBC making $220k base and easily $110k bonus.
The hours and suffer culture are real, however. Even if you’re lucky enough to work in a space with short trading windows, you likely have to spend a significant amount of off-work time making social connections with your counterparts at other firms. That part of the job intersects with a drinking culture that is no doubt hazardous for many who participate.
The best example of this I've been given was a friend who asked an MD (someone making $1.5MM+ at BofA) whether they'd considered using outsourced tutors for their kids exam prep after spending days if not weeks complaining about quality of western exam prep / online instruction. The MD supposedly had never heard of it and brushed the idea off entirely.
I built trading platforms for a bank. I am not a banker nor was I in banking
Most people I know glorify working more productively in less than 40 hours per week.
Source - another tech guy who lived with bankers in nyc.
Pretty much sums up the CEOs thoughts in a single sentence. People that aren't in the office don't "feel" like going to work.
I don't "feel" like sitting in an office being unproductive, distracted and running from meeting room to meeting room anymore. If your culture is keeping people at the office for 70 hours per week and you're afraid that vanishes if suddenly those lazy people don't have to sit there anymore... then maybe your culture isn't worth much.
So some teams were told that a certain number of people had to work from home several days a week, and everyone in Engineering was hot-desking... so you might not be sat with people you are working with. Couple that with the fact that most people are working mainly with people in other regions (or just on other floors - it's a big building) over Zoom, and it's hard to see much distinction between in-office and remote.
The constant break room noise was horrible. The smells from people microwaving Erdrich horrors mixed with the scent of fried foods. I was so far from everyone that no-one would bother visiting or even know I was at the office unless I wandered over and said hi. It seems inevitable that hot desks are always placed in the most horrible locations.
Whoever came up with the concept of "Hot-Desking" should be launched on the next solar probe as heat shielding.
Basically anything else? Terrible.
Haha, this is the funniest way I’ve seen someone express rage in a really, really long time :)
That said, it's a worker's market right now in many industries, and many companies are going remote. Honestly, I think this puts GS in a vulnerable position, as other IBs could just double-down on remote/hybrid work a thing and steal employees that way. Unless the industry agrees with GS in that everyone should be on-site, no exceptions.
Engineering is a different kettle of fish. We need quiet time to concentrate.