I find this article to be hilarious and the comment section to be a mass joke. Entertaining though.
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...
In my experience small but stable companies have a hard time justifying hiring new graduates. New graduates are especially expensive for their output. 2-3 years of experience goes a very long way into bumping the productivity of a developer. At the 2-3 year mark I can still hire them at junior developer wages without taking the hit of all their inexperience.
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).
There's a key point missing from this article: who gets respect where. Companies like Google are run by engineers while companies like Goldman are run by business people. This sounds obvious, but it has deep implications for how you are treated, how much potential you have to develop your career, etc. The best way to have a great career is to be close to the core of your employer, i.e. where the money comes from. If you aren't, you'll be a necessary evil who can be mistreated without much risk to the company (there are of course exceptions, like product managers at tech companies and quants at finance companies).
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.
This is a big factor. The only place in my hometown that hires for IT related jobs is an international law firm. In that case the lawyers are top dog and you are just some lowly engineer. Where as at large tech companies you are the company's bread and butter and you usually get treated like it. Like you said in most businesses IT/development staff is just an overhead costs.
I'd say the best way to have a great career is to choose a job where you get to be with other people you really like, respect, and can learn from. This network is how you'll find the best new opportunities in the future, and where you'll be able to recruit people into whatever you're working on.
Optimize for having the best coworkers (and manager) you can find. You can never start too soon.
One might think that the financial companies' reliance on their IT infrastructure would translate into some real influence and authority for IT staff. But it doesn't.
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.
On traditional Wall Street, IT is considered a back office cost center.
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.
I don't know how many times I've been contacted by a finance recruiter because I listed some skill they need on linkedin. These positions usually pay about double what I make now. I'm never really qualified for them so I haven't followed through but something tells me that if they have to pay so much (sometimes for junior positions) than there must be something else causing these positions to be vacant. For me I don't care if they want to pay me 150k a year if I have to give up my life to earn it. I'd rather make less and be able to spend sometime with my family. The culture in finance is a big negative.
I think that the culture of NYC has a lot to do with why it's not particularly associated with tech.
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.
Not sure about that. In my experience in NY (in the engineering circles) people are about the second, not about the first. May be I just was lucky to know the right people.
Ya, I disagree. If I was going to do my own start-up, I would definitely chose SF over NY.
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".
Investment banks have people working 100 hour weeks? This is like 14 hours every day a week with nothing else other than eating and sleeping. I don't think I've ever done anything that grueling in silicon valley.
This is a bit misleading. Those 100 work weeks are for workers on the business/finance side. Software folk are expected to work ~50 hrs / week on the sell side, closer to 60 on the buy side.
Kinda unrelated to the article's subject, but twice in this article does the author have "a person familiar with the matter said." Who is this person, how are they familiar with it, and why should anyone take that seriously? It's not like you couldn't find a person who is in the industry and has that knowledge to go on the record, and that pseudonymous "source" feels like less of a factual source and more of an editorialization. In fact, the only real "sources" in the article are a naive-sounding 22 year old and a headhunter that draws baseless correlations. I know this isn't uncommon these days... but this article just feels like super weak journalism trying to make an editorial conclusion without real data.
At the very least, quantitative analysts are some of the most technically gifted people I've had the pleasure of working with.
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.
Wall Street is noticing that they're losing talent and are slowly but surely responding. The mentality of 'tech as a cost center' is still prevalent but slowly fading as the older crew retire and the younger generation takes on more power. I've seen senior management in finance be fired for not supporting technology.
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.
"The long hours turned Velasquez off to the world of finance. He views Google as "a lot more laidback and stress-free compared with my experience at Citi." He ought to know after wrapping up a 10-week internship at the New York bank earlier this month."
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...
30 comments
[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 74.9 ms ] threadThey 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...
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).
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...
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.
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.
[1] http://paulgraham.com/cities.html
> 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".
Source: I work at a large investment bank.
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.
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.
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...