

To all those guys who took the conservative banking jobs - sdpurtill
http://sampurtill.com/post/50353347/those-guys-who-took-those-conservative-banking-jobs

======
andr
1) Jobs are investment banks and asset management are not risk free and not
conservative. There is almost zero job security and - as seen - you won't know
you were fired until the day you are. With small startups CEOs will
communicate things much better and you can usually see things coming. Case in
point, Lehman UK had a fairly succesful business, however all their cash was
pooled in Lehman US. So on Sunday they got a call that their cash was no
longer available, so they had to put a profitable business in administration.

2) They are not risk free, because your bonus depends on your performance (not
in all segments, but in many your performance is directly measurable in
money). No one cares about salary - it's all about the bonus.

3) You do gain a broad skill set working in finance. It probably looks very
narrow and simple from outside, just like programming would look to a non-
programmer.

4) On one hand, in a startup you create something tangible and in finance you
are just a glorified broker. On the other hand, startup valuation is very
chaotic and many startups would not exist if there were no bubbles. In finance
it is very clear what you and your company are paid for and how much it costs.

~~~
JohnN
Agreed. I don't think any of my friends considered their jobs "predictable and
secure" when they started. And in many cases the huge bonuses they received
last year wil cushion the fall. Let's just hope they haven't become to
accustomed to a certain lifestyle.

~~~
SwellJoe
_Let's just hope they haven't become to accustomed to a certain lifestyle._

We're _all_ accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and most folks fall on tougher
times at least once or twice in life, and have to downgrade their spending.
I'm not suggesting folks here are a couple of paychecks away from being
homeless, as I assume we're all of at least average intelligence and have some
savings, good health insurance, and don't consider debt a fun hobby...just
that we're all pretty spoiled, and we all probably have some expenses we
wouldn't hang on to if our own personal revenue took a dramatic turn south.

But, I agree. I hope that folks who work in volatile industries (like finance,
or our very own home turf, technology, to give another example) are thinking
ahead when times are good, and have an understanding that times will not
always be good. (You guys who missed the first bubble know that, right? We
will see another crash in tech. Don't imagine human nature is so dramatically
different this time around, or that enough of the folks who experienced the
first one are still around and taking part to impart wisdom to prevent it from
happening again. It'll look different, because it won't be played out in the
public markets, and the names will mostly be different...but it'll come, and
not every high flying Web 2.0 company will survive it.)

------
dustineichler
This guy is really ignorant. It's the same mentality that thinks the valley is
impervious to bubbles and inflation.

What? Really, "you get the satisfaction of knowing you aren’t a complete tool
bag every time you wake up in the morning."... They may have lost their jobs,
but you lose at life.

~~~
petercooper
Just to be fair, however, he's young. I think most of us have been there.
We've taken the path less trodden (self employment, working at a startup,
etc.) and we've had doubts. In order to counteract those doubts, we need to
act as if the "other way" is stupid, that we're better, and that we're doing
the right thing.

I think that's what this guy is doing. He's young, he's confident (to a
point), but he lacks the wisdom and ability to reflect that comes with age.

So while it's easy to call him "ignorant", a "douche bag", or whatever - he's
not willingly being any of those things. He's young, cocky, and exuberant -
like most of us were.

 _(Of course, when /we/ were acting the same way, we were probably getting
called out the same way too.. so this process might actually be necessary to
develop that wisdom ;-))_

~~~
helveticaman
_I think that's what this guy is doing. He's young, he's confident (to a
point), but he lacks the wisdom and ability to reflect that comes with age._

All of the things you mention occurred to me by the time I was 19. There's a
difference between young people who are sprinkling their brains with
alkaloids[2] at raves and the young people that are sprinkling their brains
with DHA, creatine, and glutamine.

I also realize that there's a delicate balance I have to reach with regard to
confidence. It's not easy to reach this balance, because on the one hand,
young people are treated like second-class citizens (in some circumstances),
but on the other, you need to have a lot of balls to do a startup, to charge
what you sholud be charging, and claim the work you do is as good as that of
an older adult's. This is especially true because claiming you are equal is
taken to mean arrogance, even though the evidence for the alleged inferiority
of the young is lacking. In objective contests like chess, war, athletics,
hacking, and mathematics, there are many very proficient people who are very
young.[1] This is not the case in established corporations, politics, or the
job market. Finally, people always want to feel superior to others, and while
they can't express this desire for superiority by being racist or sexist, they
can do so by discriminating based on age.

Sometimes behavior that is acceptable in a male 50-year-old CEO is considered
unacceptable in a female of the same age or a young guy (there was a Harvard
Business School study that showed something to this effect; it was a case
study of a CEO that has to make certain decisions. The male was considered to
be "tough but fair" or something, while the woman was considered a bitch. The
case studies were identical but for the gender of the protagonist). So, would
you say he's being arrogant if he were 50?

Now, is Sam being a douche? I don't know, but I do know not all young people
are the same.

[1] Fidel Castro, Alexander the Great, Octavian, Bobby Fischer, Steve Jobs,
Bill Gates, Woz, most athletes (for many reasons), Reimann, etc.

[2] NB: I'm not talking about caffeine or ritalin.

Edit: I didn't mean to get on your case, petercooper; you seemed to have said
things in good faith. I guess you touched a nerve...

------
menloparkbum
_you get the satisfaction of knowing you aren’t a complete tool bag every time
you wake up in the morning._

whilst everyone reading your blog has the exact opposite impression...

~~~
jon_dahl
Yep. This is too bad, because he makes a few good points amidst the train
wreck comments like this.

------
mseebach
> (not sure how this works when a bubble bursts, haven’t been around long
> enough).

Well, after the last .com bubble burst, there was a lot less ping-pong with
the CEO, and a lot more "You want fries with that" going on, as I understood
it.

------
baha_man
" _p.s. does it annoy you that i don't capitalize any of my letters on here?_
"

Yes, yes it does. Unless you're a cockroach who can't work the shift key:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel>

------
greendestiny
The shift key really doesn't take that long to depress, I'm not sure how not
using saves you time.

I had the same realization, that I had better job security at a startup, when
I revisited some people I left at uni doing postdocs.

~~~
hugh
Job security for postdocs? I've never heard of a postdoc losing their job.

Sure, you might be only funded for a year at a time, but at least the money
runs out on a predetermined date rather than unexpectedly one Friday.

Maybe my experiences are just limited, though.

~~~
timr
Problem is, it takes a lot longer to find work as a post-doc than as a
programmer. The money may run out on predictable, yearly intervals, but what
do you do once it's gone? Get a faculty position? (Because we all know
_that's_ easy.)

------
rgrieselhuber
Of all the career paths that I know of, finance and technology are the two
that probably hold the greatest appeal to me. I might have gone into finance
when I was younger but it just wasn't on my radar.

As others have commented, there are far more similarities (between finance
careers and the startup world) than there are differences. Some of my closest
friends are investment bankers and portfolio managers. They have a deep
interest in the world around them, are wicked smart and do what they do
because it gets them juiced like nothing else.

I'm definitely not wicked smart but the other two characteristics apply to me
so I can relate to their chosen path and don't revel in the sh*t that's
hitting the fan right now.

------
kp212
I didn't sit back, and chuckle when I saw 20,000 people potentially lose their
jobs. Even if you don't like Wall Street, you don't want to see that many
people looking for work all of a sudden.

~~~
fallentimes
Agreed. They have families and kids and rent. When half your friends are
living and working in NYC...this has been a really rough week.

------
131072
There is no such thing as a conservative banking job at these companies. All
of these firms have strongly cyclical business, resulting in aggressive hiring
and regular layoffs, and think nothing of canning an entire department if they
don't need it any more. Also, at higher levels, the odds of being sacked out
of the blue for political reasons increase greatly (e.g. new VP arrives, fires
the next tier of management and brings his friends from his last company).
Also, if you work in IT you risk being made the scapegoat for some failure
outside your control (note the rating agencies trying to blame the subprime
crisis on bugs in their ratings code). And if you do get canned, it's
merciless - I've seen it happen to people on holiday, people who have just
signed mortgages, and so on. These people are escorted from the building by
security and then forgotten. You also have to contend with the risk of
burnout, one of the reasons why there are relatively few employees above the
age of 30.

You have to do exceptionally well to receive the grand salaries and bonuses,
as these are heavily skewed towards the minority of top-ranked employees.
Plus, for every 'master of the universe' there are 10 people in compliance,
legal, audit, helpdesk, facilities, hr, IT, back office, etc slaving away.

Going into wall st is an aggressive career choice.

------
sayrer
1) Can't even spell Merrill

2) Banks wash people out. You think everyone who starts at one ends up on top?

~~~
sdpurtill
merryl = substr('merrill', 0, 4) . strrev(substr('lynch', 0, 2))

------
maxklein
Are you guys not paying attention or what? The financial industry is NOT going
under. It's doing fine. It's doing what coders would call a refactoring, and
it is nowhere near to collapse. And the developers at those industries are
certainly not getting laid off. Don't react based off 24pt headlines, first
think about the real situation.

And YouNoodle is a slimey business. It may be successful, it may make a lot of
money, but I still don't like this parasite businesses who contribute nothing
of real value, and get created solely by marketing gimicks.

And a word to Sam: lay off the uppity behaviour till you have had a down.
Nobody wants to watch a move where things just go up all the time, it's the
middle of the movie, where the hero is doing wretchedly that is the heart of
the story.

------
bkmrkr
This guy sounds like a tool bag.

------
dhouston
does this guy really that the economy tanking is somehow any better for
startups than it is for bankers?

~~~
fallentimes
I can't speak for Sam, but right now I'm really really glad I left my finance
job to do a startup.

~~~
timr
Well of course you are -- right now. But what happens when the finance shock
ripples through the rest of the economy, and tech investments dry up? Or when
tech purchases stop? Or when job losses in banking, real estate, construction
and sales (coupled with high energy costs) lead to overall drops in
consumption, which in turn leads to drops in advertising budgets?

It's still _way_ too early to be whistling past the graveyard.

~~~
fallentimes
For me personally I have a couple side business so I'd be OK.

But even if our startup whittled and died tomorrow; I've acquired more skills
in 3 months working at ticketbumblerstumbler than I did in two years working
at my old job.

Our burn rate is less than 3k a month; we're not whistling past anything.

------
swombat
Oooh... this is just asking for bad karma for your start-up. Fire him, he's
bad luck!

------
adrianwaj
"you can sell your soul to an enormous investment firm and they, in turn, will
make you rich with not very much risk involved"

This has merit.

Most of the world is chasing a dollar, if not for survival then in the pursuit
of a decent, good or great life. Glory and vanity plays a large part
especially for high net-worth individuals. Fear too, for attaining some type
of status amongst one's peers. Startups are no different in that respect. But,
'Selling your soul' is more likely to occur on Wall Street. If you want your
soul, then 'do the right thing.'

------
kurtosis
I'm not a wall street hater, but it's not hard to understand why people feel a
little tinge of poetic justice about LEH el. al. -

[http://www.google.com/search?q=announces+layoffs+stock+price...](http://www.google.com/search?q=announces+layoffs+stock+price+up)

I know that this is bogus on so many levels but I'm just saying that the
perception is that foreign competition puts pressure on companies to layoff
and offshore and then wall street is in the bleachers going wild when layoffs
are announced.

------
sdpurtill
after hearing feedback from everyone on hacker news and other places, i’ve
decided to pull this post as it was misinformed and inflammatory. sorry if i
made you mad!

~~~
adrianwaj
It wasn't that bad. I liked it because it was genuine. It's like being at uni
and seeing all the kids taking corporate finance with $ signs in their eyes,
impervious to their surroundings, as though nothing else mattered anymore,
they'd found their raison d'être and were busy submitting those graduate
applications to every corporate finance firm possible. Such individuals are
the ones you probably were thinking about in your post.

------
patrickdh
Any chance we get an enlightened rewrite of the article that will serve to
correct misconceptions that all startupers can’t distinguish between finance
and banking. It won’t make me love my banker anymore today. He's sitting on
his fat ass conservative banking job riding the credit crunch!!

------
Hejog
Lehman bros: 150 years. Startups: ???

------
tom_rath
Is this guy's startup profitable or is it dependent on that superfluous
'investment capital' stuff?

------
logjam
Other than the chortling about people losing jobs, I agree with this guy.

Finance and portfolio folk really create little.

They are gamblers in the basic sense: their highest goal is gaining as much as
possible in return for as little as possible - the cheapest, easiest way.

It is a curious thing that as many of us grow, the less interested we are in
that mindset. Our eyes start to open to the costliest, hardest way.

It's not to be found in investment banking, finance, and the market any more
than it is playing the lottery.

