
Talent Wars: Silicon Valley vs. Wall Street - evo_9
http://money.cnn.com/2014/08/22/investing/wall-street-silicon-valley-talent/index.html?hpt=hp_t4
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rm999
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.

~~~
johnward
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.

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bicknergseng
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.

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johnward
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.

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pkaye
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.

~~~
dneronique
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.

Source: I work at a large investment bank.

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dneronique
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.

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Ologn
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...](http://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-takes-heat-for-hoodie-on-ipo-road-
show) )?

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.

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grim_up_north
I find it rather sad actually that the talent does not consider a third way,
and into smaller but stable or growing companies.

Life in the valley will be great for some, but crap for most. Equally for wall
street.

~~~
kasey_junk
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).

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shmerl
It's annoying that NYC is usually stereotypically associated with Wall Street.
I think there should be more technological companies in NY.

~~~
santaclaus
Reminds me of the classic Paul Graham essay on cities and ambition. [1]

[1] [http://paulgraham.com/cities.html](http://paulgraham.com/cities.html)

~~~
shmerl
Thanks, a very interesting read.

 _> 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".

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dropit_sphere
This may sound stupid, but...why does Wall Street care about "talent?"

~~~
Permit
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.

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josephschmoe
Why is the Silicon Valley half wearing a tie?

~~~
laxatives
Looks more like Silicon Valley gets a little less than half the image.

------
jbdigriz
"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 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.

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jchonphoenix
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...

~~~
laxatives
Isn't a misguided and uninformed kid the right person to interview given the
content of the article?

