Is this advice really on a broken record? I recently saw a pitch from a bank marketing an LP stake in a prominent VC firm, and one of the first slides highlighted the willingness of Silicon Valley engineers to work for below-market rates in exchange for psychological benefits.
How do you know if someone at a party is working for YCombinator startup? Don't worry, he/she will tell you.
The advice is "broken record" and it will be ignored by majority of young engineers. Working for a cool startup is very very cool. Working for big corporation is not cool (and considered evil if that corporation is Microsoft or Oracle).
And that is actually good for economy, for startups, for VCs, and for engineers (not in monetary sense but they will become wiser).
The cool quotient, in this case, is not governed by the amount of money you make later but by the satisfaction, excitement and thrill of risk associated with working in a startup. Not to forget, more often than not you also tend to learn a lot more in a startup than the usual big corp job.
Opinions like this make me happy that I accepted a graduate job at an investment bank (with the hope that I will be able to develop something on the side) instead of going for a startup after finishing university.
One advantage people don't often talk about with finance industry jobs is their incredibly lax moonlighting clauses. Most seem to be of the form, "if we don't trade it and our vendors don't make it, knock yourself out."
That is a far cry from the policy I experienced at MSFT. Doing free reviews on my own time of books being published by Microsoft Press on products I was an engineer on required approval from my VP.
> One advantage people don't often talk about with finance industry jobs is their incredibly lax moonlighting clauses.
Interesting. My first programming job was in a finance company who had a "we own everything you make, here or at home" policy. My manager said most finance companies would rather pay people more than have them working on things outside of work, which I took at face value. Knowing that was how I enjoy learning most, it was a big factor in my leaving.
Maybe it wasn't a trading-focused firm? Most of my friends (and wife) work at firms that are primarily about trading, and it's hard to hire (good) traders if you restrict them from also trading with their own funds on their own time. So, they seem to have the bare minimum policy that satisfies legal regulations about insider information and the contracts they usually have to sign with high-end enterprise vendors.
There's a 'the side' when working at an investment bank? I thought you guys pulled silly-nuts hours and had no spare time. The IB guys I read about constantly lament forgetting that they can't have a social life on weeknights when they get called in at crazy hours to fix up some higher-up's whim.
I think it depends on the division you work in. Some guy working in the networks/infra team may get better work/life balance than someone else in the front-office development team. I work in the latter and I must say the hours do suck and you tend to be drained when you get back home after work.
But I believe that if you have a strong will and good work ethics you can still manage to work on side projects in the evenings and week-ends. Hard but feasible.
