131–140 of 198 posts
Ugh.
In my experience, this is one of the most painful situations to be in (I've been in one myself, obviously). Pretending like you're someone who you're not (or worse yet, feeling that you have to dance this dance) is unexpectedly draining and demoralizing.
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I'm always curious when I hear things like "Lehman for 4+ years" because, based on the numbers thrown around on HN and blogs like this, it seems likely you could have a net worth over a million dollars. While not the "F You" money many here dream of, it still seems like a few years on wall street would give you a nest egg that would make it easy to live comfortably on any other salary (whether that's tech or teaching…
That's not generally how it seems to work. For junior bankers under 30 (analysts and associates) you're making good money, but not such great money that you're putting away hundreds of thousands of dollars a year after your expenses and taxes. I can't recall ever hearing of someone saying, "I've worked 5 years, I've saved $500K, but instead of making $500K next year, I'm going to retire." Also, the lifestyle (and par…
But for the people who do leave, as you did, and the blog author, and presumably the others considering which foul acts are better than going to work each day, I have to think their lives are still on a much easier trajectory. If you have $500k and hate your life, you can easily take a year off to figure out a new plan, go to grad school without worrying about cost or lost wages, start a company, etc. If you hate your job as a dishwasher you probably don't have a lot of options, but as a wall streeter, it seems like you should be able to walk away at any point and still be better off than 95% of Americans.
I guess I just wonder how many people do take that opportunity. $500k makes you a BSD in most of the US, but if you've only ever known prep school, ivy league then wall street, I suspect the idea of living and working elsewhere sounds repugnant.
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You're assuming that the occasional gigantic bankruptcy isn't a natural outcome of the smartest strategy as a bank. But when you're comped on this year's profits, and a large chunk of your comp is cash, it makes sense to take huge risks that result in near-term profit, or immense long-term profit, and largely ignore the potential for a total collapse. (Not to mention most of the employees found jobs at other banks, o…
You bring up a great point, which is actually an excellent alternative answer to OP's question, "what do you expect?" What we should expect is for banks to protect themselves as businesses by changing compensation to account for long term risk. And if they fail to do that organically, we should acknowledge that the market is failing in a dangerous way and more regulation around compensation is needed.
If I had some sort of magical power to enact this kind of reversal to where ibanks were once again partnerships, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
I have to say I enjoyed my time there. I primarily worked as a developer in a non-developer team, but was continually encouraged by management to pursue this work. This led to work with development teams in other regions, which really helped expand my horizons.
When I started making money from my website (independent of Lehman and unrelated to finance) and wanted to start it as a business, I had to approach legal and my division's MD for approval. They were completely supportive and again encouraged this work.
The downfall of Lehman was a sad but strangely exciting time for me. I remember staying up all night on September 14th watching the number of remote access sessions running, and suspected those users were doing the same as me and watching Bloomberg for an announcement. The following days and weeks saw a lot of interesting events take place, particularly from an infrastructure point of view. Barclays and Nomura (who bought different regions of the bank a few weeks apart) both rushed to connect their infrastructure to Lehman's, which resulted in some curious situations I'm still reluctant to mention publicly!
The most interesting part of it was the transition to Nomura for me. I stayed on there until mid-2010. It was a very different environment to Lehman. Our small team was given vastly expanded responsibilities to build out key services and infrastructure lost during the bankruptcy, and our team truly operated like a startup for about 9 months. We toiled tirelessly with teams in other regions to get services online before deadlines, and got a real sense of achievement out of it.
As things at the day-job settled down, my website became a startup and it was time to join that full time. Again, management was very supportive (incidentally the same management as at Lehman).
I look back on my time at Lehman/Nomura with fondness and truly believe my time there gave me experience I couldn't have received anywhere else.
"Which, it turns out, is a trader’s field day. What this meant, in its simplest form, is that these traders (or salespeople) could buy bonds at the "market" price from intelligent hedge fund managers in NYC and sell this same crap at much higher levels to unsophisticated (but legally considered "sophisticated") pension funds and insurance companies in middle America. What I discovered, quite starkly, is that the part…
> simply transferring wealth from the less sophisticated investors often teachers’ pension funds and factory workers’ retirement accounts, to the more sophisticated investors... Exactly. Wall street and investment have wonderful effects -- funneling money towards companies that can use it in amazingly productive ways. It provides an incredibly valuable service. But the flip side is exactly this, that pension funds, o…
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> Why would Main Street transact with them at all if that were the case? Because we force them to, through 401k's and the like.
What specific law are you referring to that forces Main Street to invest in 401Ks?
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That's not generally how it seems to work. For junior bankers under 30 (analysts and associates) you're making good money, but not such great money that you're putting away hundreds of thousands of dollars a year after your expenses and taxes. I can't recall ever hearing of someone saying, "I've worked 5 years, I've saved $500K, but instead of making $500K next year, I'm going to retire." Also, the lifestyle (and par…
I absolutely understand that $1M doesn't seem like much while on wall street, as I said in my original comment it's not early retirement / "F You" money. For the purely money-driven clearly they keep working and living the lifestyle. But for the people who do leave, as you did, and the blog author, and presumably the others considering which foul acts are better than going to work each day, I have to think their live…
Most of my friends did change their lifestyles while working in Canary Wharf and when they decided to leave they had no money at all. I'm glad I avoided that.
The reality where if you play for the Yankees you do not care if you beat the Jamestown Little League Allstars.
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I think American public policy has a hard time grappling with Wall Street because the financial sector has disproportionate lobbying power. Also, I don't think most Americans care about how free from regulation the financial sector is. Most people have a feeling that Wall Street is screwing over everybody and there's nothing they can do about it. I'm not exactly sure who you mean by "we," either. Hacker News commente…
> the financial sector has disproportionate lobbying power. I'm not sure that's true. If Wall Street really had some super lobbying power Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley wouldn't have passed in their current forms. Regulating Wall Street is a pretty easy position to take if you're a politician.
What this shows is that Wall Street has America by the balls, and as long as they don't squeeze too tightly, there aren't going to be any restrictions on their behavior.
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> simply transferring wealth from the less sophisticated investors often teachers’ pension funds and factory workers’ retirement accounts, to the more sophisticated investors... Exactly. Wall street and investment have wonderful effects -- funneling money towards companies that can use it in amazingly productive ways. It provides an incredibly valuable service. But the flip side is exactly this, that pension funds, o…
>Why should retirement accounts get invested in anything but government bonds and index funds? Step 1: Pension return rates get "set" during boom time highs. Step 2: Boom times end, the pension fund is grossly under funded, and the manager needs to find ways to get excess return beyond what the typical fixed income and equity products can offer. Step 3: Pension Managers reach for "alternative investments", hoping for…