When Workers Own Their Companies, Everyone Wins

There are some trading houses with really terrible cultures, but there are plenty where people work 9-to-5. Possibly 9-to-7, if a new strategy is being deployed that week. The 12-hour-per-day shops exist, but they're not the norm and they don't get the best people. At least, they don't get good people on the entry level. Top traders will work at them, for a price, but trading companies promote from within a lot more than tech, so that actually hurts them.

within a much more rigid environment with less transparency.

That's regulatory. It's true that it'd be hard for a trading firm to pull off a Valve-like structure, but most tech companies have the same barriers and permissions systems (but for arbitrary and stupid reasons). If you work for a closed-allocation tech company, there's no good reason not to trade up to a financial job with 50-100+ percent more pay and no fundamental change in work quality.

Financial firms also value loyalty more and promote from within. Tech companies almost never promote from within, because they have that emasculated social-climbing mentality of always feeling the need for "better" people. Traders, culturally, have more of humility. "We're regular guys making money doing something hard." (There are some prima donna star traders who are exceptions, but they tend to fall hard and when they do, they're viciously attacked-- as they should be.)

Also, throughout finance firms (even among the more tech-saavy ones), the programmers are ostensibly considered second-class to the portfolio managers, and this is reflected in the pay.

If you're savvy at all, you'll establish yourself as a quant-who-codes, not a pure programmer.

I don't think the Valley is different, in this regard. Non-managing programmers are, if anything, third-class citizens compared to venture capitalists, executives, and the people who are well-connected enough to be made founders.

Trust me. Outside of the few open-allocation tech companies (e.g. Valve, Github) the financial world's deal is across-the-board superior. It's harder to get into, though.

Most of those programs are junk, it's worth noting. That's true, even in the Valley, where 0.05% (vesting over 4 years, with nothing gained if the company decides to cliff you) of a 100-person company is typical for a "mere" engineer.

The term I like is "checkbox equity". It's just offered so the company can say, "we offer stock options" on its website. It means absolute jack shit. Far from making you a partner in the company, it has the opposite effect. It's an excuse not to offer raises and to demand unreasonable sacrifice. It's a mediocre equity program that exists just to check off the box. To that I say: fuck you, pay me.

I would rather not have the equity (which is almost always insultingly low) and just get a fair wage. Let's just be honest here. I'm going to be a mercenary unless you give me a legitimate reason not to be, and 0.03% of a 200-person company is 0.06 of a person's labor, which is just not enough to make me give a shit about anything other than my own career. So I won't, and that should be socially acceptable.

The purpose of these Valley startups' equity programs is to encourage a tyranny of the masses, and make the honest mercenary attitude socially unacceptable (allowing the employees to be plundered by the dishonest mercenaries at the top).

I don't know where you get the more hours/more rigid attitude from. 9hrs is very typical, weekends are very rare, and the only time you ever exceed that is when you are releasing very new strategies -- strategies which you get a direct cut of the PnL, so you have a very direct incentive to want to get that out there and trading as soon as you can.

Is everyone equal in finance? No. But compared to working in the valley? It's worlds apart. Let's look at a simple example, for Google and Goldman, take a look at average revenue per employee (~1.2m for both) vs. average compensation per employee (600k for GS, ~150-200k for Google). In what way are Google employees not getting screwed over? Prop trading firms have even flatter structures than Goldman.