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How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

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Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#111

Post by [deleted] »

gaius wrote: post #79
dba7dba wrote: post #38

Wall Street is NOT building up America but is instead weakening America by causing a Great Brain Drain from every other vital industry. It is a cancer that's eating away America. Because America is losing the brightest kids who could've really shined and played vital leadership roles in other industries, I feel American industries are falling behind. Some quotes from the article that you should remember: 1. "so many…

... Because apart from medicine, no other field pays a market rate. What's the salary at Boeing or Lockheed or a life sciences company or a research lab? It's all creamed off by management, the talent never sees it. Wall Street does not overpay technical people. It pays fairly. Everyone else underpays.

[deleted]

Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#112

Post by bsaul »

tdees40 wrote: post #26
nymph wrote: post #12

It's like so obvious, if you've spent any time at all working for one of these places. Or heck, even interviewing with them. Here's what it all boils down to: aside the quants, the genuinely alpha traders, and few other wonky actuarial types, most of the grunts (you know: the "analysts"... and the vast majority of the IT types) don't seem to be there, or to have any other propelling motive in life, other than: (1) th…

I work in finance, and I have an aesthetic love of finance. I just find it interesting. But most people who work in it have no interest whatsoever. They just want money. This means that it tends to be a joyless environment full of assholes, who think of the world in winner/loser terms.

I pity you. Between those assholes, and the image the media gives of your field because of them, you must realy feel lonely.

Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#113

Post by noname123 »

tdees40 wrote: post #26
nymph wrote: post #12

It's like so obvious, if you've spent any time at all working for one of these places. Or heck, even interviewing with them. Here's what it all boils down to: aside the quants, the genuinely alpha traders, and few other wonky actuarial types, most of the grunts (you know: the "analysts"... and the vast majority of the IT types) don't seem to be there, or to have any other propelling motive in life, other than: (1) th…

I work in finance, and I have an aesthetic love of finance. I just find it interesting. But most people who work in it have no interest whatsoever. They just want money. This means that it tends to be a joyless environment full of assholes, who think of the world in winner/loser terms.

What do you find so aesthetically pleasing about it?

Is it the mathematics/model building. Portfolio allocation mean-covariance? Different hedging schemes? Black-Scholes model? Different numerical methods?

Is it the system design? Use of FP to model different contracts or concurrency and distributed trading systems?

Or is it the statistics and back-testing?

Personally, I like the aesthetics a bit but mostly I love the thrill of gambling and watching the market tick and the aesthetics of CNBC money-honey's.

Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#114

Post by the_watcher »

Pet peeve: 120 hours a week is 17 hours a day, leaving 7 hours for sleep assuming literally nothing else is done. While those kind of numbers are often used to sum up the lifestyle of "wake up at 6, get to work at 7, get breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks with work, get home at 10, go to sleep, repeat," even that ridiculous schedule puts you at 15 hours a day, or 105 hours a week, assuming you treat weekends the same as weekdays. To hit 120 hours a week, you'd have to be arriving at work at 5 and leaving at 10 every day (or 7 and 12, etc.), and that counts all meals and breaks as work hours. No one I've ever met works that many hours (and I went to college with a lot of bankers). There may be the occasional day like that, or the odd week where you push 120 hours (but primarily based on one or two all nighters), but no one regularly spends 71% of their total week working, unless you count any non-leisure as work. It's simply not possible.

Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#115

Post by twic »

idsmct wrote: post #44
dba7dba wrote: post #38

Wall Street is NOT building up America but is instead weakening America by causing a Great Brain Drain from every other vital industry. It is a cancer that's eating away America. Because America is losing the brightest kids who could've really shined and played vital leadership roles in other industries, I feel American industries are falling behind. Some quotes from the article that you should remember: 1. "so many…

I'm from the UK and going to be doing an internship at an investment bank this summer, I do Comp Sci at university. Here are some of my thoughts and motivations. Banks recruit ALOT of people and have offices across the country, they are very accommodating to your needs. Applying for a bank seems much less intimidating than applying to a big tech company. The view is that only the very best even have a shot at intervi…

> the entire place (Canary Wharf) has a feeling of being important

Heh. To those of us who work in the City, the Wharf feels like Siberia - somewhere you get exiled to if things don't go well for you.

Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#116

Post by gambogi »

aianus wrote: post #101
dba7dba wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I want to make it clear I don't consider Facebook/Google/Twitter as vital as GM/Boeing/Tesla/SpaceX. I don't care if Facebook/Google/Twitter don't end up with top brains. But I am concerned GM/Boeing/Tesla/SpaceX are not getting the top brains as much as they should.

GM, Boeing, Tesla, none of these companies would exist without the financial industry. There would be no such thing as large enterprise because no one person or institution can take on that much risk other than the government and we've seen what happens with centrally planned economies. So, yeah, finance is more vital than any other business.

This is a pretty broken argument. Those companies also wouldn't exist without the steel industry, or the construction industry, or the electronics industry, etc. etc.

Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#117

Post by eli_gottlieb »

jpfuentes2 wrote: post #75
gaius wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a far cry from the serious, dedicated abstract thought demanded by fields such as software engineering/machine learning/data science etc. 99% of software work is straightforward too. Here's a form for entering data. Here's a report for formatting data someone else entered. Every website is just these two concepts that have been around since the 60s. Don't kid yourself that a "full stack developer" or a "rocksta…

There are lots of programming jobs out there that are outside of the web/CRUD development realm.

But there's a lot more that aren't.

Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#118

Post by eli_gottlieb »

austinz wrote: post #76
dba7dba wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, what large financial institutions need are people who are extremely assiduous to small details, have a work ethic in which 7am-11pm hours creating powerpoints are no big deal (and have good sounding qualifications to impress investors). The problem is Wall Street is sweeping up a THIRD of Ivy league graduates. This no doubt causes harm to US economy. Can you imagine what a young really bright scientist/eng…

A "young really bright scientist/engineer putting in 120/hr weeks at a stretch" is a recipe for mental illness, low-quality output, and burnout.

That doesn't mean it isn't normal for the early stages of a STEM career (grad school, post-doc, pre-tenure professorship) to demand such work-ethic.

Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#119

Post by zodiac »

dba7dba wrote: post #58
wil421 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These are kids really really smart, socially adjusted (enough to be accepted by Ivy League), and hard working. If they entered science/medicine/engineering/etc, they would've added great positive impact. IMHO I believe the kids the banks are stealing from science/medicine/engineering/etc, are not kids that would truly follow those paths. Personally once I found IT I didnt want to leave and nothing was going to deter…

I want to point out IT is not the true engine of America's economy. The true engines to me are companies like Boeing/GM/Tesla/SpaceX who make things that other economies want to pay money for.

IT companies makes things other economies want to pay money for too...

Re: How Wall Street recruits so many Ivy League grads

#120

Post by rayiner »

ForHackernews wrote: post #99
rayiner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to disagree with the other posters. At least in investment banking, the hours are driven by the pace of corporate transactions. Mergers and divestitures are fragile things, and there is a tremendous incentive to get them done as quickly as possible. Investment bankers are at the service of their clients, and when the client wants someone to run the numbers on some idea on Thursday evening so he can have the…

> Mergers and divestitures are fragile things Why is that the case? Is it just human nature and people are weird and illogical? It seems to me like if a deal makes business sense at Friday at 11:30 pm, it will still make financial sense next Tuesday at 10:30 am.

I imagine at least one major problem is avoiding a bidding war by competing buyers.
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