Wall Street vs Sillicon Valley

[Andy Nguyen]

As recent as few years ago, who've ever thought that people technical skills would turn down Wall Street for tech firms? It's a reality now and a growing challenge to big banks that they start to do outreach campaign like one happened recently in New York City.

A panel of Goldman Sachs employees spent a recent Tuesday night at the Columbia University faculty club trying to convince a packed room of potential recruits that Wall Street, not Silicon Valley, was the place to be for computer scientists.

The Goldman employees knew they had an uphill battle. They were fighting against perceptions of Wall Street as boring and regulation-bound and Silicon Valley as the promised land of flip-flops, beanbag chairs and million-dollar stock options.

Their argument to the room of technologically inclined students was that Wall Street was where they could find far more challenging, diverse and, yes, lucrative jobs working on some of the world’s most difficult technical problems.

I'm sure a lot of QuantNet members here do more than their shares working in various technical roles at banks and we have firsthand experience of "the world’s most difficult technical problems."

What would you do if you are given two offers between Sillion Valley and Wall Street?

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/11/13/goldman-sachs-recasts-its-reputation-to-woo-tech-talent/

 

[tfors]

SV: I am under the impression the work environment will be more agreeable to me. However, should be finance related.

 

[mhy]

The thing is, tech on Wall Street isn't where the 'action' is. It is still a cost center in most cases. This may or may not continue to be the case in the future. Salaries are actually pretty high (my VP boss at my old job probably made 300k and he was only managing 4-5 people), but the traders & bankers still run the show. You will likely never get a $20 million bonus working in tech even if you are a high-level MD.

It's ridiculous to see that GS is trying to market its tech divisions as not being "back-office employees" when that is only true of a very small number of employees in its tech/strat divisions. The fact is unless you are in a very well-positioned team (e.x. desk-facing strat/dev, and even then...) you are still considered by most to be a cost, not a profit driver. The guy working closely with the desk writing exotic derivatives pricing&trading systems might be adding value, but the guy getting paid 150k to restart UNIX servers is not creating profit for GS.

Tech is highly variable depending on which area you are in. Goldman touts 'machine learning', 'cloud computing, 'data mining' but what % of tech people at the firm actually work on those things? It's unlikely that all 8,000 of the tech/strats people at GS do that day-to-day. I suspect less than 1000 actually do, and probably the other 7,000 are left maintaining 25-year-old legacy systems. I have seen many people excitingly join an IB only to end up in a dead-end team in the midst of being outsourced to India. It is easy to woo fresh graduates with exciting buzzwords, and then stick a 15-year old settlement system with an 8-year-old Sybase backend in their face and tell them to "fix it".

 

[Andy Nguyen]

It's ridiculous to see that GS is trying to market its tech divisions as not being "back-office employees" when that is only true of a very small number of employees in its tech/strat divisions. The fact is unless you are in a very well-positioned team (e.x. desk-facing strat/dev, and even then...) you are still considered by most to be a cost, not a profit driver. The guy working closely with the desk writing exotic derivatives pricing&trading systems might be adding value, but the guy getting paid 150k to restart UNIX servers is not creating profit for GS.

I'm sure quite a few engineering majors at Columbia bought into the GS sales pitch. They probably never utter the word back-office at that presentation