Almost 200k Job Cuts in Tech Pushes New Grads to Wall Street

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-23/how-to-get-a-job-in-2023-young-workers-eye-finance-with-tech-struggling

by megacorp • 3 years ago

173 182 3 years ago

bloomberg.com

ftxbro2• 3 years ago

this doesn't sound so productive if the extra ones join a zero sum arena battle

sausagefeet• 3 years ago

Haven't you heard? The credit belongs to the who is actually in the arena. And other such corporate platitudes.

caddemon2• 3 years ago

Well if we're going to be so reductive I don't think they were ever productive for society to begin with. How many people do we really need working on targeted advertisements and algorithms for social media engagement?

ftxbro2• 3 years ago

Well if we're going to be so pedantic I didn't say they were ever productive

jansommer• 3 years ago

https://archive.md/BzNgh

ghaff5• 3 years ago

Pretty unsurprising.

It's not like it's certain anywhere but, as the article says, the equation has changed both respect to total comp (especially because of stock) and perceived job stability. And I suspect that a lot of people weren't that set on Big Tech aside from the compensation and lifestyle.

sfpotter6• 3 years ago

I think the last point is really important... how many people really want to work at a tech company? There are many other jobs that frankly provide significantly more meaning and personal gratification to the person doing them. Doctor? Teacher? Nurse? Public defender? Chef? The list goes on. I hope the tech bubble deflates permanently and allows salaries across professions to normalize so that there is more balance in society.

ghaff5• 3 years ago

In general, pay in other branches of engineering even is pretty skewed relative to at least software salaries in Big Tech and adjacent. That was not really true historically and, arguably, it's self-correcting to some degree. If CS/EE had been the obvious high salary opportunity among engineering majors when I was an undergrad, it's not like I was really that wedded to the field I went into--and indeed didn't really work as a mechanical engineer for all that long.

yamtaddle8• 3 years ago

I'm literally only doing this because tinkering on computers in high school got me skills that had me accidentally landing jobs that paid better than anything I actually wanted to do, with comically little effort. Never intended to do it as a living, don't really like it (and like it less every year), but don't want a 50-70% pay cut in middle-age, either.

avgDev2• 3 years ago

This is a very oblivious take.

I have friends who are doctors.....their work doesn't feel meaningful. They are constantly pressured to move from patient to patient like they are cattle.

Friend is a pharmacist, she stands 12 hours a day. She he is forced to go in sick. She gets written up for being late.

Many teachers hate their jobs, they are underpaid and have to deal with all kinds of good/shitty kids.

Chef? Seriously do some snooping around subreddits/message boards for these professions. You will quickly realize how corporations can make any "meaningful" job a drag and unhealthy.

Programming can be extremely meaningful. You can create great things that help society. However, many of those projects won't pay for themselves. So, if I company wants to pay me over six figures to write some code, I will gladly take it.

Plus, I am a nerd, I like building stuff, sheds, racing sims, tinkering on bikes, cars and computers. My ability to tinker with computers, write queries and programming can allow other people to do their jobs. Imagine a health system without a computer.

gumballindie8• 3 years ago

I hope the tech bubble deflates permanently and allows salaries across professions to normalize so that there is more balance in society.

Yeah but normalisation usually involves deflating people's pay instead of increasing that of "Doctor? Teacher? Nurse? Public defender? Chef?". A very odd wish to be honest.

akavi• 3 years ago

You seem to be conflating two different things:

1) How personally validating a job is to a person

2) How valuable the job is to society at large.

To see how those might decouple, consider Superman continuously turning a crank to provide limitless energy for society (credit: SMBC [0]). Fabulously valuable to society, extremely lacking in personal validation for superman.

In general, you'd expect salary to correlate with 2, and inversely correlate with 1, since the sense of validation is in effect part of the compensation you're getting from a job. It also seems pretty common to (IMO wrongly) think that 1 and 2 are tightly coupled: the jobs that produce the greatest societal value are the ones that feel the most personally validating. But that's just because modern society is far more complicated than our brains were evolved to handle. Identifying the actual value of a job requires following a complex chain of incentives and value production through the vast networks of businesses and organizations that comprise our world.

Sadly for those instincts, it is probably true that a programmer writing a piece of code that makes $business_process_c56_2 0.1% more efficient, which is then run billions upon billions of times is actually producing more value in net than a teacher who changes the lives of O(1000) kids over their lifetime.

[0] https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2305

stuff4ben• 3 years ago

But the person being interviewed isn't actually "in tech". She graduated with a degree in strategic communication. She just limited her search initially to tech companies which is odd. Clickbait article makes it sound like actual tech graduates are going to Wall Street which I'd be more interested in knowing about.

mywittyname• 3 years ago

It seems like most news outlets treat "tech workers" as anyone who works at a "tech" company. I wonder if they would call her a "construction worker" if she worked in the same capacity for a construction company.

azemetre2• 3 years ago

No but you can say they work in the construction industry, like how the health care industry is more than just nurses, doctors, and surgeons.

I think it's fair to say that product owners and UI designers are tech workers too, but maybe the issue is that "tech industry/worker" is way too broad of a term. Especially when a lot of these roles are extremely new to humanity (engineering and doctor/healer have been around for thousands of years whereas a marketer is barely over a 100 years old).

Aromasin• 3 years ago

I posted a comment a while back about this same phenomenon, which I can't for the life of me find now, but it was quoting some data from media posts about job cuts in the tech industry. The overarching theme was that the "tech worker layoffs" almost never featured actual, STEM degree educated, feature making, bug fixing, engineering focused, individual contributors. The layoffs impacted Sales, Marketing, Product, HR, and Manager roles. Despite this, media outlets continued to make it out as if engineers and scientists were the ones being primarily impacted. They were doing it by hiding the actual jobs roles of those being interviewed deep into the article, in a short one-liner. There was never good data to suggest who those being most effected really were.

I don't understand the reasoning behind it beyond blatant ignorance, or perhaps that they have a dislike for silicon valley types and get satisfaction out of demeaning the job role in some way by making engineers out to be as "easily dispensable" as everyone else. It's bizarre. I guess, whatever generates the most clicks.

davemp• 3 years ago

I think there is an apprehension to use descriptive titles for whatever lame reason (I think it was to avoid status signals originally). What's wrong with administrator, clerk, etc?

i2cmaster• 3 years ago

They do this with actual products as well. Companies like Ycombinator for some time were often thought of as "tech companies" and not investment banks.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

I think tech workers are people who work at tech companies. Including non technical roles.

ghaff5• 3 years ago

They do mention someone else who was a CS major but, yes, not clear how much of this is developers etc. and how much is all the other people who work at a tech or a finance company.

JohnMakin• 3 years ago

Exactly. Tech unemployment is still extremely low, practically nonexistent. All the tech professionals I know with hard skills that have sought jobs in the last 6 months find them most of the time in less than a month. It's not a struggle for anyone except recruiters and maybe the tech-managerial class that lacks hard skills or a long track record. Gone probably are the days of 400k TC PM's with a degree in communications.

tristor2• 3 years ago

Gone probably are the days of 400k TC PM's with a degree in communications.

As a PM, these days never existed. All of the high TC PMs are technical PMs, like myself, who have an engineering background. I was in Eng for more than a decade before I became a PM. MBAs turned PMs never commanded as high of compensation as technical PMs as ICs at any tech company. Technical PMs are in the same salary bands as Eng, non-technical PMs are generally 1 level or half step below in the bands.

There's way too many people that get their impression about what PMs do from "Day in the Life" TikTok videos made by non-technical associate PMs who are a couple years out of college and basically doing the easiest pieces of things.

CoastalCoder• 3 years ago

All the tech professionals I know with hard skills that have sought jobs in the last 6 months find them most of the time in less than a month.

I'm curious how representative that sample is.

A few months ago the AI startup I worked at pivoted and laid off 15%. AFAIK the majority of us, all very technical, are still looking for work.

Note: My situation may be a little niche. I live in the middle-of-nowhere, USA, so I'm trying to restrict my search to remote jobs. That rules out most of finance, and many Alphabet-related jobs. I really, really hope I don't need to move my family to find decent work.

hgsgm2• 3 years ago

PMs make less than Devs at the same level in the company.

rchaud• 3 years ago

Clickbait article makes it sound like actual tech graduates are going to Wall Street

Is this not still the case? Investment banks and hedge funds were full of EE majors back when I was there, and most banks have significant software operations.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

There isnt really a “tech graduate“ though. Computer Science is as close as you’ll get but there are lots of non technical people in tech.

jossclimb• 3 years ago

Queue 1/2 years and big tech starts whining about a skills shortage again.

ilc• 3 years ago

Nah, they'll only want 15 years of Rust experience.

betaby• 3 years ago

and one must be under 25 years old - no gray beards!

tcmart143• 3 years ago

30 years of Google's Carbon you mean? Only because Rust is now 15 years old or close? Carbon is like 1 or 2 years old.

whitemary• 3 years ago

Absolutely. It's such a load of bullshit.

ProjectArcturis• 3 years ago

https://archive.is/BzNgh

Eumenes• 3 years ago

Wall street is pretty much tech ... Its all software, systems, infrastructure, UI, reporting/BI, etc. Prob comparable number of SWEs in Wall street compared to big tech.

adamredwoods2• 3 years ago

> “But on Wall Street, you work really hard and you make a lot of money. That’s the deal.”

Who still thinks this? There is very little correlation between "hard work" and income.

golergka• 3 years ago

Can you tell more about your experience on Wall Street that disproves that? I personally don't have any, but from what I hear from friends and strangers on the internet mostly falls in line with this statement.

Also true from my 16 years experience in tech. May be not hard work as in amount of hours spent, but quality of result certainly correlates with compensation.

adamredwoods2• 3 years ago

I'm speaking generally, but I feel it still applies to Wall Street. Research shows the "hard work" mindset is only a state of mind, and not a correlation of income:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy

https://www.aei.org/op-eds/the-us-still-believes-in-hard-wor...

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/views-of-the...

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2022/06/29/stuck-on-...

Some specific research looks at "earnings elasticity" between generations:

> While faith in the American Dream is deep, evidence suggests that the United States lacks policies to ensure the opportunities that the dream envisions. According to the data, there is considerably more mobility in most other developed economies.

https://www.epi.org/publication/usa-lags-peer-countries-mobi...

We can conclude there are many factors involved besides a general attitude of "hard work".

caddemon2• 3 years ago

They're not talking about the general population, they're talking about a niche career where salaries are in large part driven by performance-related bonuses. "On Wall Street" is perhaps too generic, and sure talent will always factor in too, but there are still trading jobs that exist where work output correlates directly with pay. The fact that across jobs nationally the correlation doesn't hold is irrelevant.

curiousgal• 3 years ago

Yeah even that is not true. Sure if you have a direct impact on PnL you can expect your bonus to be tied to your performance, otherwise, i.e. 90% of the workforce in an investment bank, you have a fixed grid for bonuses.

hindsightbias• 3 years ago

Michael Lewis first book was in 1989. Liar's Poker. It's about his career as a bond trader. Pretty hard work. None of his other books make WS sound easy.

Said he'd go to colleges to speak after each book came out. Students saw his books as opportunities, not a warning as intended. Q&A was always "so, where to you think the next boom is?"

He's very grim about it.

legendofbrando• 3 years ago

FWIW, I think one of the chief challenges over the last 5 years is that “tech” became a fashionable, prestige job. Both because of the earnings potential and because of some “it” factor/cultural cache.

This led to an influx of people who would otherwise have gone into banking or consulting or other careers similarly targeted as “elite” professions when graduating from college and to an influx of people from those professions into tech.

I think it bodes well for the sector to have less of this prestige seeking- not because these folks aren’t talented, but because rebalancing the overall tech workforce towards a mix of talent is probably more healthy for people who value working in tech because it’s an area of genuine interest for them.

hammyhavoc4• 3 years ago

I think it's further back than 5 years, beginning prior to even The Social Network movie. I would argue that Apple probably made tech cool for normies, despite not being a modern-day Apple user.

The iPod happened. Smartphones went mainstream, gaming stopped being just for kids and men in basements. A lot changed with the adoption of tech.

The Social Network movie was indicative of a big shift in how the public felt about nerds in tech. It might not have shown Zuck in a particularly positive light, but the fascination was there. Same goes for the passing of Steve Jobs.

Felt like everybody had an idea for an app about 12 years ago, even though most of them were bad or already done! Also seemed like a lot of teens were going to college to "learn to develop apps".

The seeming accessibility of consumer technology brought down the perceived barrier of admission to doing things with tech.

Clubber2• 3 years ago

When I first got into tech, it wasn't cool, it was nerd stuff (as a pajorative). I remember it first started being cool when the internet went commercial. It became really cool when the iPhone was released.

I think tech is currently undergoing a long overdue culling period. I recall one in 2001ish and in 2008ish. All the people who got into it because of the money and don't particularly care for it will move on. Some people who do care for it will also get culled. It's not pretty.

deepzn3• 3 years ago

We could go even further back to the late 90's and the official launch of the Internet, where you see the more people believing in this. When Bill Gates was officially the richest man in the world. But, I think with every cycle, you got more believers. Google in 2003-06, along with Facebook. In 2007-09 with the iPhone disrupting the phone industry, that became a big thing. And early 2010's with the rise of the apps - Airbnb, Uber, etc.

I feel we hit a crescendo with the post pandemic bubble and fed pumping money, that's when tech usage globally was of course at it's highest, but also like the sheer number of people using it everyday was massive(maybe 50-75%+ of the world). And it arguably "ate" or saved the world during the pandemic. It's fascinating, and now we're entering another cycle maybe after a brief respite, with LLMs.

mountainofdeath6• 3 years ago

In my youth, console gamers were considered basement dwelling weirdos by normal people and PC gamers were considered weirdos by console gamers. Such was the hierarchy.

2devnull• 3 years ago

“Apple probably made tech cool for normies”

It felt like that, but I suspect it’s not really true.

FooBarBizBazz2• 3 years ago

The 2008 financial crisis. Before that it was less FAANG, more Goldman and McKinsey.

throwawayai2• 3 years ago

I think it's partly that, but I think it's also partly that tech is just becoming just another job. Sure, there is 20% of tech workers doing something new and innovating. There is also 80% that just needs to the role filled and could be done by someone decent enough to make CRUD react apps.

I think it's moving more towards how engineering (mechanical, ee, etc, not software) is seen. It's a skilled and respected job that pays decent, but at the end of the day it's just another job. There will always be mechanical engineers and software engineers who LOVE it and tinker all through the night after work, but that's becoming less and less then norm for software.

My old roommate was a mech engineer who designed lighting fixtures, didn't love his job, but it paid decent enough, and the company needed an ME to design them. There are plenty of "lighting fixtures" that need to be built in the software world.

ativzzz• 3 years ago

Sure, there is 20% of tech workers doing something new and innovating

Try closer to 1%. The vast majority of us are just making software to make businesses chug along

CPLX2• 3 years ago

The elites chase the money. It's definitional.

Rapidly emerging profitable technologies create fortunes and the elites chase the fortunes. There's no conceptual difference between the iPhone and the steam engine or steel mill in this regard.

bendango• 3 years ago

Why do we keep providing such unskilled grifters so much influence over human agency?

Such classist BS exploits manual labor.

We’re just perpetuating empowering the lazy. It makes the screeching about social programs seem hilarious since being a bank CEO is not biology sustaining work. It’s historical barnacle. History we hallucinate since we were never there. We’re more like LLMs than we want to admit

spacemadness2• 3 years ago

Elites? I think our definitions vary widely here.

krooj2• 3 years ago

There's nothing fashionable or prestigious about debugging and patching a security hole at 1am on a Friday in my underwear.

jorvi• 3 years ago

It is if you’re getting paid $300 000 a year to do that.

negamax• 3 years ago

I think the six months bootcamp hires certainly tilted the prestige part into tech being just another mass hiring industry. And mass hiring did happen during the pandemic on a large scale.

Imo, tech is still a great place to be. But we all need to raise the bar for hires.

fnordpiglet2• 3 years ago

Tech became fashionable with the Netscape IPO. Maybe even as far back as Adam Curries internet chat based MTV things he would do. IMO that was the pivot when I look back - once it was cool enough to be on MTV in weekend marathons, back in say 1994, that was the beginning.

deepzn3• 3 years ago

I think it's also recalibrating the different types of jobs. The type that tech has accumulated in excess over the last 5 years especially and even longer in the biggest companies are the product and middle managers, Marketing/Strategy/HR/Sales folks.

compiler-guy• 3 years ago

People were saying this back in the dotcom crash days around 2001, and before that in the collapse of the 6501-based home computer market, to name just two.

I don't think much has changed in the attractiveness--it has been a high-paying field for fifty-years now. The sexiness comes and goes with the cycle.

And tech is cyclical on about 10-15 year cycles or so, and we have hit a downturn after a long upturn. Maybe AI will be the next uptick. Or maybe VR. Hard to predict. But I'm pretty sure it will happen.

hvs• 3 years ago

This "trend" started over 25 years ago.

intelVISA2• 3 years ago

I'm mixed on this, I can definitely appreciate the 10x TC boost but it makes hiring unbearable: I need hackers and now the market's flooded with very academically strong, much smarter than me and easily more talented PMCs.

None of the existing methods e.g. leetcode work well, so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend. Something you'd likely have been exposed to in CS102 type stuff.

yamtaddle8• 3 years ago

I need hackers and now the market's flooded with very academically strong, much smarter than me and easily more talented PMCs.
so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend

There are too many good candidates so you're having to... flog them harder?

God, tech hiring is weird. People in other sectors of the economy look at me like I've just announced that I have cancer, when I explain what the tech interview world looks like.

mountainofdeath6• 3 years ago

One of the side-effects of the technology crowd becoming saturated with the straight-laced, standardized-test oriented, topper types is that LeetCode aligns neatly with how you prepare.

Right secondary school grades + near perfect exams -> Right Undergraduate

Right undergraduate + LeetCode (basically an exam) -> Big Tech job " + Case interview prep -> High paying entry level management consulting job " + Right connections -> High paying entry level wall-st job " + High LSAT -> Right Law School -> High-paying BigLaw job " + High MCAT -> Right Med School -> Right Residency -> High Paying Physician Job

If you notice, tech (Googles of the World and elite startups) have now fallen inline with the path for other white-shoe industries.

FWIW, I know at least a few people from memory that had non-technical undergraduates (usually economics) but are excellent at studying for exams. Sure enough, they did enough LeetCode they could get a job at Meta or similar. Ask them what actually happens in a CPU or similar technical question and you get a blank stare.

commandlinefan• 3 years ago

write a simple device driver from scratch ... exposed to in CS102

Where the hell did you go to school? When I did CS102, they were talking about linked lists and recursion. I would love to have seen device drivers, but when I was in school, everything was way more academic and impractical than that.

nradov• 3 years ago

That is not an effective or realistic approach to hiring. Introductory CS courses seldom cover low-level device drivers. And you don't really need a particular type of "hacker" (whatever that means). Just hire someone with the right aptitude and send them to a technical training course.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1142662.1142667

Abby0• 3 years ago

so now we may resort to paid novel take homes e.g. write a simple device driver from scratch for the Intel E1000 in C99 over the weekend. Something you'd likely have been exposed to in CS102 type stuff.

I am really curious to know what school has a cs 102 level class that teaches you writing a device driver?

I could perhaps see this as part of Operating systems class, where you just learned about how kernels works using a minimal OS (like xv6).

but that example you gave based on the expectation you mentioned are very extreme. This is why its hard to find talnet to hire.

mountainofdeath6• 3 years ago

I can confirm. When I graduated in the early 2010s, one of the professors I was close to mentioned that the cohorts where turning away from the typical hacker types and to the high-achieving money and prestige seekers who did not really care about the field. The last time it had happened was leading into the year 2000 and the EECS department got an entire building out of it as a result. Once the dotcom bubble crashed, enrollment was down to third of its 1999 levels and the building was mostly empty.

History is a flat circle.

My last company was chock-full of Ivy league/Stanford/Berkeley/etc graduates with almost none being the type who actually is interested in technology. About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years. I will also say that parental pressure had a big part. Why spend 10 years of your life to be a doctor when you can make more money in big tech?

It also became fashionable for people to pivot out of high-finance or management consulting (traditional white-shoe industries) and into corporate development roles at hot companies.

jgalentine0072• 3 years ago

If I remember correctly, there were 600 CS freshmen in 2000 at Virginia Tech, only ~60 of us were left by graduation, I think largely because of people evaluating their prospects after the crash (and computer science is hard).

sidewndr463• 3 years ago

About half openly admitted to being a SWE because they couldn't get a product manager role and hoped to pivot into it from SWE after a few years

I'm always kind of curious about these folks. Do they not communicate amongst themselves? It would seem that 50% aspiring to be product managers could not be statistically possible.

I feel like if I walked into a service bay of a dealership and asked the mechanics working on vehicles, there is no way 1/2 of them would try and claim they expect to be service advisor in 2 years.

treeman792• 3 years ago

Back in 1997 when I joined college for computer Science in California, in any class there was maybe 1, occasionally 2 people that were in the class because they loved technology, and wanted to be in due to passion.

Everyone else was in it because computers paid well.

Not to say that people didn’t work hard or eventually become skilled. Just that money was the driving force more than anything.

currymj• 3 years ago

previously the only socially acceptable legitimate career paths for new grads from top colleges were finance, consulting, medical+law+business school, PhD (for nerds), and maybe working for Congress or a policy think tank. anything else and other people's parents would pity your parents at graduation.

probably about 10 years ago big tech got added to this list. not sure exactly why. maybe they just got big enough to start doing serious campus recruiting.

neilv• 3 years ago

Different people will say it happened at different times.

I noticed it around 25 years ago.

But I understand there have been phases of go-to prestige job that a certain class went through. Techbro didn't immediately displace, say, investment banking bro, or management consulting bro.

g9yuayon• 3 years ago

I think one of the chief challenges over the last 5 years is that “tech” became a fashionable, prestige job

This is especially interesting given that Americans used to mock nerds in pop culture and in schools.

A trajectory question that always puzzles me is how fast can we really supply software engineers. Is software engineering like other ordinary white-collar jobs where supply is as elastic as it can be, or software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent? I draw this question from personal observation, so it's definitely not scientific: China has been big on math education. Math whiz kids are honed like superheroes in China. Teachers and parents put great pressure on students to excel at maths. Yet in the end, only a small percentage of students can truly learn high-school math or entry-level college math. If software engineering is like math, then the supply will stay tight until the demand drops, and techies will continue enjoying good pay after the recession.

reaperman• 3 years ago

I think software engineering is like math that requires a peculiar personality and certain talent. However, there's actually a massive pool of these candidates who allocate themselves between different industries as demand ebbs and flows.

They end up in medicine, consulting, engineering, manufacturing, academic research, Wall Street, etc and often switch whole industries mid-career too.

epolanski3• 3 years ago

I think 90%+ of people without a CS degree and a boot camp can easily outperform any genius dev just by caring, being focused and professional. I'm not kidding. I've seen it many times.

But this is also a byproduct of many tech companies valuing plumbing over good engineering and accepting or ignoring the cost.

But yes, I've met so many boot campers easily outperform their ivy college senior because the second one didn't care, barely worked and completed his daily tasks in one hour.

But in the end the first one churned more code, learned more about the business and people and was miles ahead in efficiency.

nonethewiser5• 3 years ago

But scarcity also adds prestige.

Frankly I think its much simpler. Its a high income to effort career.

But even if we do think this is good because it weeds out people worried about prestige, why stop at 200k layoffs. Why not more? You probably don’t really want that.

etrautmann• 3 years ago

The swing towards tech as a default prestige career over finance and banking started after the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent aftermath. The iPhone was released in 2009, Facebook had already been growing for 6 years, and google was already big and the cool place to work.

listenallyall• 3 years ago

It started in the mid 1990s. The common thought was, why join an investment bank and underwrite some random dude's IPO when I can start my own company and by 28 it'll be MY company going public?

derwiki• 3 years ago

iPhone was released in 2007

thedailyroar• 3 years ago

I agree with you to some extent, however, the skillset you can build working for a financial institution motivates young adults beyond prestige. The knowledge you accumulate in these roles (info on investment strategies, financing options and strategic thinking surrounding exit opportunities or inorganic growth pathways) can be applicable in many industries and is useful no matter what you choose to do since money is moving the world. People prefer these careers for more than the high status and tech graduates could benefit from expanding their horizons.

dpflan• 3 years ago

I mean wasn't the appeal of this ZIRP-period of startups-for-everything the potential financial gain of stock options packages, so non-techies become techies...if you're going to WS, what's the appeal -- isn't it the trade off that you can make large compensation? It makes sense that the financially motivated are going to follow the financial incentives...

fnordpiglet2• 3 years ago

fWIW it’s layoffs and hiring freezes on Wall Street too. When the fed announces a planned artificial recession, you better get ready by pre-downsizing despite good earnings and continued economic strength. Nothing spells “worse than worst” more than preemptive artificial recession artificial recessions.

mountainofdeath6• 3 years ago

My wife (former investment banker who pivoted to risk management) was half-joking when she said that high-finance is always the apex predator, even if at times it doesn't look like it. It sits at the center of all major institutions.

jamestimmins• 3 years ago

Similar vibe to the very last line: “Even when things go poorly, banks make it out all right."

ylee• 3 years ago

When I graduated from Columbia in 1999, I interviewed and got offers at various tech startups, but entry-level jobs on the "PM track" for those without a CS/engineering degree didn't formally exist at the likes of Microsoft or Yahoo as far as I know. I had a technical background, but was almost entirely self-taught, and had no interest in writing code for money anyway. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36027171>

Of my offers I chose an investment banking job where I worked with tech companies. Thank goodness for that; I got to participate in the dotcom bubble without being directly swept up in its popping, and saw the Valley immediately post-bubble collapse. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34726735>

mountainofdeath6• 3 years ago

Most of the APM programs require a quantitative if not technical background but that isn't the real selection criteria. The selection criteria are "go getters". The people who graduate at the top of their class while preparing for the next Olympics and running their seed-stage startup on the side. Top MBA programs select for the same criteria but in a business context.

deepzn3• 3 years ago

Software differentiated itself from hardware by means of scale. And then the profits accumulated by said companies created higher wages in those roles. And tech kept booming, and expanding throughout the last 10 or 15 years.

Until supply meets demand, this will continue but I guess the trend is abating or maybe it's just the possible recession for now. Though in the future it will be a mix of incumbents plugging all the vertical holes plus LLMs offering a horizontal suite of products, and then the market calibrating to the new supply.

Eventually though, it feels like majority of the knowledge jobs will be replaced and there would be the need for whole new tier of jobs, and hobbies that people pursue, with a UBI floor.

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

Joining the teams that demand tech companies lower spend on talent and layoff everyone.

Randomizer42• 3 years ago

The people let go find similar or better jobs in startups which encourages competition. Just because they were let go from a large company does not mean, there is no demand for their skills. In fact there is a huge demand.

gumballindie8• 3 years ago

In tech, employees could work less for the same paycheck.

What?

sacnoradhq• 3 years ago

All of the companies not Fortune 50 are experiencing a senior talent hiring frenzy. They have record profits and see gold in the failure of giant dinosaurs.

Almost 200k Job Cuts in Tech Pushes New Grads to Wall Street

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