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Comment by seldo | Hacker News Reader

It's worth pointing out that this is really only a viable career option if you are a straight, white, anglo-saxon male ready to work long hours, drink hard, and put up with a machismo-dominated culture. The financial sector and investment banking in particular, even in their tech departments, have the kind of corporate culture that sends me running.

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Having worked at Goldman Sachs in FIG investment banking, and having very close friends at virtually every bulge bracket as well as 8 of the 10 largest Private Equity firms, I can attest that this is completely false. If there is one industry that bleeds meritocracy (outside of entrepreneurship, which I think is a clear first), it is finance. You are definitely right about the long hours - you must be intelligent and be willing to work extremely hard, and you must also be willing to put up with a great deal of tedium and grunt work at almost all levels. However, the one thing that you don't have to be is white. Minorities are vastly overrepresented, and while I have not done a hard calculation if you take Asians and Indians as a percentage of total front office workers, I would not be surprised if it were near 30%. Include Jews and it's even higher. I currently work at McKinsey & Co in the Corporate Finance practice in New York, and the office as a whole (of 500 front office consultants) is probably 40% Asian or Indian.

That said, there are many downsides to finance as well and there are many reasons I am forgoing a $400k+ paycheck in PE to move back to SF to start a company where I am paid $0 and will have to live off of a ramen diet. The fact that I am not straight, white, and anglo-saxon however does not play a factor at all (and in fact there are running jokes at many banks and top tier consultancies that the above description puts you in the minority).

Agreed. I'm British Asian and work on the the trading floor of a mid-tier bank in London, race is completely a non-issue. Diversity is huge both on the business and tech side.

On the IBD side (M&A/CF) there's probably less diversity, but again it's not a huge issue. In IBD the division is more down to class than to race.

The trading floor is still male dominated though, although there are a fair number of female quants in the industry.

I disagree somewhat although I am a contractor not a permanent employee seeking promotion so that might be the reason for the difference. I am straight and white but otherwise I don't fit what you describe. I arrive at 08:00 and leave at 16:30 sharp unless exceptional circumstances arise. I make it clear from the first day that I'm not there to socialise and I won't routinely work outside my contracted hours. My theory is I have the length of my first contract (usually 3 to 6 months) to prove that I'm worth sticking with in spite of not being the proverbial round peg. So far it's worked and I've always been extended multiple times at each institution. They eventually stop offering you out to get drunk if you're politely constant with your rejection - I do get a bit of a ribbing and feel pressure in this respect but it doesn't impact me.

Currently my team is made up of 2x French men, 1x Nigerian man, 1x Indian Man and me (Irish man) the team leader is an English man so there certainly could and should be better female representation but that was also the case (but to a lesser extent) when I used to work in the telecoms sector.

There is a lot of arrogance and machismo on display but it's less prevalent in the back office - certainly more than what I experienced in other sectors. It is hard to stomach though.

So by "better female representation" you mean "less than 100% male". And the team is 50% white, and 100% straight (I assume you'd have mentioned otherwise). And you admit they pressure you to drink with them. So it sounds like you agree with almost everything I said about the makeup of the workforce at these places.

This is completely not true anymore and I don't think it has been for 30 years. Just like that WSJ article from a few months back said, WASPs are a dying breed, if not totally dead already. The CEOs of Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Bear Stearns and Barclays are/were all Jewish. As is Charles Schwab, he president of the World Bank, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, the president of the European Central Bank, and so on and so forth. Anecdotally, I don't know any WASPs in Finance at all. British Indian, Russian, Chinese/Korean american, tons of jewish people, white guys who aren't WASPs... the hours and culture might be ridiculous, but it ain't WASP culture anymore, if it ever was.

If I could I would mod this up like 50 times.

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