Comment by ZeroCool2u | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ZeroCool2u | Hacker News Reader

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It seems like in Finance, actual banks pay pretty terribly. I think it was about 2 or 3 years ago that starting base salary at Goldman broke 6 figures for CS grads out of school. From what I've heard its gone up since then, but definitely not to FAANG standards. The interesting part is watching these firms with fairly prestigious reputations in the finance world begin to realize/grapple with the fact that very few engineers actually _want_ to work there, because they're basically just not considered cool. This is balanced out by places like 2 Sigma and other quantitative hedge funds that tend towards the other extreme of the compensation spectrum. It seems like there's not a whole lot of middle ground from my anecdotal experience, but of course YMMV.

The best engineers at banks are often traders. The majority of their compensation is given in the form of year-end bonuses. From my limited understanding, traders at the top banks can clear seven figures in annual compensation after five to eight years if they are talented.

Tech itself is often viewed as a cost center at banks, rather than a profit center. Many of its teams are not the best programmers, nor do they need to be. Their job is to understand the tools, interact with personnel in the profit centers, and use that feedback to make secure and useful updates to the firm's tools in a timely manner.

That said, there are some superstar coders who work at banks. They just don't tend to be fresh-out-of-college millennials. Bjarne Stroustrup is an example.

One thing common to banks (and in general, finance) is that a significant amount of your compensation is in year end bonuses. These figures are notoriously hard to get a hold of, and makes direct comparisons tough. Accounting for these bonuses even at the major banks doesn't make the gap seem as high as without it, but yes, FANG would still beat tech roles at these places. The better comparison would be quant roles at these places vs FANG tech.

Millenials aren't fresh out of college.

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