"I went to Wall Street and my friends went into tech. Guess who made the mistake?"

30 November 2015

3 minute read

"I went to Wall Street and my friends went into tech. Guess who made the mistake?"

I could be working in Silicon Valley. I studied computer science at one of the top universities in the U.S. and most of my peers went into start-ups. Six years later, I'm a 27-year-old a quant on Wall Street and I seriously think I've made the wrong call.

My mistake was crystallized when I went back to San Francisco for three days last week. Literally everyone I know there is working for a start-up and the contrast with Wall Street is immense. Everyone in SF knows someone who's cashed out, who's bought a "second home in the Bahamas", some kind of car, or has just stopped working altogether. That kind of stuff is commonplace.

OK, it helps that my class graduated in 2010: my peers have been able to ride the post-Facebook IPO valuations wave. The companies they work for are mostly private, so the equity wealth has gone to the venture capital and private equity funds that backed their employers - and to them as employees. Banks and traders have been mostly locked out of this, it's the 20-something workers who are cashing in (and out).

In the meantime, the sell-side is floundering. I've been paid less than $155k for the last two years and have been waiting for the kinda-good-times to come back to Wall Street. Sure, there are some upsides: I'm at a bulge bracket bank which is highly respected and has a wealth of institutional knowledge to tap. I get to work with cash sales and trading, derivatives sales and trading, exotics and prime brokerage. There's a wealth of data and knowledge at my fingertips.

However, while I respect the institution I work for abstractly, being a junior quant/tech guy who's had flat pay for three years in a stressful job in a stressful city isn't my idea of fun. I'm starting to get a little tired of this, especially when I look at SF and see that everyone else's net worth is multiplying.

The thing is that I knew finance would be a challenge, but I didn't imagine that it would be like this. The low pay, resignations, and general pessimism are beyond what I imagined. Back in San Francisco, the gyms are filled with 20-somethings who've parked their Maseratis and Ferraris outside. Someone made a wrong choice, and right now it looks like that person was me.

Quentin Angus is the pseudonym of a quant trader who works for a major bank on Wall Street

Photo credit: Romain Drapri

AUTHORQuentin Angus

Insider Comment

3 comments

pa
pamfeuer S
20 February 2019
Ive worked in tech.
And you are wrong....you have indeed made the right choice.
Unless you have the eagerness to learn C/C++/python and bash you are NOWHERE.
All those people who think they are techies writing node.js code is just euphoria.
Unless you have the skillset to adapt drones to different worksets and jobs or automate and control boring drills on an oil rig, your tech job is really worth nothing.
Trust me, few people are made to work in tech....you will get sick trying to solve problems using your brain 'ALL' the time.... being intelligent can also make you sick.
If you can work in finance doing tech work, well then you can control the outcome, to a cetain extent.
Once you reach 30, you are no longer interested in making an 'impact' or 'changing the world', you have real world responsibilities and problems to deal with.
Most of those tech guys who are retired by 35....are the ones who are fed up, made enough money and are living a minimalist lifestyle, are single, get enough sex(older guys dislike too much sex) and have a secondary income coming in from the markets and enjoy spending time playing tetris, are vegetarian(for the most part), dont spend on less than useless things etc etc....the list goes on and on.
The mainstream media has this Uber Mensch lookout on life that everybody wants to become like tyrell making replicants and change the world.....when the truth is you want to be under a tree under the sun...with plenty of water and enough food.....look at Tom Hanks character at the end of Castaway.......the soul and survival skills always over power materialism....not getting lured by ferrrari's etc.
Remember.....you work very hard so that you can have better days when you grow old.....and this target can be achieved much faster if you have skills that are more than competent.
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bk
bks
1 December 2015
You're well-paid, but someone you know on the other side of the country is obscenely well-paid. What blubbering. What suffering. Grow up, crybaby.
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Al
Alexander D.
1 December 2015
As Nassim Taleb describes this phenomenon in his book 'Fooled by Randomness...', Quentin makes a wrong decision. His income is a very stable one, and he would probably failed within hi-tech. There's a foreseeable way of his career development respecting his risk-level. Going into ventures assumes the large uncertainty peculiar to hi-tech, esp. dangerous with bursting of the bubble.
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