4 ms·

> out-of-college salaries for programming are often better than virtually everything else (notably, banking and consulting); but after ten years, the opposite i

> out-of-college salaries for programming are often better than virtually everything else (notably, banking and consulting); but after ten years, the opposite is relationship is reversed (considerably so) Don't forget that there is huge flight from banking and consulting, but much less so for programming. Of 10 people who start as bankers or consultants, 80% will likely leave the industry within 5 years, and 90% within 10 years. So, in a way you're comparing the salary growth of a median programmer to the salary growth of a top 5-10% banker.

sl8r 11y ago
This is an interesting point; thanks! Found this article incase anyone is interested. One quote stood out to me: > Private equity recruitment firm PER conducts an ‘unofficial count’ into how many analysts join the M&A and corporate finance teams of six leading banks in London. In 2010, PER calculated that 250 people joined a combination of Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. After tracking those individuals for three years, it recently calculated that 140 of them are still working in banking. That’s an attrition rate of 44%. (http://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/139375/nearly-half-of-junior-ma-bankers-at-top-banks-quit-within-three-years/ http://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/139375/nearly-half-o...)
sien 11y ago
That's an interesting comment. Do sources for those stats and numbers on how many people leave banking? What about programming? Just searching around doesn't show anything solid up.
- slapshot 11y ago
  In short, the "up or out" policy of banks and consultancies is notorious for having more "out" than "up": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out To put hard numbers on it, McKinsey is one of top management consulting firms. According to an employee, its average tenure among new consultants is 2.5 years. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-employees-loyal-to-McKinsey https://www.quora.com/Why-are-employees-loyal-to-McKinsey That's consistent with the staffing ratios within the firm (Wikipedia suggests thare are ~400 directors compared to about 9000 total consultants). Those are the ones who stuck around for more than a decade.
  - jacquesm 11y ago
    This is the employment equivalent of Betz' law from wind power. Before you throw that idea out as ridiculous let me explain. Betz' law states that there is an upper limit to the amount of power that you can extract from a given mass of moving air (aka wind). The plainest explanation is that the wind has to go somewhere in order to be able to bring in fresh wind. If you extract all the energy then the air would have to pool around the windmill and then eventually the pressure differential would drop to 0 and there would be no more wind. So you give up some of the energy and use it to remove the air after you're done extracting energy from it. The parallel is that if up-or-out wasn't a fact that these companies would sooner or later run out of room in their org chart to bring in fresh recruits at the bottom. This would stop them from hiring the occasional gem that they will promote to the top of that chart. So to be able to hire the really good people they have to create room at the bottom, they have to get rid of a certain percentage of their people at all levels every year to keep the machinery moving. It's an expensive affair but in the longer term it makes good business sense. Both windmills and really big companies are extraction devices.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- sharkweek 11y ago
  Not OP but I read a statistic that only 1 in 5 analysts at I-banks are still in the industry after five years in the book 'Young Money'

sl8r 11y ago

This is an interesting point; thanks! Found this article incase anyone is interested. One quote stood out to me: > Private equity recruitment firm PER conducts an ‘unofficial count’ into how many analysts join the M&A and corporate finance teams of six leading banks in London. In 2010, PER calculated that 250 people joined a combination of Bank of America, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley. After tracking those individuals for three years, it recently calculated that 140 of them are still working in banking. That’s an attrition rate of 44%. (http://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/139375/nearly-half-of-junior-ma-bankers-at-top-banks-quit-within-three-years/ http://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/139375/nearly-half-o...)

sien 11y ago

That's an interesting comment. Do sources for those stats and numbers on how many people leave banking? What about programming? Just searching around doesn't show anything solid up.

slapshot 11y ago
In short, the "up or out" policy of banks and consultancies is notorious for having more "out" than "up": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Up_or_out To put hard numbers on it, McKinsey is one of top management consulting firms. According to an employee, its average tenure among new consultants is 2.5 years. https://www.quora.com/Why-are-employees-loyal-to-McKinsey https://www.quora.com/Why-are-employees-loyal-to-McKinsey That's consistent with the staffing ratios within the firm (Wikipedia suggests thare are ~400 directors compared to about 9000 total consultants). Those are the ones who stuck around for more than a decade.
- jacquesm 11y ago
  This is the employment equivalent of Betz' law from wind power. Before you throw that idea out as ridiculous let me explain. Betz' law states that there is an upper limit to the amount of power that you can extract from a given mass of moving air (aka wind). The plainest explanation is that the wind has to go somewhere in order to be able to bring in fresh wind. If you extract all the energy then the air would have to pool around the windmill and then eventually the pressure differential would drop to 0 and there would be no more wind. So you give up some of the energy and use it to remove the air after you're done extracting energy from it. The parallel is that if up-or-out wasn't a fact that these companies would sooner or later run out of room in their org chart to bring in fresh recruits at the bottom. This would stop them from hiring the occasional gem that they will promote to the top of that chart. So to be able to hire the really good people they have to create room at the bottom, they have to get rid of a certain percentage of their people at all levels every year to keep the machinery moving. It's an expensive affair but in the longer term it makes good business sense. Both windmills and really big companies are extraction devices.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
sharkweek 11y ago
Not OP but I read a statistic that only 1 in 5 analysts at I-banks are still in the industry after five years in the book 'Young Money'