I guess it depends on what you mean by upper tier. Goldman Sachs pays well. JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, BNP, Citi, Morgan Stanley, TD Bank, Standar

I guess it depends on what you mean by upper tier. Goldman Sachs pays well. JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, BNP, Citi, Morgan Stanley, TD Bank, Standard Chartered, etc... These places absolutely don't pay well even compared to medium quality established tech firms. Certainly they don't pay well compared to hedge funds, private equity, VC, and other types of boutiques. And if it is even remotely adjusted for quality of life, they begin to look horrible. The larger banks like JPM etc go out of their way to suppress wages. They are sort of the IBM of finance. Lots of big, senseless, ill-conceived technology re-orgs all the time happening to create bonus fuel for someone up the food chain. These places certainly don't recruit the best, and often dupe decent developers into doing totally foolish things, like working in a proprietary language for years that heavily damages your ability to get other jobs, for salaries and bonuses that don't even afford that great of a lifestyle in the high-cost cities you're required to live in to work for them. Bonuses at banks are also often paid in the form of bank stock and vests on a rolling basis. This stands in contrast to straight cash bonuses paid by many other types of firms, which have the benefit of not immediately being correlated directly to your regular income stream (e.g. if things go downhill and you're laid off, at a bank this often means that stock bonus has lost considerable value and you could be screwed out of a large portion due to vesting issues ... whereas a cash bonus could have been invested in some way that helped diversify and hedge against risks of losing your job). Comparing with start-ups is not very useful since start-ups also seek to greatly suppress wages by marketing jobs as lifestyles instead of a fair trade of labor for wage.