I currently work for an investment bank and have worked at a fortune 500 web company. From a technologists standpoint, the cultural chasm between the two is gr

I currently work for an investment bank and have worked at a fortune 500 web company. From a technologists standpoint, the cultural chasm between the two is great. This is largely because pure technology companies can succeed by culturally incentivizing good engineering, which is timeless. Banks have much shorter horizons in building systems of comparable complexity, and thus have a far greater need to constantly mobilize and change architectural direction. This is just a fact of the industry: technology advances, finance is cyclical. One of the cultural side effects, which certainly can have sinister implications, is that financial institutions lean heavily on monetary incentives to provide such mobility. There has obviously been a lot of bad press on structured credit, but the basic concept is ultimately a great innovation in risk management. Surely there was excess. But before ye great engineers start throwing stones, consider how much your current occupation is aided by the massive corridors of fiber optics constructed during the tech boom.