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Hard figures - more than half of the graduates from one of the top technical universities in the UK (Imperial) go to work for banks (computer scientists that is

• ThomPete 15y ago
  Thanks for the info (didn't know this) Isn't there something inherently wrong with society when an industry that provides little value to society make so much money that they can afford to pay better than anyone else?
  • JonWood 15y ago
    Yes, there is certainly something wrong with it, but for some reason the entire country is effectively owned by the banking industry at the moment (despite the fact the country in fact owns a good chunk of the banking industry). Personally I'd quite like to see the government actually tax them at decent rates, and call the bluff that they're all going to up and leave if they have to contribute to the country. The chances of that happening when the current government all made a fortune in investment and banking careers is low though.
  • gaius 15y ago
    I don't know where you get that "little value to society" nonsense from. Asset allocation is a non-trivially hard problem, and the alternative to doing it our way is Five Year Plans and the like, which tend to result - and this is actual, historical fact - in tens of millions of people starving.
    • wazzles 15y ago
      Yea it's definitely a non trivial problem to rip people off with as much success as the likes of Goldman. IBs are completely socially useless, excessively criminal, and for the most part just exploit clients through front-running etc. I used to work for one, now I work for a startup that actually makes stuff. Happy days.
    • ThomPete 15y ago
      You seem to be confusing what is difficult with what is beneficial to society. But if how hard a problem is would be an indication of how beneficial then there are plenty of jobs that is grossly underpaid. You also seem to be assuming that there can be only two possible solutions to this problem. But please don't let your strawmen be my burden.
      • gaius 15y ago
        No - my point is that countries that have sophisticated financial services industries have historically been extremely unlikely to make catastropic errors of asset allocation resulting in famine, etc. If we had a group - let's call it The Party - deciding what to invest where, and they ballsed it up, then you get the Great Leap Forward (30M starving to death is half the population of the UK).
        • ThomPete 15y ago
          And where exactly did I promote such a solution?
          • Nrsolis 15y ago
            Right where you made a value judgement about the "value" the algorithmic component of the financial services sector provides to society.
        • geebee 15y ago
          I'd rather live in a country with lots of lawyers and bankers than none. And some of these lawyers and bankers are, without question, very valuable to society. People who look favorably on these industries would probably describe the rent-collection or wealth-destroying activities of these sectors as the regrettable but minor (and maybe inevitable) byproduct effect of an activity that is, on the balance, very positive. We all have these types - high tech has patent trolls (er, innovative technology development partnerships), but nobody would say that the tech sector is a rent-collecting segment of the economy (though many would say that patent trolls are part of the legal industry, not the high tech industry). Other people like Wooley at the LSE (quoted in the article) take a far dimmer view: “The amount of rent capture has been huge,” Woolley said. “Investment banking, prime broking, mergers and acquisitions, hedge funds, private equity, commodity investment—the whole scale of activity is far too large.” I asked Woolley how big he thought the financial sector should be. “About a half or a third of its current size,” he replied"
  • whyleyc 15y ago
    "an industry that provides little value to society" Whilst this is a nice popular statement to trot out in the current climate, it is simply not true, at least not in fiscal terms. Some facts: * The financial services industry accounted for 10% of GDP in 2009 * It provides 4% of total employment in the UK (1 million jobs) * It contributes 28% of the UK’s total exports of services * It contributed £53.4bn in tax in 2009/10 (11% of total government receipts) Much as everyone would like to say "sod the bankers, let them go elsewhere", the truth is doing so would likely torpedo the economy. Source: http://217.154.230.218/NR/rdonlyres/E01CD45A-053F-4C9B-BDAA-2E16CF668268/0/BC_RS_ContributionofFinancialServicesintheUK.pdf http://217.154.230.218/NR/rdonlyres/E01CD45A-053F-4C9B-BDAA-...
    • wazzles 15y ago
      Um, nice try. Takes a lot of 50 billions to add up to 1.5 trillion. Especially when you include interest. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8262037/Bank-bail-out-adds-1.5-trillion-to-debt.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfina...
      • whyleyc 15y ago
        You're assuming two things here: (1) The country would have been better off financially not to bail the banks out and let them burn (2) The nationalised banks won't end up turning a profit for taxpayers in the long run anyway Both of which could be considered shaky assumptions. See Robert Peston's analysis on this very topic for more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/03/can_taxpayers_profit_from_nort.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/2010/03...
        • ThomPete 15y ago
          The day that the banks choose to bail out it's customers I might consider changing my opinioin about the value the provide to society. (not saying that they don't provide any)
          • 15y ago
  • Nrsolis 15y ago
    Thom, if you're so convinced that the financial industry provides so little benefit to modern society, why don't you try and live in a country without one. The Great Depression in the US (which effectively wiped out a significant portion of the financial industry here) was the source of much misery and pain. Pick up a book on bond valuation and capital allocation and tell me if YOU would like to do that work for yourself. Finance is hard won and specialized knowledge. Don't dismiss that expertise.
    • ThomPete 15y ago
      Why the strawman? I never said it wasn't of any value. I have repeatedly clarified that I am talking in the context of this article and about certain parts of the financial industry, namely the part can afford to pay better than anyone else. The developers working on your average netbank aren't in question here their salaries are not extreme. All I am saying is that the kind of developers that the OP is talking about are being lost to parts of the financial industry that aren't providing value to society but primarily to themselves and I find that problematic. That has nothing to do with my view of other parts of the banking industry.
      • Nrsolis 15y ago
        They aren't being "lost" to the financial industry. They are proving "value" to the consumers of those (valuable) services. You could make the same argument for home health care workers and cardiac nurses. Potential home health care workers aren't "lost" to the nursing industry. Society VALUES what they provide to a greater degree because it compensates them more. You seem to be laboring under the assumption that a career in the financial services industry is a guarantee of high-income. The truth is quite different. Life in the financial services industry has its own downsides (insecurity of income, long hours, poor working conditions generally) which you seem to be glossing over to make your argument. On my last flight to Mountain View, I sat next to a guy who left a job at Goldman Sachs (as a broker) to go do ad sales for Google. His reason: better working conditions and quality of life. Don't assume that your choices are everyone else's. The high pay in the financial services industry is there because the work is hard and few people can or are willing to do it.
• vixen99 15y ago
  That's great for the graduates who get these jobs but can I add that it seems to me that there's precious little evidence (actually none at all) that their skills result in any kind of improvement in the service offered to the millions of ordinary customers of the monopolized banking industry in Britain.As far as I can see there's been a marked decline.
  • adaml_623 15y ago
    That's because the graduates don't go and work for the retail arms of the big banks. They work in the investment and trading arms and generally have very little to do with customers. Many of the Banks don't even have retail arms. And that's not even thinking about Hedge Funds, Brokerages and other Financial institutions that are normally grouped into 'the banking industry'
  • gaius 15y ago
    Really? Do you queue in your branch still, or use the website? Remember if you have an ISA or a pension you are "the stock market"...
    • vixen99 15y ago
      I spend a lot of time abroad so my experience is almost entirely of internet transactions. I have no complaints about counter service when I use it. Decline in service? One small example: the website has been revamped so now I have no print option for my credit card (as supplied by the same bank) account. I am forced to copy-paste details from the site which they seem to have arranged to make as tricky as possible. The old ‘print account’ option has gone. I did wonder if statistically this might mean that enough folk would make mistakes in repayment to the bank's advantage in interest payments. But that's just my rotten suspicious mind. I mean - as if a bank would ever stoop so low!
  • c3m 15y ago
    You're absolutely correct. Think of it like this - if you're paying a lot of money to get the top people, you'll want to use their brains. Simply put, retail banking does not provide comparable returns on investment than putting the people into hedge funds, trading, etc. You have to bear in mind that banks (from my personal experience and from my peers) are first and foremost profit oriented, which effectively guides their decisions. Hence, you'll not see those people working on things that directly impact retail customers.
• tomh- 15y ago
  I'm curious, whats the avarage starting salary at a financial company in london? Sometimes I see salaries of 23k-25k pound per year (for other software companies) from which you can barely afford an appartment for yourself in London.
  • dmitri1981 15y ago
    around £35k+bonus for dev at decent bank.
    • wazzles 15y ago
      yup 35 - 40k starting, 50 to 60k after a few years, over 100k possible after 5 (top tier IB)
  • JonoW 15y ago
    As a bit of a finger in the air estimate from looking at job ads here, I would probably estimate that a London finance company will pay about 50% more than a "normal" company. Not sure what a starting salary would be, but I would bet it would be > 30k. After 5 years you would probably be on > 60k, but if you're quite specialist (in terms of finance based skills) you could be earning much more.
  • c3m 15y ago
    Working for Deutsche Bank, JPMorgan and the lot, starting salaries for Imperial graduates are upwards of £40k (definitely know people who are starting at £50k). You're correct, £25k seems to be a ballpark figure for software houses. Looking at it statistically, average salary for Imperial graduates is something like £35k, so you can do the math and infer what the top grads are earning.
    • eroded 15y ago
      Paying £25k (~$40k USD) for grad devs in London is a bit cheeky, when you consider the living costs are higher than in Silicon Valley (http://tinyurl.com/6e8d3th http://tinyurl.com/6e8d3th). Clearly, UK students enjoy selling their soul to live in bedsits eating noodles :-)
• singular 15y ago
  I went to Imperial (did CivEng) and I can confirm this, lecturers even joked about it. At one point the people in the class who were actually going to go into engineering were asked to raise their hands - around 1/3 did. To digress briefly, part of the reason the City likes Imperial so much is that they work you into the ground. If you can survive Imperial then you're likely to do well under city-levels of pressure.