6 ms·

To all those guys who took the conservative banking jobs

21 points by sdpurtill 18y ago

andr 18y ago
1) Jobs are investment banks and asset management are not risk free and not conservative. There is almost zero job security and - as seen - you won't know you were fired until the day you are. With small startups CEOs will communicate things much better and you can usually see things coming. Case in point, Lehman UK had a fairly succesful business, however all their cash was pooled in Lehman US. So on Sunday they got a call that their cash was no longer available, so they had to put a profitable business in administration. 2) They are not risk free, because your bonus depends on your performance (not in all segments, but in many your performance is directly measurable in money). No one cares about salary - it's all about the bonus. 3) You do gain a broad skill set working in finance. It probably looks very narrow and simple from outside, just like programming would look to a non-programmer. 4) On one hand, in a startup you create something tangible and in finance you are just a glorified broker. On the other hand, startup valuation is very chaotic and many startups would not exist if there were no bubbles. In finance it is very clear what you and your company are paid for and how much it costs.
- JohnN 18y ago
  Agreed. I don't think any of my friends considered their jobs "predictable and secure" when they started. And in many cases the huge bonuses they received last year wil cushion the fall. Let's just hope they haven't become to accustomed to a certain lifestyle.
  - SwellJoe 18y ago
    Let's just hope they haven't become to accustomed to a certain lifestyle. We're all accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and most folks fall on tougher times at least once or twice in life, and have to downgrade their spending. I'm not suggesting folks here are a couple of paychecks away from being homeless, as I assume we're all of at least average intelligence and have some savings, good health insurance, and don't consider debt a fun hobby...just that we're all pretty spoiled, and we all probably have some expenses we wouldn't hang on to if our own personal revenue took a dramatic turn south. But, I agree. I hope that folks who work in volatile industries (like finance, or our very own home turf, technology, to give another example) are thinking ahead when times are good, and have an understanding that times will not always be good. (You guys who missed the first bubble know that, right? We will see another crash in tech. Don't imagine human nature is so dramatically different this time around, or that enough of the folks who experienced the first one are still around and taking part to impart wisdom to prevent it from happening again. It'll look different, because it won't be played out in the public markets, and the names will mostly be different...but it'll come, and not every high flying Web 2.0 company will survive it.)
- timr 18y ago
  "With small startups CEOs will communicate things much better and you can usually see things coming." Not necessarily. More than one of my friends lost their jobs on less than 24 hours' notice during the first dot com bust.
greendestiny 18y ago
The shift key really doesn't take that long to depress, I'm not sure how not using saves you time. I had the same realization, that I had better job security at a startup, when I revisited some people I left at uni doing postdocs.
- hugh 18y ago
  Job security for postdocs? I've never heard of a postdoc losing their job. Sure, you might be only funded for a year at a time, but at least the money runs out on a predetermined date rather than unexpectedly one Friday. Maybe my experiences are just limited, though.
  - timr 18y ago
    Problem is, it takes a lot longer to find work as a post-doc than as a programmer. The money may run out on predictable, yearly intervals, but what do you do once it's gone? Get a faculty position? (Because we all know that's easy.)
- fallentimes 18y ago
  I could understand if you just wanted to write some thoughts down as quickly as possible (hi AIM), but normally those are converted in to rough drafts and then in to finalized copy.
dustineichler 18y ago
This guy is really ignorant. It's the same mentality that thinks the valley is impervious to bubbles and inflation. What? Really, "you get the satisfaction of knowing you aren’t a complete tool bag every time you wake up in the morning."... They may have lost their jobs, but you lose at life.
- jwilliams 18y ago
  This guy is really ignorant. It's the same mentality that thinks the valley is impervious to bubbles and inflation. Yup - More than that - he thinks his limited value system applies to everyone. Maybe he's never considered people do those jobs because they like them, because they are good at it, because it's dynamic, because it's lucrative, because they think it's an essential part of our society? You know, similar reasons that people do startups.
  - imgabe 18y ago
    Sure it's dynamic and lucrative, but I think the last few months have shown that shilling securitized high risk mortgages is anything but an essential part of society.
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
    - jwilliams 18y ago
      You can point at the current financial crisis, but there is absolutely no doubt that financial services are a fundamental part of society. The current crisis owes a lot to greed, poor governance and ignorance (not only of the bankers, but the stockholders, pension funds, etc, etc, etc - i.e. everyone)... Even so, this isn't unique to the financial industry.
- drandall 18y ago
  Schadenfreude is completely inappropriate. You were what, 12 when the dot-com shit hit the fan? Go figure: 19 yr old php/python/actionscript hero at younoodle
menloparkbum 18y ago
you get the satisfaction of knowing you aren’t a complete tool bag every time you wake up in the morning. whilst everyone reading your blog has the exact opposite impression...
- jon_dahl 18y ago
  Yep. This is too bad, because he makes a few good points amidst the train wreck comments like this.
sayrer 18y ago
1) Can't even spell Merrill 2) Banks wash people out. You think everyone who starts at one ends up on top?
- sdpurtill 18y ago
  merryl = substr('merrill', 0, 4) . strrev(substr('lynch', 0, 2))
swombat 18y ago
Oooh... this is just asking for bad karma for your start-up. Fire him, he's bad luck!
mseebach 18y ago
> (not sure how this works when a bubble bursts, haven’t been around long enough). Well, after the last .com bubble burst, there was a lot less ping-pong with the CEO, and a lot more "You want fries with that" going on, as I understood it.
baha_man 18y ago
"p.s. does it annoy you that i don't capitalize any of my letters on here?" Yes, yes it does. Unless you're a cockroach who can't work the shift key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel
dhouston 18y ago
does this guy really that the economy tanking is somehow any better for startups than it is for bankers?
- fallentimes 18y ago
  I can't speak for Sam, but right now I'm really really glad I left my finance job to do a startup.
  - timr 18y ago
    Well of course you are -- right now. But what happens when the finance shock ripples through the rest of the economy, and tech investments dry up? Or when tech purchases stop? Or when job losses in banking, real estate, construction and sales (coupled with high energy costs) lead to overall drops in consumption, which in turn leads to drops in advertising budgets? It's still way too early to be whistling past the graveyard.
    - fallentimes 18y ago
      For me personally I have a couple side business so I'd be OK. But even if our startup whittled and died tomorrow; I've acquired more skills in 3 months working at ticketbumblerstumbler than I did in two years working at my old job. Our burn rate is less than 3k a month; we're not whistling past anything.
kp212 18y ago
I didn't sit back, and chuckle when I saw 20,000 people potentially lose their jobs. Even if you don't like Wall Street, you don't want to see that many people looking for work all of a sudden.
- fallentimes 18y ago
  Agreed. They have families and kids and rent. When half your friends are living and working in NYC...this has been a really rough week.
Hejog 18y ago
Lehman bros: 150 years. Startups: ???
bkmrkr 18y ago
This guy sounds like a tool bag.
rgrieselhuber 18y ago
Of all the career paths that I know of, finance and technology are the two that probably hold the greatest appeal to me. I might have gone into finance when I was younger but it just wasn't on my radar. As others have commented, there are far more similarities (between finance careers and the startup world) than there are differences. Some of my closest friends are investment bankers and portfolio managers. They have a deep interest in the world around them, are wicked smart and do what they do because it gets them juiced like nothing else. I'm definitely not wicked smart but the other two characteristics apply to me so I can relate to their chosen path and don't revel in the sh*t that's hitting the fan right now.
kurtosis 18y ago
I'm not a wall street hater, but it's not hard to understand why people feel a little tinge of poetic justice about LEH el. al. - http://www.google.com/search?q=announces+layoffs+stock+price+up http://www.google.com/search?q=announces+layoffs+stock+price... I know that this is bogus on so many levels but I'm just saying that the perception is that foreign competition puts pressure on companies to layoff and offshore and then wall street is in the bleachers going wild when layoffs are announced.
adrianwaj 18y ago
"you can sell your soul to an enormous investment firm and they, in turn, will make you rich with not very much risk involved" This has merit. Most of the world is chasing a dollar, if not for survival then in the pursuit of a decent, good or great life. Glory and vanity plays a large part especially for high net-worth individuals. Fear too, for attaining some type of status amongst one's peers. Startups are no different in that respect. But, 'Selling your soul' is more likely to occur on Wall Street. If you want your soul, then 'do the right thing.'
tom_rath 18y ago
Is this guy's startup profitable or is it dependent on that superfluous 'investment capital' stuff?
131072 18y ago
There is no such thing as a conservative banking job at these companies. All of these firms have strongly cyclical business, resulting in aggressive hiring and regular layoffs, and think nothing of canning an entire department if they don't need it any more. Also, at higher levels, the odds of being sacked out of the blue for political reasons increase greatly (e.g. new VP arrives, fires the next tier of management and brings his friends from his last company). Also, if you work in IT you risk being made the scapegoat for some failure outside your control (note the rating agencies trying to blame the subprime crisis on bugs in their ratings code). And if you do get canned, it's merciless - I've seen it happen to people on holiday, people who have just signed mortgages, and so on. These people are escorted from the building by security and then forgotten. You also have to contend with the risk of burnout, one of the reasons why there are relatively few employees above the age of 30. You have to do exceptionally well to receive the grand salaries and bonuses, as these are heavily skewed towards the minority of top-ranked employees. Plus, for every 'master of the universe' there are 10 people in compliance, legal, audit, helpdesk, facilities, hr, IT, back office, etc slaving away. Going into wall st is an aggressive career choice.
logjam 18y ago
Other than the chortling about people losing jobs, I agree with this guy. Finance and portfolio folk really create little. They are gamblers in the basic sense: their highest goal is gaining as much as possible in return for as little as possible - the cheapest, easiest way. It is a curious thing that as many of us grow, the less interested we are in that mindset. Our eyes start to open to the costliest, hardest way. It's not to be found in investment banking, finance, and the market any more than it is playing the lottery.
maxklein 18y ago
Are you guys not paying attention or what? The financial industry is NOT going under. It's doing fine. It's doing what coders would call a refactoring, and it is nowhere near to collapse. And the developers at those industries are certainly not getting laid off. Don't react based off 24pt headlines, first think about the real situation. And YouNoodle is a slimey business. It may be successful, it may make a lot of money, but I still don't like this parasite businesses who contribute nothing of real value, and get created solely by marketing gimicks. And a word to Sam: lay off the uppity behaviour till you have had a down. Nobody wants to watch a move where things just go up all the time, it's the middle of the movie, where the hero is doing wretchedly that is the heart of the story.
sdpurtill 18y ago
after hearing feedback from everyone on hacker news and other places, i’ve decided to pull this post as it was misinformed and inflammatory. sorry if i made you mad!
- adrianwaj 18y ago
  It wasn't that bad. I liked it because it was genuine. It's like being at uni and seeing all the kids taking corporate finance with $ signs in their eyes, impervious to their surroundings, as though nothing else mattered anymore, they'd found their raison d'être and were busy submitting those graduate applications to every corporate finance firm possible. Such individuals are the ones you probably were thinking about in your post.
patrickdh 18y ago
Any chance we get an enlightened rewrite of the article that will serve to correct misconceptions that all startupers can’t distinguish between finance and banking. It won’t make me love my banker anymore today. He's sitting on his fat ass conservative banking job riding the credit crunch!!

21 points by sdpurtill 18y ago

andr 18y ago

1) Jobs are investment banks and asset management are not risk free and not conservative. There is almost zero job security and - as seen - you won't know you were fired until the day you are. With small startups CEOs will communicate things much better and you can usually see things coming. Case in point, Lehman UK had a fairly succesful business, however all their cash was pooled in Lehman US. So on Sunday they got a call that their cash was no longer available, so they had to put a profitable business in administration. 2) They are not risk free, because your bonus depends on your performance (not in all segments, but in many your performance is directly measurable in money). No one cares about salary - it's all about the bonus. 3) You do gain a broad skill set working in finance. It probably looks very narrow and simple from outside, just like programming would look to a non-programmer. 4) On one hand, in a startup you create something tangible and in finance you are just a glorified broker. On the other hand, startup valuation is very chaotic and many startups would not exist if there were no bubbles. In finance it is very clear what you and your company are paid for and how much it costs.

JohnN 18y ago
Agreed. I don't think any of my friends considered their jobs "predictable and secure" when they started. And in many cases the huge bonuses they received last year wil cushion the fall. Let's just hope they haven't become to accustomed to a certain lifestyle.
- SwellJoe 18y ago
  Let's just hope they haven't become to accustomed to a certain lifestyle. We're all accustomed to a certain lifestyle, and most folks fall on tougher times at least once or twice in life, and have to downgrade their spending. I'm not suggesting folks here are a couple of paychecks away from being homeless, as I assume we're all of at least average intelligence and have some savings, good health insurance, and don't consider debt a fun hobby...just that we're all pretty spoiled, and we all probably have some expenses we wouldn't hang on to if our own personal revenue took a dramatic turn south. But, I agree. I hope that folks who work in volatile industries (like finance, or our very own home turf, technology, to give another example) are thinking ahead when times are good, and have an understanding that times will not always be good. (You guys who missed the first bubble know that, right? We will see another crash in tech. Don't imagine human nature is so dramatically different this time around, or that enough of the folks who experienced the first one are still around and taking part to impart wisdom to prevent it from happening again. It'll look different, because it won't be played out in the public markets, and the names will mostly be different...but it'll come, and not every high flying Web 2.0 company will survive it.)
timr 18y ago
"With small startups CEOs will communicate things much better and you can usually see things coming." Not necessarily. More than one of my friends lost their jobs on less than 24 hours' notice during the first dot com bust.

greendestiny 18y ago

The shift key really doesn't take that long to depress, I'm not sure how not using saves you time. I had the same realization, that I had better job security at a startup, when I revisited some people I left at uni doing postdocs.

hugh 18y ago
Job security for postdocs? I've never heard of a postdoc losing their job. Sure, you might be only funded for a year at a time, but at least the money runs out on a predetermined date rather than unexpectedly one Friday. Maybe my experiences are just limited, though.
- timr 18y ago
  Problem is, it takes a lot longer to find work as a post-doc than as a programmer. The money may run out on predictable, yearly intervals, but what do you do once it's gone? Get a faculty position? (Because we all know that's easy.)
fallentimes 18y ago
I could understand if you just wanted to write some thoughts down as quickly as possible (hi AIM), but normally those are converted in to rough drafts and then in to finalized copy.

dustineichler 18y ago

This guy is really ignorant. It's the same mentality that thinks the valley is impervious to bubbles and inflation. What? Really, "you get the satisfaction of knowing you aren’t a complete tool bag every time you wake up in the morning."... They may have lost their jobs, but you lose at life.

jwilliams 18y ago
This guy is really ignorant. It's the same mentality that thinks the valley is impervious to bubbles and inflation. Yup - More than that - he thinks his limited value system applies to everyone. Maybe he's never considered people do those jobs because they like them, because they are good at it, because it's dynamic, because it's lucrative, because they think it's an essential part of our society? You know, similar reasons that people do startups.
- imgabe 18y ago
  Sure it's dynamic and lucrative, but I think the last few months have shown that shilling securitized high risk mortgages is anything but an essential part of society.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - jwilliams 18y ago
    You can point at the current financial crisis, but there is absolutely no doubt that financial services are a fundamental part of society. The current crisis owes a lot to greed, poor governance and ignorance (not only of the bankers, but the stockholders, pension funds, etc, etc, etc - i.e. everyone)... Even so, this isn't unique to the financial industry.
drandall 18y ago
Schadenfreude is completely inappropriate. You were what, 12 when the dot-com shit hit the fan? Go figure: 19 yr old php/python/actionscript hero at younoodle

menloparkbum 18y ago

you get the satisfaction of knowing you aren’t a complete tool bag every time you wake up in the morning. whilst everyone reading your blog has the exact opposite impression...

jon_dahl 18y ago
Yep. This is too bad, because he makes a few good points amidst the train wreck comments like this.

sayrer 18y ago

1) Can't even spell Merrill 2) Banks wash people out. You think everyone who starts at one ends up on top?

sdpurtill 18y ago
merryl = substr('merrill', 0, 4) . strrev(substr('lynch', 0, 2))

swombat 18y ago

Oooh... this is just asking for bad karma for your start-up. Fire him, he's bad luck!

mseebach 18y ago

> (not sure how this works when a bubble bursts, haven’t been around long enough). Well, after the last .com bubble burst, there was a lot less ping-pong with the CEO, and a lot more "You want fries with that" going on, as I understood it.

baha_man 18y ago

"p.s. does it annoy you that i don't capitalize any of my letters on here?" Yes, yes it does. Unless you're a cockroach who can't work the shift key: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel

dhouston 18y ago

does this guy really that the economy tanking is somehow any better for startups than it is for bankers?

fallentimes 18y ago
I can't speak for Sam, but right now I'm really really glad I left my finance job to do a startup.
- timr 18y ago
  Well of course you are -- right now. But what happens when the finance shock ripples through the rest of the economy, and tech investments dry up? Or when tech purchases stop? Or when job losses in banking, real estate, construction and sales (coupled with high energy costs) lead to overall drops in consumption, which in turn leads to drops in advertising budgets? It's still way too early to be whistling past the graveyard.
  - fallentimes 18y ago
    For me personally I have a couple side business so I'd be OK. But even if our startup whittled and died tomorrow; I've acquired more skills in 3 months working at ticketbumblerstumbler than I did in two years working at my old job. Our burn rate is less than 3k a month; we're not whistling past anything.

kp212 18y ago

I didn't sit back, and chuckle when I saw 20,000 people potentially lose their jobs. Even if you don't like Wall Street, you don't want to see that many people looking for work all of a sudden.

fallentimes 18y ago
Agreed. They have families and kids and rent. When half your friends are living and working in NYC...this has been a really rough week.

Hejog 18y ago

Lehman bros: 150 years. Startups: ???

bkmrkr 18y ago

This guy sounds like a tool bag.

rgrieselhuber 18y ago

Of all the career paths that I know of, finance and technology are the two that probably hold the greatest appeal to me. I might have gone into finance when I was younger but it just wasn't on my radar. As others have commented, there are far more similarities (between finance careers and the startup world) than there are differences. Some of my closest friends are investment bankers and portfolio managers. They have a deep interest in the world around them, are wicked smart and do what they do because it gets them juiced like nothing else. I'm definitely not wicked smart but the other two characteristics apply to me so I can relate to their chosen path and don't revel in the sh*t that's hitting the fan right now.

kurtosis 18y ago

I'm not a wall street hater, but it's not hard to understand why people feel a little tinge of poetic justice about LEH el. al. - http://www.google.com/search?q=announces+layoffs+stock+price+up http://www.google.com/search?q=announces+layoffs+stock+price... I know that this is bogus on so many levels but I'm just saying that the perception is that foreign competition puts pressure on companies to layoff and offshore and then wall street is in the bleachers going wild when layoffs are announced.

adrianwaj 18y ago

"you can sell your soul to an enormous investment firm and they, in turn, will make you rich with not very much risk involved" This has merit. Most of the world is chasing a dollar, if not for survival then in the pursuit of a decent, good or great life. Glory and vanity plays a large part especially for high net-worth individuals. Fear too, for attaining some type of status amongst one's peers. Startups are no different in that respect. But, 'Selling your soul' is more likely to occur on Wall Street. If you want your soul, then 'do the right thing.'

tom_rath 18y ago

Is this guy's startup profitable or is it dependent on that superfluous 'investment capital' stuff?

131072 18y ago

There is no such thing as a conservative banking job at these companies. All of these firms have strongly cyclical business, resulting in aggressive hiring and regular layoffs, and think nothing of canning an entire department if they don't need it any more. Also, at higher levels, the odds of being sacked out of the blue for political reasons increase greatly (e.g. new VP arrives, fires the next tier of management and brings his friends from his last company). Also, if you work in IT you risk being made the scapegoat for some failure outside your control (note the rating agencies trying to blame the subprime crisis on bugs in their ratings code). And if you do get canned, it's merciless - I've seen it happen to people on holiday, people who have just signed mortgages, and so on. These people are escorted from the building by security and then forgotten. You also have to contend with the risk of burnout, one of the reasons why there are relatively few employees above the age of 30. You have to do exceptionally well to receive the grand salaries and bonuses, as these are heavily skewed towards the minority of top-ranked employees. Plus, for every 'master of the universe' there are 10 people in compliance, legal, audit, helpdesk, facilities, hr, IT, back office, etc slaving away. Going into wall st is an aggressive career choice.

logjam 18y ago

Other than the chortling about people losing jobs, I agree with this guy. Finance and portfolio folk really create little. They are gamblers in the basic sense: their highest goal is gaining as much as possible in return for as little as possible - the cheapest, easiest way. It is a curious thing that as many of us grow, the less interested we are in that mindset. Our eyes start to open to the costliest, hardest way. It's not to be found in investment banking, finance, and the market any more than it is playing the lottery.

maxklein 18y ago

Are you guys not paying attention or what? The financial industry is NOT going under. It's doing fine. It's doing what coders would call a refactoring, and it is nowhere near to collapse. And the developers at those industries are certainly not getting laid off. Don't react based off 24pt headlines, first think about the real situation. And YouNoodle is a slimey business. It may be successful, it may make a lot of money, but I still don't like this parasite businesses who contribute nothing of real value, and get created solely by marketing gimicks. And a word to Sam: lay off the uppity behaviour till you have had a down. Nobody wants to watch a move where things just go up all the time, it's the middle of the movie, where the hero is doing wretchedly that is the heart of the story.

sdpurtill 18y ago

after hearing feedback from everyone on hacker news and other places, i’ve decided to pull this post as it was misinformed and inflammatory. sorry if i made you mad!

adrianwaj 18y ago
It wasn't that bad. I liked it because it was genuine. It's like being at uni and seeing all the kids taking corporate finance with $ signs in their eyes, impervious to their surroundings, as though nothing else mattered anymore, they'd found their raison d'être and were busy submitting those graduate applications to every corporate finance firm possible. Such individuals are the ones you probably were thinking about in your post.

patrickdh 18y ago

Any chance we get an enlightened rewrite of the article that will serve to correct misconceptions that all startupers can’t distinguish between finance and banking. It won’t make me love my banker anymore today. He's sitting on his fat ass conservative banking job riding the credit crunch!!