"Lies, damn lies, and statistics." :) When someone says "the average employee" at an investment bank made 600K last year, or brought in 1.25M in profits, keep

"Lies, damn lies, and statistics." :) When someone says "the average employee" at an investment bank made 600K last year, or brought in 1.25M in profits, keep in mind the old joke about how, when Bill Gates walks into a bar, the average guy in that bar becomes a multimillionaire. Every trader, salesperson, and banker has dozens of people working to support his or her work with paying clients. The support staff, which includes operations and IT, generates absolutely no revenue at all. (With possible exceptions for the small handful of people who write automated trading and risk systems.) Correspondingly, the support staff is not paid anywhere nearly as well as people who work in "producing" divisions. Notice that no one talks about the median employee, which would be a much more interesting metric.