On traditional Wall Street, IT is considered a back office cost center. Back toward the end of the dot-com boom, investment banks were grumbling how the dot-co

On traditional Wall Street, IT is considered a back office cost center. Back toward the end of the dot-com boom, investment banks were grumbling how the dot-com boom had loosened requirements for IT to wear suits to work, and how with the bubble coming to an end, maybe they were going to try to bring the suits back. Sticking to that dress theme, what were financial analysts talking about when Facebook was doing its IPO road show two years ago( http://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-takes-heat-for-hoodie-on-ipo-road-show http://www.cnet.com/news/zuckerberg-takes-heat-for-hoodie-on... )? While some unbehagen is felt with these sartorial changes, the real threat to traditional Wall Street comes from hedge funds like Renaissance Technologies, which hires no financial people, yet has spectacular financial returns, pushing Jim Simons up to #34 on the Forbes richest list. Renaissance hire astronomers as well as people like Peter J. Weinberger and Leonard E. Baum, but no traditional financial Wall Street people. Tossing the usual nonsense has led to spectacular success, meanwhile banks like Lehman Brothers go under. Other companies of a similar model have sprung up such as D. E. Shaw. Many of these hedge funds are under the radar. I noticed Andy Lutomirski of AMA Capital Management on stage at Linuxcon this weekend along with Linus Torvalds, Andrew Morton, Greg Kroah-Hartman and Shuah Khan. These hedge funds are popping up and well-financed, and the traditional investment banks are beginning to build out in-house clones of these successful hedge funds. But the culture hurts it - at Renaissance the quants and computer scientists are the profit centers, at traditional Wall Street investment banks they are still considered cost centers who take orders from the "financial people" in other departments. How many people who start as programmers or systems/network/database/etc. administrators in the IT department at investment banks versus those who start off in sales or investment banking? It's a sign of how things are that so many of these hedge funds are popping up outside of investment banks. It's not just due to regulations. One nice part of working at a large bank is they are global, and a software change you push out can go to London, New York and Tokyo, and be used by people worldwide, within a massive software, systems and network architecture and IT staff. But you can get that experience working at Google or Facebook or Amazon as well. There's not much going for you if you work IT at an investment or commercial bank. There are sinecures here and there, but usually you're better off at a technology company where you're seen as part of a profit center, not as part of a major cost center. Banks are being forced to change due to outside pressure, but they are resisting the change from within. If you like dealing with bureaucracy more than technology, working at a bank may be for you. Otherwise you're better off working at a technology company - or at least a hedge fund.