<p>Okay... yeah, the day-to-day thrill of the job might not be spectacular all of the time... </p>
<p>But it's one of those slow-and-steady-wins-the-race kinds of things. I design these beams and girders and joists and columns one at a time, and slowly but surely, a building starts to form. There's a lot of nuance involved in keeping forces and boundary conditions accurate, and then there's construction administration work that all young engineers get to do, where you take the beams and columns and girders and spandrels and joists that you've designed and you go out and check on their progress every month, or on some projects, even every day. Then you get to watch your building being born, and even the most crotchety old engineers get pretty giddy about actually seeing the structures they've worked on start to emerge from nothingness.</p>
<p>Not to mention, some days, I get to do really cool things like construct computer models of pedestrian bridges and load them up with, for example, a hundred people jumping in synch (please don't try this with your local pedestrian bridge... not all engineers are as diligent as I...) and try and break the darned thing in whatever ways I can think of.</p>
<p>I would imagine that my experience is in-line with engineers in other fields, as well.</p>
<p>Engineering's one of those things where it's not flashy every second. It's not spectacularly thrilling, granted, but it's a lower-burning more constant excitement of watching things grow. If you like taming wild horses, maybe IBanking is more your style. Engineering's less like taming wild horses and more like growing watermelons.</p>
<p>^ There are way more than 1000...and consider that not everyone working in the investment banking division, has the job title of "investment banker".</p>
<p>I consider myself an engineer...my training is in engineering...my current job title is "business analyst".</p>
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There are tens of hundreds of thousands of engineers, but how many ibankers are there? Like 1000?
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<p>Well, let me put it to you this way. Goldman Sachs alone has over 35k employees. Now, obviously not all of them are bankers (i.e. there are surely plenty of secretaries as well as workers in the standard corporate staff functions, i.e. IT, human resources, marketing, legal, etc.) But even subtracting all those people out, and I think we can all agree that GS alone has thousands of ibankers. </p>
<p>Note, I use the term Ibanker rather loosely to also include sales & trading, asset management, research/analysis, quants, VC/PE and so forth. After all, in the context of this thread, those are also jobs that are highly likely to attract engineers. For example, I know a guy who graduated with an engineering degree from MIT and now works for GS Capital Partners, which is GS's private equity arm. Frankly, that's a job that is more desirable than is traditional investment banking. {It is now often times said that you work in traditional Ibanking only because you weren't good enough to get an offer in private equity.} After all, the boys (and girls) in PE not only make more money and have more power than do the traditional ibankers, but also work less. Sweet deal if you can get it.</p>
<p>when you guys say ‘IBanking’, do you guys refer to quants as well? If so, hows it a bad idea to go from engineering to becoming a quant?</p>
<p>’ Specifically, many people like the thrill of ‘the deal’ as well as the feeling of power. So they probably don’t mind working 100 hours a week on something they like. The fact is, an Ibanking job can give you access to power that most other jobs, including engineering jobs, do not. {Let’s face it, many entry-level engineering jobs are quite mundane.}'</p>