Let me agree with most things you said below this part of the comment.
When I said kids think about this carefully, I mean they can. Regarding the parts of tech and the parts of finance that my son is interested in, he talked to some 20-30 people in each bucket (tech/finance) at various firms and and at various levels of seniority, both through the college network, as well as through my network. When he was at an internship last summer, he talked to his manager, and people above his manager that are some 20 years in the industry etc. You have resources to educate yourself if you choose to.
At last yearâs internship, and the upcoming one this summer (for which they had a 3 day event for kids that hadnât committed yet in October last year), I told him he needs to figure out the comp curve 1,5,10 years out as is understood by people at the firm, at different performance percentiles, and whether performance is a function of trainable skills or just luck etcâŠ
He is not unique. Many of his friends are the same way from what I hear.
Thatâs great he knew and spoke to many people. Good way to get a feel for the industry. i havenât met a kid like that. Our kids are younger so not ready for that but they are busy and I doubt theyâd talk to that many people. My family members did not do that but they ended up in great finance jobs and two in tech.
Would be tricky IMO to figure out the comp curve many years out. I doubt HR would share it. My own perspective is that in finance performance is more of a straight line based on performance. Some skills are trainable the most important ones are not ( soft skills that can put you in IB for example). Theyâll never say why someone isnât promotable. Itâs often inability to get along with others. In tech, itâs common to have a Senior person assign a number and they have to put folks on their team on a curve. Some get a huge pay increase others a very small one. Tech firms used to get rid of about 10% of employees every year or two. This hasnât happened recently because they canât hire fast enough. But that was a way to get rid of dead wood and also people whose skills no longer fit the direction of the company. Adding skills all the time is expected and required. This is true in finance but even more so in tech.
When it comes down to it, itâs always economics. Supply and demand. Weâve also found that our youngest family members and kids friends care a lot about money when they are young but switch once theyâve been in the job market a while. Hard to go 40 years in tech/IB.
There are a lot of people from his college at the internship place, and they gave a lot of time to the kids, informally. Senior people from the firm made themselves available one-on-one to answer intern questions more formally.
Wouldnât it be impossible to assess the soft skills that make someone promotable and earning much more? IME, the soft skills are what matters the higher up you go. For a Director level position, many people can do it, far fewer once you get to VP/ SVP. The in the C roles sometimes they are hiring for a person who is great with VC or someone who is a great presenter/ Evangelist, or someone who has some other skill set the board desires. Sometime itâs a weird combination. LOL.
We know a lot of people who are now board members and C level people. And many serial entrepreneurs. They have a wide variety of skills. Some when I knew them 30 years ago you wouldnât have said thatâs the one. Some you definitely would not have said, hey that guy/girl will be a major player.
I certainly think knowing the average pay per job and the skills needed is useful. Weâve found that our biggest promotions/changes as well as our friends were opportunistic. Either you created the opportunities through hard work, having a connection or you got pulled in by someone who knew you from another job.
Again, itâs economics. Everyone thinks theyâll be on the right side of the bell curve but few are. Most people get stuck or chose to remain at a certain level where they are comfortable. Some kids even actively manage their careers to make only x amount and retain their work/life balance.
Or maybe you are just talking about knowing what jobs are out there to determine the bell curve and itsâ range. I just donât know a soul who could tell someone where theyâll likely be in 30 years.
I am talking 5-10 years. Not 30. He was given 25th and 75th percentile numbers at the 5y point. The firm is very flat. Mostly no titles. Although everyone informally knows who the senior people are that make decisions. And this is a relatively hard skilled job apart from requirements that you be nice, and not be a jerk.
But I agree with you. Hard to have a 30 year outlook.
Been there and seen those firms under that description. Usually top numbers are high, rest is close together. We were just talking about titles the other day. The HR dept can confirm titles but not salaries. Interesting. In todayâs market hard to bring someone in with a title that doesnât match even if skills are there. But with appropriate title and skills that donât match can be done. We were talking about a merger situation.
My advice on the no titles job. Donât take it. Hard to move and too much control at the top. Some CEOâs/founders like uncertainty. Thinks it gives them an edge. It doesnât. Non titled orgs give and take responsibilities away based on other factors. They often also are lax about job descriptions or make up ones. But I donât like flat organizations. I like ones with lots of roles and opps.
The hard skills job aspect sounds good. YMMV.
5-10 years seems long but better than 30. 1-3 seems realistic. Beyond that. No one know, IMO.
:-). He is strongly likely to take it if they offer, and if he finds the internship interesting. He is not sensitive about titles. They said incentives will be aligned. There is hard revenue attribution. The money is respectable. Average tenure is 10 years. It is a partnership.
I think the focus on the trajectory of future pay is an interesting distraction, but might perhaps be better thought of as a rather noisy proxy for âinfluenceâ or âimportanceâ in society.
Billionaires continue to work to make more money, not because they need it, but because itâs a way of measuring âsuccessâ and gaining (or maintaining) recognition and influence.
But there are others who might be considered even more successful in society, even if they donât earn as much money: you donât earn billions from being president or from discovering the solution to Fermatâs Last Theorem, or even inventing the World Wide Web.
So for a super talented and ambitious kid, is the best way to achieve âsuccessâ like that simply to take a job out of college that pays a lot and will pay even more in the future? Or is it to find something new and (relatively) underappreciated, comparable to taking a job at Google in 2001 or Facebook in 2007? Are quant hedge funds doing anything comparably innovative (or even teaching you the skills needed to be involved in something like that in the future, as you could learn at say McKinsey or a PE firm)?
Why do they âneedâ to find the highest paying job either?
I can see how people get seduced by money in the near term. One of Sâs super talented friends had no apparent interest in tech until a FAANG company offered her a job. But thatâs not because she finds it to be a desirable career, merely because she wants to make some money for a couple of years and then will probably do something else thatâs nothing to do with tech.
What I donât get is planning based on what company has the best pay trajectory for the next 10+ years. Not only is it hard to imagine doing the same job for a decade but itâs surely more important to consider if itâs a job thatâs interesting now and gets more or less desirable over time (like the old joke that a law firm partnership is a pie eating competition where the prize is more pie).
I like the 80000 hours type thinking, because it emphasizes that youâll likely be spending most of your waking hours for the rest of your life on this thing called a âcareerâ and more broadly trying to imagine what you might be doing in a decade or two. The joke in our house is that at the age of 12, S had already mapped out his plan to run for president in 2048.
I am not going to be telling people what they should and should not need. Itâs a mostly free country. People factor in whatever considerations are important to them â interestingness, wlb, self actualization needs etc.
No one is telling anyone what to do. But you gave the example of the internship/job your S is looking at and that long term pay trajectory was an important consideration. My question is why, whatâs his thought process?
He is optimizing to his goals. I am not in the mood two discuss the complexity of his decision making process here :-). Suffice to say, he thinks he can figure out within 2-3 years whether he can retire in 10-15 years, while still doing an interesting job, and not working more than 50-60 hours a week.
Is this a common ambition for talented kids nowadays? Seems like it would be disastrous for the wider economy. I get the idea of being semi-retired at 50 after burning out from 25 years in tech or finance, which was a common situation at my college reunion just before the pandemic, but I donât know anyone in my generation who planned to retire in their 30s.
Question: would a career in computational biology be considered a Tech job or a bio job? Does anyone have insights on a possible career trajectory for this sub specialty. Thinking along on the lines of genetics/pharmaceuticals/protein mathematics and algorithms but curious as to what others think.
What I have seen many decades in, is that people who have attained enough financial resources to never work often do something very different. Some also will take a year or two off and come back to the same job but with a different outlook.
At some point ( usually after 50 years old), people realize they arenât going to live forever. Time is valuable and so is legacy. I donât think the independently are in it for the $$ so much as the legacy. What impact does anyone have on the world and do they enjoy getting up in the morning.
Pay really is a very small subset of happiness. I think the number theyâve studied is 70K beyond which not much else matters in term of $. Granted if you canât pay your bills or your expectations donât match your salary there will be issues. But great wealth doesnât give people happier marriages, better relations with their kids or more friends.
Itâs a hybrid. You really need to find someone in that field and have a one on one conversation about all the flavors of what the industry does. This canât be done on CC. I have some third hand knowledge, but donât want to expend effort to type stuff here about an area that I donât know better . I know a comp bio PhD recently started his first job at 200k. The biotech industry waxes and vanes. A lot of pre ipo players with associated risks. Most of the upside comes from going ipo. Otherwise hard to justify high wages because you are a cost center in a business that has yet to start producing cash. You need fda approvals etc to start producing cash. For a while it is unclear if the traditional leaders in the field (the biologists and the medicinal chemists) would treat the comp biologists as first class citizens or second class citizens.
Short answer, 99.99999% No. Esp, the 50-60 week part. Actually, donât think I know a soul who has ever done that even those who had amazing careers from the get go.
I am talking 5-10 years. Not 30. He was given 25th and 75th percentile numbers at the 5y point. The firm is very flat. Mostly no titles. Although everyone informally knows who the senior people are that make decisions. And this is a relatively hard skilled job apart from requirements that you be nice, and not be a jerk.