Finance pays extremely well. Why make $100,000 at Google when you can make $300,000 at Goldman Sachs? But here's the thing: revenue per employee at Goldman is $1.1 million. At Google it's $1.2 million. At Apple it's $1.3 million. Divide net income by revenue and you get a similar margin for all three businesses.
This all suggests that tech companies can, and perhaps should, be salary-competitive with finance for engineering-heavy jobs.
But big tech companies like Google aren't hurting for talent. Plenty of bright young computer scientists would far rather than work at Google than on Wall Street, even with a lower salary, simply because they consider it more interesting and fun. It's startups that are being drained of talent by finance, and that's what the author of the article is concerned about.
Shouldn't google at least have far more non-salary related costs than Goldman?
According to Wikipedia, Google's profit margin last year was 29 percent ($8.5B profit on $29.3B revenue) and Goldman's was 21 percent ($8.4B profit on $39.1B revenue). You're probably right that Google has more non-payroll costs, but at least last year, Google had a much bigger slice of its money left after all costs, payroll and otherwise.
They could be salary-competitive with Goldman and still have a >20 percent overall profit margin. The reason they just pocket the money instead is that even with their meager-compared-to-finance salaries, they still basically have their pick of the finest employees. I think they simply don't feel that finance is stealing all that many good candidates. But if Google et al start to have a measurable "Shit all the people we want are ditching us for Wall Street" problem, you can expect to see their engineering salaries go way up.
Like most, this article attacks investment banks in the wrong way. Investment banking is not quantitative finance. It's core business is M&A, underwriting and asset management.
Keeping engineers out of finance is good for both parties IMO. Engineers and mathematics majors became "must haves" for financial firms beginning in the 70's and 80's, but really seemed to hit full throttle in the 90's, with the emergence of hedge funds, such as LTCM. Many hedge funds and I-banks saw arbitrage opportunities and needed quant guys to come in and build models to exploit these quickly, especially due to the rapid technology shift and speed.
Engineers and mathematicians don't really understand some of the key issues with finance and their models never are able to properly measure risk or build the proper safety nets against things that happened in the Wall St. collapse of '08, the Asian Crisis of '97, Russian Crisis of '98, etc.
I agree with the author to the point that engineers are best served in other industries. But, I also feel it would benefit the banks, as well.
You can't blame someone for taking the sure bet, especially when they're so burdened with debt. Crippling student loans are issue number one to address if new graduates are to be persuaded to be entrepreneurs instead of I-bankers.
Besides, there are way more PhDs in physics and math than there are professorships; the fact that financial firms hire them is actually a gain in their case, because otherwise you'd have a bunch of really bright people doing data entry or teaching high school, and not using any of their trained skills.
I'm just quoting, don't give me karma, give it to the reddit posters.
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Oh how I wish I could have the iPod hardware with an open source program in Linux to put music on it
You can. I know, the software that interfaces with iPods on linux are all something of a kludge, and Apple occasionally breaks compatibility and jerks you around. But you can run open software on your iPod and make it really easy. After screwing around with iPod loaders for years, I switched to rockbox and never looked back.
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken