The skills acquired at their day jobs also enable them to be much more financially savvy than tech workers. Tech workers, I imagine, get better work computers for similar reasons.
It's not a job that is easily displaced by code.
I don't see why we can't automate the workflow of coke snorting gordon gekko wannabe fuckboys on wall street in the next 15 years as will a large chunk of professional careers. To boot, we see lot of the floor trading becoming automated as a result of the innovation we had in the past 15 years.
Luddites of the 21st century will hit the mid to lower upper class hard, I'd love to work on such problems.
We've had plenty of stuff like NLP for 10-Ks and management calls but the job has been relatively unchanged overtime save for the introduction of CapIQ, Bloomberg and Excel. Which isn't to say that it can't change, but that it probably won't happen anytime soon.
GP's question was "Why is the industry standard high?"
I'd give my hard working employees a good chunk of the company over VC any fucking day. I'd love to see a PHP developer take home high six digit bonus checks, even after they leave if the stuff they build keeps making the company money, sort of like the million dollar royalty fees that were paid to developers of Tomb Raider II.
Because a job candidate being told at an interview "we are looking for people who are motivated by things other than money" would walk out, and the banks know it.
The jobs of an engineer at a startup... oh wait is that a job? I thought they were just naive kid fucking around and making money for the board[1].
[1] Don't worry. You'll understand when you'll see your CEO negotiate £8 millions more shares while children are taking the job for less than 4k and they think it's a good deal. Best day ever! :D
You can't fix other people but you can choose whether you want to be a naive child or a business man.
Almost every day of their job is managing extremely time sensitive transactions that are often the most important single event in the lifecycle of any given company.
That's why we should start teaching people that they won't get rich.
The article shows how most employees are too occupied counting their imaginary fortunes to seek the most basic grasp of how their options really work.
The race for riches in early-stage startups has become a gold-rush, and now that we are clearly after the peak, most employees are chasing the dreams of yesterday's big-payoff exits, failing to look around and notice that these were rare even back in the day, and now they hardly ever happen at all.
Investors got savvy about protecting their investment, while employees are just as clueless as ever, so even when big IPOs do rarely happen, the employees see very little profit.
This works very well for the investors. The downside is the erosion of equity as an incentive, but even more so - any sense of working towards a common goal and shared success, which is what startups are supposed to be about.
This will hurt the entire industry. On an individual level, if you accept substantially lower pay, for a tiny unprotected bit of equity and someone's unsubstantiated promises that it will be "one day" earn you millions, then you are a fool.