> Why are bankers so highly paid?

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.

I have rarely worked somewhere (as a tech worker) where I received a better work computer than a manager. I consider myself an above-average negotiator (compared to my peers) and my comments fall on deaf ears.

Excel is such a highly valued skill compared to machine learning in the mind of bankers, they think their job can't be replaced by AI as did the Luddites of the 18th century when industrial revolution took over.

Then explain why we've seen almost no automation of the workflow of investment bankers of the last 15 years even though it is a massive payroll expense in banks that are aggressively cutting headcount and automating back office functions.

It's not a job that is easily displaced by code.

who says the next 15 years won't see the automation of investment bankers? We've only recently started seeing the rise of deep learning to reach new heights like AlphaGo, put Picasso to shame, drive cars, replace managers in Japanese factories, mimic human voice, predict conversion and see patterns & deep links unclear to the human.

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.

It's going to be one of the last jobs to be automated because it has a massive amount of client facing/relationship work and despite your disdain for it, the fact is that it is more complex and demanding than the vast majority of white collar jobs out there. It also is an extremely small industry in terms of actual headcount, probably 150K worldwide

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.

That's a good point. I have been thinking along similar lines about the push to 401k instead of pensions and people having to do their own investing. There are people who can focus 100% of their time on finance whereas we have to be good at tech, which already is a complex full time job, but then we additionally have to be investment experts.

The comp is standard across the industry with extremely limited room for negotiation. It isn't a function of them being 'savvy'.

> The comp is standard across the industry

GP's question was "Why is the industry standard high?"

That is my dream. I would love to share the wealth with my employees, nay that is in accurate, partners that show up 9-5pm who weather the ups and downs not funding some coke snorting gordon gekko wannabe fuckboy lifestyle who thinks $100,000 USD is pocket change.

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.

> Why are bankers so highly paid?

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 bankers, lawyers and businessman is to negotiate and evaluate risks. They do that all day along.

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.

Same reason the top paid executives aside from CEOs tend to be CFOs: they know what they are worth and know to ask for that and often refuse to settle for less.

For one, they routinely work 80+ hours a week and are on call constantly.

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.