The incentives in finance are remarkably well-tuned to rewarding employee effort. Make the company 300k? You get 30k. Make the company 300 million? You get 30 million.

That seems so easy to game. Do some small change that brings short term gain, bag the profit and let the rebound be the failure of another team.

Doesn't that pretty much describe the 2007-2008 financial crisis?

And every such crisis before it, and the next one too.

The crisis was 07/08, but the buildup was almost a decade in the making, does that count as short term?

the law in the UK is that material risk takers bonus pay over a certain amount (couple of hundred thousand) is deferred over 3-5 years and can be clawed back

Maybe the profit share is earned out over time? Otherwise I would agree with you..

If you think it's easy to game 30M in short term revenue, please try to do that in a large firm.

The risk/compliance teams would be interested in your strategy.

I'm a socialist/anarchist, they would never give me that opportunity :)

You could try this overall strategy in the stock market and see how it works out ;)

how do swe get into finance?

I see quite a few SWE jobs here in Singapore in finance, mostly realtime C++ order management. If the advertised salaries are real, they're very well-paid (300-700k USD, plus bonus).

First step, understand what Finance means in the scope of technology work.

i dont have a clue

The path of least resistance is to become a well known C++ or systems guru.

This can be done by contributing substantially to the language standard, a compiler, etc etc.

Or you could learn COBOL!

I think you would have to target the scope even smalller to particular areas of finance probably quant or trading within a hedge fund. The majority of jobs at a large bank are mostly fixed salary with limited bonus. There are many jobs that are essential but don't capture a percentage of the value they generate. For example processing transactions is essential for a bank but typically doesn't pay large bonuses in that area.

>There are many jobs that are essential but don't capture a percentage of the value they generate.

Isn't that strange?

Unfortunately not. Nurses, doctors, bin men, car mechanics, plumbers can all be essential at times but rarely pay large bonuses.

It's the scale.

One important blue collar worker can help a limited number of people at a time, usually one.

One line of code can affect what billions of people are doing.

Large banks can pay very well for the right software role, but there's so much more nepotism than big tech that it's pretty much impossible to land these unless you have a godfather in the industry AND you are a recognized prodigy.