I basically doubled my salary by moving from finance to software. And the job is much more interesting, my coworkers are smarter, people appreciate my work, and the food is free. (There are also fringe benefits, like finding things that annoy you about your desktop and submitting a patch to the OS that day.)

I find investment banking very interesting work, from the software side, but the market doesn't really care about software. You're always a "cost center", never a revenue center. Also you have to use Outlook, which I find unenjoyable.

I think that has changed with the rise of algorithmic trading it's the software making the money and they advertise 150k+ salaries in job listings I've come across in that industry.

Tech companies on the other hand seem to pay an average of $125k which seems to be the bare minimum you would need to survive in the bay area. Free food is great but if you figure out the value of it it is probably worth $5k per year tops.

Algo trading is a vanishingly small segment of the finance industry & a very small part of what an ibank like GS does. I don't have references to back this up, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have single derivatives deals that are more profitable than their entire HFT operation. Like most big deals the "sales" side makes the money in those.

Well so far extracting money from dumb customers is still an excellent business to be in. eg charging $47m for a spreadsheet with a $100m error [1] or helping Libya invest its money in trades that soon became worthless[2]. It is hard to make money like that from trading alone with such low risk.

But Goldman can see the writing on the wall, and now has 25% of its staff in tech, because the markets are changing fast. Stupid people will still make up much of the revenue stream for a long time though, and large companies that like to pay large sums.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/10/16/spreadsheet-mistak...

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/oct/06/goldman-sach...

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure starting salaries at GS and other banks are around $80-90k + a small bonus (10-20%?). Not bad, but definitely less than Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and other major tech companies. So if you're a software engineer going for the money, GS isn't really the place to be.

> So if you're a software engineer going for the money, GS isn't really the place to be.

Over the long term, financial services wins. The compensation curve is much steeper than most tech firms.

GS in particular pays crap wages according to salar.ly.

That's because you're looking at the wrong job title. For experienced engineers look at Vice President and Senior Vice President.

I'm well aware of the "everybody's a VP" system at Goldman. Those are the titles I'm looking at.

Do the stats include bonus? If you're a Goldman VP then your salary might be mediocre but your bonus will be significant

Salar.ly gets it's data from foreign worker visa applications how representative of the wider work force can that possibly be?

Different work atmosphere though