I don't know if it's the same for you Oxonians but my colleagues who headed for consulting/banking straight after graduation are often retraining to go into engineering, and many of the engineers are now heading towards consulting! I guess the grass is always greener on the other side. The engineers want money and status, the consultants want meaning and a healthier life.

Although SpaceX is pretty awesome. I wanted to apply to Lockheed, Northrop and anybody else involved in aviation and space (reading about the X-37B these days, I still get that pulse of excitement), but unfortunately, they needed US citizens. Many of my neighbours ended up working for the various F1 teams. I worked briefly for Schlumberger's research centre in Cambridge which was, in hindsight, awesome. A massive, airy site, loads of expensive toys, really cool fun "engineer types" complete with thick beard, and an awesome French-run canteen including traditional Thursday leg roasts. What academia should be like! I got to chop stuff and make high tech toys and test them with not an MBA in sight.

edit - and the most academically successful people almost all went on to MIT to do a PhD. No idea why. Something about that place.

Well, funnily enough I seem to be going that way. I know an awful lot about the financial side of things (Options, derivatives, etc), but I'm more and more drawn towards technological things such as latency minimization and smart execution.

I think the real problem is pay. I got offered £11K/pa for an internship in engineering out in the middle of nowhere. I ended up taking an internship in marketing for 15. My friend at Goldman got 37.

To be fair unskilled new grads - in any subject, from any university - aren't worth much. Even the banks basically take a bet on which 20 of the 200 of the intake will survive and absorb enough knowledge to produce value (basically a bunch of cheap OTM calls). The first few years of experience determine a lot of things because they allow you to gain the competency and experience you can then sell as useful work (and thus decent coin).

The prof that sent me to India called me to his office on my last week, and showed me Legionnaire by Murray which he was reading. Told me it was an interesting read and I should check it out, so I did. The gist of Murray's advice was that you don't need to follow the tracks of the set career path to do well in life; in his case, he went soldiering aged 17 in Algeria at the worst period of the bloodiest colonial war the French ever waged, in the unit specifically set up to do the dirty work, and that was his "higher education". He then went off to Hong Kong and somehow rose to run a bank there, and through a bunch of international adventures is now chairman of Glencore. I don't know what the standard is for saying someone led an interesting life but he certainly qualifies.

I think the prof's point was to go and take some risks and go east young man and live a richer life, which I more or less ended up doing, but I'm not chairman of Glencore, not even a Hong Kong bank director, so don't know whether my judgement that it was worth it really is worth much.

And how many top managers these days don't have an MBA? There's a sense that jobs used to be somewhat open-skilled, in that everyone could just sit down and learn them. That's still the case, but nowadays you need paper to prove it.

The exception is in new business areas, which is why they are probably also the most interesting for career travellers. Anything that has shortages needs to entertain applications from people without credentials.

The economy is also not growing at a fantastic rate compared to earlier times, and the job market even less so.

Almost none of the trading heads had an MBA. Even within the traditional management, few of the ex-consultants had one. And yet the business is one of the oldest ones in the world. The key is that the main requirement for moving up was the value created for the firm (which was and still is privately held, mostly between the founding family and the head traders); this did not seem to correlate with having an MBA, but the firm culture was to grow talent rather than hire outsiders.

I've seen businesses where MBAs hire more of themselves "at competitive salaries" and nobody actually has any hard skills. Those have very negative cash flow, but also are very good at raising more money to match it. Not a fan of the degree, but maybe I just saw the bottom of the barrel.

Actually where I started the partners were mostly school leavers who'd worked their way up from (literally) running around with bits of paper. Some of those guys are roughly in their late 40s-50s, running some big desks around the City.

But they don't seem to hire anyone without a degree anymore.

I actually thought I would join the military out of school and jump out of planes and shoot people, and somehow I ended up getting a job writing compilers instead.

Life is weird.

As a founder I can tell you that my LEAST favorite part of the job is the financial stuff - granting how necessary it is - which takes most of my time. It's a means to an end...that end being making absolutely mind blowing breakthroughs in Augmented Reality technologies for consumers.

If you're in SF I have a friend who does finance at a medium sized startup.