Joining investment banking in Sept. 2008 isn't buying low and selling high. It's more like buying Nasdaq futures at 3500 in Oct. 2000.<p>The industry will always exist, but "investment banking" will lose its rather singular cachet as finance becomes "just another industry", with a relatively normal set of trade-offs and paying normal salaries. What we observed over the past three decades was a bubble wherein financial professionals out-earned their counterparts elsewhere by a factor of 3-10. That's on the way out; finance is about to get much poorer, both in terms of the compensation it offers and the talent it can draw. On the upside, other industries, including technology, stand to get much richer.