To all those guys who took the conservative banking jobs

1) Jobs are investment banks and asset management are not risk free and not conservative. There is almost zero job security and - as seen - you won't know you were fired until the day you are. With small startups CEOs will communicate things much better and you can usually see things coming. Case in point, Lehman UK had a fairly succesful business, however all their cash was pooled in Lehman US. So on Sunday they got a call that their cash was no longer available, so they had to put a profitable business in administration.<p>2) They are not risk free, because your bonus depends on your performance (not in all segments, but in many your performance is directly measurable in money). No one cares about salary - it's all about the bonus.<p>3) You do gain a broad skill set working in finance. It probably looks very narrow and simple from outside, just like programming would look to a non-programmer.<p>4) On one hand, in a startup you create something tangible and in finance you are just a glorified broker. On the other hand, startup valuation is very chaotic and many startups would not exist if there were no bubbles. In finance it is very clear what you and your company are paid for and how much it costs.

This guy is really ignorant. It's the same mentality that thinks the valley is impervious to bubbles and inflation.<p>What? Really, "you get the satisfaction of knowing you aren’t a complete tool bag every time you wake up in the morning."... They may have lost their jobs, but you lose at life.

<i>you get the satisfaction of knowing you aren’t a complete tool bag every time you wake up in the morning.</i><p>whilst everyone reading your blog has the exact opposite impression...

&#62; (not sure how this works when a bubble bursts, haven’t been around long enough).<p>Well, after the last .com bubble burst, there was a lot less ping-pong with the CEO, and a lot more "You want fries with that" going on, as I understood it.

"<i>p.s. does it annoy you that i don't capitalize any of my letters on here?</i>"<p>Yes, yes it does. Unless you're a cockroach who can't work the shift key:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archy_and_Mehitabel</a>

The shift key really doesn't take that long to depress, I'm not sure how not using saves you time.<p>I had the same realization, that I had better job security at a startup, when I revisited some people I left at uni doing postdocs.

Of all the career paths that I know of, finance and technology are the two that probably hold the greatest appeal to me. I might have gone into finance when I was younger but it just wasn't on my radar.<p>As others have commented, there are far more similarities (between finance careers and the startup world) than there are differences. Some of my closest friends are investment bankers and portfolio managers. They have a deep interest in the world around them, are wicked smart and do what they do because it gets them juiced like nothing else.<p>I'm definitely not wicked smart but the other two characteristics apply to me so I can relate to their chosen path and don't revel in the sh*t that's hitting the fan right now.

I didn't sit back, and chuckle when I saw 20,000 people potentially lose their jobs. Even if you don't like Wall Street, you don't want to see that many people looking for work all of a sudden.

There is no such thing as a conservative banking job at these companies. All of these firms have strongly cyclical business, resulting in aggressive hiring and regular layoffs, and think nothing of canning an entire department if they don't need it any more. Also, at higher levels, the odds of being sacked out of the blue for political reasons increase greatly (e.g. new VP arrives, fires the next tier of management and brings his friends from his last company). Also, if you work in IT you risk being made the scapegoat for some failure outside your control (note the rating agencies trying to blame the subprime crisis on bugs in their ratings code). And if you do get canned, it's merciless - I've seen it happen to people on holiday, people who have just signed mortgages, and so on. These people are escorted from the building by security and then forgotten. You also have to contend with the risk of burnout, one of the reasons why there are relatively few employees above the age of 30.<p>You have to do exceptionally well to receive the grand salaries and bonuses, as these are heavily skewed towards the minority of top-ranked employees. Plus, for every 'master of the universe' there are 10 people in compliance, legal, audit, helpdesk, facilities, hr, IT, back office, etc slaving away.<p>Going into wall st is an aggressive career choice.

1) Can't even spell Merrill<p>2) Banks wash people out. You think everyone who starts at one ends up on top?

Are you guys not paying attention or what? The financial industry is NOT going under. It's doing fine. It's doing what coders would call a refactoring, and it is nowhere near to collapse. And the developers at those industries are certainly not getting laid off. Don't react based off 24pt headlines, first think about the real situation.<p>And YouNoodle is a slimey business. It may be successful, it may make a lot of money, but I still don't like this parasite businesses who contribute nothing of real value, and get created solely by marketing gimicks.<p>And a word to Sam: lay off the uppity behaviour till you have had a down. Nobody wants to watch a move where things just go up all the time, it's the middle of the movie, where the hero is doing wretchedly that is the heart of the story.

This guy sounds like a tool bag.

does this guy really that the economy tanking is somehow any better for startups than it is for bankers?

Oooh... this is just asking for bad karma for your start-up. Fire him, he's bad luck!

"you can sell your soul to an enormous investment firm and they, in turn, will make you rich with not very much risk involved"<p>This has merit.<p>Most of the world is chasing a dollar, if not for survival then in the pursuit of a decent, good or great life. Glory and vanity plays a large part especially for high net-worth individuals. Fear too, for attaining some type of status amongst one's peers. Startups are no different in that respect. But, 'Selling your soul' is more likely to occur on Wall Street. If you want your soul, then 'do the right thing.'

I'm not a wall street hater, but it's not hard to understand why people feel a little tinge of poetic justice about LEH el. al. -<p><a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=announces+layoffs+stock+price+up" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?q=announces+layoffs+stock+price...</a><p>I know that this is bogus on so many levels but I'm just saying that the perception is that foreign competition puts pressure on companies to layoff and offshore and then wall street is in the bleachers going wild when layoffs are announced.

after hearing feedback from everyone on hacker news and other places, i’ve decided to pull this post as it was misinformed and inflammatory. sorry if i made you mad!

Any chance we get an enlightened rewrite of the article that will serve to correct misconceptions that all startupers can’t distinguish between finance and banking. It won’t make me love my banker anymore today. He's sitting on his fat ass conservative banking job riding the credit crunch!!

Lehman bros: 150 years. Startups: ???

Is this guy's startup profitable or is it dependent on that superfluous 'investment capital' stuff?

Other than the chortling about people losing jobs, I agree with this guy.<p>Finance and portfolio folk really create little.<p>They are gamblers in the basic sense: their highest goal is gaining as much as possible in return for as little as possible - the cheapest, easiest way.<p>It is a curious thing that as many of us grow, the less interested we are in that mindset. Our eyes start to open to the costliest, hardest way.<p>It's not to be found in investment banking, finance, and the market any more than it is playing the lottery.