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I am a software developer (I know, so unique around here!) at the beginning of my career. I expect to get an offer from a trading company next week which will easily double my salary, possibly more depending on the market. The tech stack is amazing and exactly what I wanted to work with. The office and benefits look great. People seemed fun when I met the team and I was even assured that overtime is rare. I will get training in finance subjects so this is a perfect gateway into the industry. All in all, if one is to treat a job as simply a source of income, I cannot do much better than this. Especially with the current crappy labour market.
But I can't shake away the feeling that something is wrong here. The company is a market-maker in one of those areas of finance almost entirely uncoupled from the real economy and became pure speculation, so it makes all this money via basically imposing a tax on gullible layman day traders. There is absolutely nothing of value being produced. I am worried that when I get a bit older, I will regret that I wasted my potential on something so useless and zero-sum. Especially since until this point I have always worked on projects with a real "product". Often code that goes into things you could hold in your hand etc. It gives me enormous satisfaction, but pay is meh and life just seems to be getting more expensive. I know there is some value in providing liquidity to the markets, but I cannot fool myself enough to ignore that this whole operation is just a bunch of very smart people using their learning and wits to leech off the broader society. I had an informal lunch interview round and it felt a tiny bit embarrassing to be served lunch by someone who is at least doing something useful and in turn has to serve these people who aren't.
I know some people here work in finance. Would appreciate your perspective or anyone else with an opinion
I get the impression you're looking for some straight talk, so here goes. As someone who has spent time in finance, I think it's honestly more likely you'll look back on this moment, and be amazed how naive you were, as so many of us are when we are young.
I'm basically going to copy @reknizfff here, because he's right. If you want to build a life of comfort and ease for yourself and those you love - a very respectable ambition, by the way - then doubling your salary will make that twice as easy.
If you want to make a difference to the world, it will let you give twice as much to charity; or retire twice as early, and spend the remaining time working on anything you want. That's assuming you only double your salary, of course; the potential upside, and the corresponding effects on your life, could be far, far greater.
You're asking if you should give all that up, to what, build an app? I can't speak to your motivations, but I find financial work plenty satisfying; either way, no-one looks back on their deathbed and says "I wish I'd shipped a physical product".
I haven't worked in finance but I have changed my mind about the morality of certain financial instruments enough times to understand that my formulation of "morality" isn't written in stone.
What if OP is wrong about the morality of what his company does? Does he understand the financial system as a whole good enough to guarantee his intuition? I mean Marxists think owning capital at all is some form of immoral let alone financializing it. What if OP changes his mind about what he considers moral or not in a year or two, I certainly did that many times in my short life. What gives OP such a strong reason to feel something that is legal and fills a need in the market is immoral, it's not like he is going to launder money for criminals who murder children with chainsaws.
If he finds his job truly immoral he can quit, but if he doesn't take it he is doing it at great opportunity cost and just might find himself holding the bag a few years down the line. What if AI ends up blowing up the world? Should the people who worked for PyTorch in 2017 take moral responsibility for what their creation has facilitated? How does he know he isn't already in a situation like that? How abstract do you really want to go? Should we consider Alan Turing and Dennis Ritchie to be evil?
"Feeling good about what I do" is such a hippie-goody two-shoes sentiment. You'd don't simply choose to say that you have to first be able to afford saying that. I'm not dissing OP but preemptively dissing anyone who tries to fool him into not getting richer*.
Yeah, if OP has moral issues with finance, they're certainly worth thinking over; from my perspective, I've never really understood the "finance is evil" position. Most finance jobs aren't making the world a better place, sure, but nor are they making it any worse; they're morally neutral, same as most tech jobs.
I have previously done (non-finance) work I disagreed with, and that really sucked, and I wouldn't want to go back. So if OP really doesn't want the work, it's their call. I do wonder if some of this isn't just nerves, though, or taking liberal platitudes a little too seriously.
Maybe as the OP, I can expand a bit more on my worldview concerning finance. I am not a "liberal" in the American sense nor anything to further left. Most of my understanding of the role of markets and finance in society comes from reading Polanyi, who doesn't take a very positive view on it but also has the common sense to credit these institutions with enormous amounts of economic development and peace between nations connected via international finance. But I also think that since 80s and especially since 2009 the finance class has evolved into some sort of grotesque aristocracy that warps most of real economy and state power into constantly feeding its members more resources while using those resources extremely anti-socially (i.e. conspicuous consumption and buying more influence).
I am not as naive as to literally reject the opportunity to become a minor member of a modern day aristocracy. That is why I applied and passed the gazillion difficult interview rounds after all. I still hope to be able to jump ship to a more product oriented company in the future if the tech sector manages to lift its nose and pay me a comparable salary
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