You and Pay

I had a rather interesting conversation with a co-worker of mine this week. He told me that at a previous job he found himself unhappy with his management and wanted to quit. He decided that a good way to do so would be to claim he felt he was underpaid. When he brought up to his manager that he felt this way and was going to resign, the manager asked how much would be enough. He picked a random number out of the air that seemed absurd to him (about three times his pay), and the manager said, "Done. It's your fault you didn't bring this up earlier."

He still quit shortly after that conversation, and he's quite happy right now.

The lesson here is that money comes easy on the street. I, myself, was offered a good 50% raise to move to another firm not long ago. I stayed. 50% when you're relatively junior looks like a lot, but it will look like a lot more when you are senior. Would you rather move for a 50k raise or a 250k raise later on? Yes, that assumes that the 250k raise does not come later on anyway. Well, something interesting you see in the investment banks is that the most senior people have spent some 20years at one firm or another. Yes, 20. That's a lot. You will see that a lot of the big-time senior hires (the ones poached for $1M+) spent some 20 years at another firm. You'll find your pay catches up to your market offers very quickly.

That being said, the other quality you find in senior people is that they live and breathe whatever it is they do. The senior i-bankers love the deal. They want to be talking about that new issue ALL THE TIME. The senior traders love the markets. They always talk about their market, and when they're not they're using market terms anyway ("They're willing to pay what for your house!? Oh, you have to hit that bid!"). I've said it before, and I'll probably say it many more times: You need to love what you do to advance in this industry. Otherwise it will just wear on you.

Love what you do, and the pay will come. It doesn't matter whether you choose to trade, do sales, i-banking, tech, quants, it doesn't really matter. There's upside everywhere if you're good at what you do. Trust me.