“I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I suspect that you can determine the career destinations of a future generation by observing what TV shows they enjoy. It comes as no surprise that kids who grew up watching Star Trek in the 1960s chose to work and build the field of computer science as adults. But a different curiosity is how MBAs choose their careers: in a way, it shows which careers have peaked in importance. In the 1980s, they pursued Drexel Burnham Lambert before the cataclysmic burst of the junk bond bubble; in 2006, they were furiously swarming to be traders of mortgage-backed securities like sheep; and today, in the wake of tech antitrust, they’re joining Facebook as product managers. Always late, never early.
Growing up, my peers were all obsessed with the TV drama, Suits. Unfortunately for some, it turns out that pursuing the field of law after watching the show would have been career suicide. More than a decade later, the job market for lawyers is only now reaching pre-2008 levels, which is largely explained by smaller law school classes.
Bigger firms like Skadden Arps are taking the lion’s share of hiring leaving the rest out to dry. Out of the 30,000 law students who graduate annually, only a minuscule few actually go into the corporate law both ambitious kids and glamorous TV serials are made of. I believe the parable of law – a once high-earning profession on the speedy decline – is a harbinger for America’s other prestigious, formal careers like finance and advertising.
The ‘Powerless’ Broker
New York was famous as the cornerstone capital for attracting ambitious, young kids who were unclear of their futures: the Pete Buttigiegs of the world. Although, two things have changed since his time: there is a net emigration out of New York at a rate of 300 daily, and the job market in the city’s formal labor mainstays (advertising, media, and finance) have cratered.
I’m sure we’re all aware of how the web has completely changed the landscape for digital media and advertising, but what about finance? Wall Street’s not safe either.
“Andrew Juhasz believed that a job on Wall Street was the ticket to the good life. The former West Islip, Long Island, resident landed a position on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange when he was 23. Not long after, he was taking home $200,000 a year.
“I thought I’d be one of those people who retired rich in their 40s,” he says. But then came algorithmic trading, and he began to see his colleagues lose their jobs. Out of the 350 traders at one of his former employers, LaBranche & Co., there were 26 left when Juhasz was recruited to work for another firm.
“I thought I was safe,” he says. But two years later, he was laid off. “It was a shock,” he says.”
It’s pretty brutal to get laid off in these formal professions because rising to the top doesn’t imply that you have any useful skills. Michael Lewis pithily remarks in his genre-defining book, Liar’s Poker, that the fact that banks were hiring art history majors out of undergrad (read: him) told you everything you needed to know about the industry.
Many of these Wall Street scions were excellent salesman, but when the algorithms entered the scene, the Masters of the Universe were no more. Like Juhasz, when you realize you can’t make it to the top, would you still live in NYC? If you have the ambition to make it big, then stay; yet, the reality is that people move to cities for jobs – something I touched on in ‘A Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’.
As these bastions of formal power are abruptly decaying, technology is the only flourishing industry in New York. This resurgence has its roots after 2008 when the Bloomberg administration made a task force to figure out why areas like Silicon Valley and Israel’s equivalent, the Haifa quarter, were succeeding. Like a version update, every industry was attaching the suffix ‘digital’ to their sectors. We saw a similar move with Long Island Tea changing its name to Long Blockchain in 2017.
For the average New Yorker, it was earth-shattering; what happened to the ‘city of dreams’ in a decade? That aphorism perhaps only holds true now if your dreams are in technology. Indeed, the city has made the public education of computer science a priority and boasts over 9000 startups. And if that wasn’t a blessing, Amazon and Google have chosen to expand their workforce in the city. Certainly, this sounds like amazing news, but who for?
Everyone says the technology industry is a meritocracy, but I’m inclined to disagree. We still have copious amounts of sexism, racism, and even agism in the sector. The industry was only regarded as meritocratic because in the early days of the internet, there were only male weirdos who wanted to join the club – movies like the Social Network hadn’t yet convinced your neighbors and extended family that it was alright, if not cool, to work in technology. People thought this new-age sector would be welcoming, but ex post we’ve seen that the way in which applicants are selected, coding interviews as one example, benefit those who have had the money and werewithal to jump through these unceasing number of hoops. I think being selective is great, but it’s the hiring process that is abnormally Byzantine and outdated.
“I’ve been in IT for quite a long time and had my fair share of interviews from the perspective of being the interviewee and interviewer. I’ve dealt with my fair share of interviews where the interviewer came from on high with a with their favorite Computer Science question. Some of my favorites, design a B-Tree sorting algorithm, write code to solve this polynomial equation, write a compiler…
My favorite question after those is, how often do you do that day to day? The answer 90% of the time, never. Most of the time, although the companies don’t like to admit it, they ask Computer Science level questions like that are a form of ageism, once your out of the CS program for a while and not exercising that knowledge day to day (like most high level business programmers) you loose that knowledge. CS questions are great at finding people who a.) studied an algo book before the interview or b.) are reality right out of college”
Movies like the Wolf of Wall Street gave us stereotypes about bankers during the heyday of finance: drug-addicted, power-obsessed, and filled with greed. Aren’t those same qualities pervasive in pseudo-liberal, tech hubs everywhere? If you’re not convinced, replace the cocaine with the MDMA, the managing director with the VP of product, and the end of year bonus with the IPO exit. They look eerily similar; the difference is that we just don’t hear about the inner machinations of tech power as much. Antonio García Martínez, the author of Chaos Monkeys, divulged his time in startups and the early days at Facebook; for that, he was blacklisted by the greater tech community for blowing their secrets. A tactic discussed is a tactic disarmed and speaking truth to power definitely has its drawbacks.
This is probably why some journalists are consumed with hatred against everything techies stand for: much of the ‘saving the world’ illusion crumbles with a closer glance. This was Eric Weinstein’s point about how scientific employers conspired with federal administrators to manufacture lies that America had a dearth of STEM workers. It’s cheaper to bring in foreign talent and pay them less with no benefits. Upon closer inspection, the tech community shares some semblance to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle about the exploited lives of immigrants in Chicago:
“Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery.”
What would have happened if Elizabeth Holmes was caught after falsely diagnosing millions? This is becoming a greater issue in the tech world and obviously, forgiveness is easier to ask for than permission. As technology and the physical world start to become indistinguishable, it is pertinent to understand how many more Holmesian cases we’re willing to endure before the fantasy fades into nothingness.
If you missed it, check out my other post: The Final Colony.