It's not a question of so much disliking the engineering fields, its that within the corporate world of the likes of GS, the IT/IS and software/hardware groups are literally considered a cost center. If you don't generate revenue and contribute to the firms bottom line then you are nothing and comp'ed as such. Oh, could I tell you some stories.... ;-) So a lot of the CS/EE/CE peeps who end up at GS want/try to move over to the business side.
jrsmee, can you please tell about your experience prop trading for a prop trading firm? why you're happy you dont do this anymore?
Don't even think about going into engineering unless you want to be Sh*t on. Engineering has to be one of the worst career choices one could make these days, especially here in the US. I'm sure its a different story over in Asia or europe. Especially since that's where all the high-tech jobs are now. Getting a degree in engineering is a total waste of time. These days it take 5 years to get one and the material you learn is worthless. You're better off learning some CAD program on your own. I personally work as a Design engineer now, and I haven't used one thing I learned in college. All that math and science will do you no good unless maybe you can apply it too making some real money in the markets. Like $420k/yr instead of the whimpy $60k they pay engineers. My advice would be to stay clear of engineering unless you like to travel around the country looking for a new job every 6 months to a year.
That means that they are ripping off their clients. Stay away from big firms, their mutual funds and their fantastic products, they give you pennies and they take the Gold.
The first year analysts get $50,000 and the 25 year managing directors get $3 million. How about lawyers? I remember an FT article last year (on a plane to Beijing, plenty of time to read it cover to cover) talking about how each lawyer in the US pulled in an average of $1.5 million in revenue or something like that.
It was total revenues from some specific aspect of law (i want to say it was corporate law services) divided by the total number of practicing lawyers and it came out to a shade under $1.5 million in revenues for EACH lawyer. I don't know if you can search FT.com for it, I think it was in feb of 2005 when I read it.
I made some calls to friends at GS, and they had already seen this article, which made the whole office laugh out loud. The first response was "...we just try to get a standard wage....no thought of a bonus" --- To be fair, the top guys get all the money. I'm told that 20,000 of the 22,000 probably won't see much at all. More power to those who make some of these "deals" come true. I just don't want the loyal ET'ers to get the wrong impression about all "jobs" on Wall Street. All the best, Don