The new economy, the employee disappears, now youre a entrepeneur, and executive, or a temporary worker. the money is with the first two, not the last one.
Temping today is working in nearly slave-like conditions....and incredibly, it appears to be growing.
Very little on Wall Street is built for longevity and durability. Management and culture are too impatient. "Let's make a dollar today, and we'll figure out tomorrow, tomorrow."
You want names? In all seriousness, most aren't "truly incompetent", they're just not particularly good. Which goes some way to understanding why software and systems in financial services are, for the most part, utter crap. I also accept your statement about many business decisions/processes negatively affecting the outcomes of technical development. The business side folks on the street are a sorry lot, by and large, in terms of ability.
I used to work in a warehouse, over the summer in between school, driving a forklift. Management got this plan that instead of loading trucks with pallets and it taking two trucks to haul a full load, they decided to fit it all on one. They hired temps to stack about 16,000 small boxes on the trucks from floor to ceiling. They would come in at 6am and leave at about 4. THey hated their jobs to say the least. Management just hired them starting off with this new idea so that none of the regular employees would get mad and quit... Then they slowly made the transition to making us do it lol. Quite a few temps quit on the job, but I mean it wasn't that bad they were just lazy a lot of times. Two of them would take all day to do it. But another guy and myself could do it in about 4-5 hours so we had to start doing it instead. Just thought I would share my experience with temp work lol.
I think anyone smart enough to get hired on Wall St. generally has the potential to be a decent (or maybe even excellent) programmer. However, code quality is a function of more than just the programmer. The culture makes a difference. I've been a solo operation for a while. I harbor a lot of guilt for accusing others of bad code in the past, mostly because every time I f* up now, I take the heat and have full visibility into "what was going on in the programmer's head".
Omigosh, the back office of JP Morgan was the pits. Only high point of the place were the skirts....wowzer.
Been there, done that. Get this: had a gig at a wealth management firm pulling in about $3 million in fees per year. I was trying to fix their messed-up systems built by inexperienced programmers. Nothing was documented either. I had to figure out EVERYTHING. The VP of operations, a chick, spent about 1 hour with me during the entire engagement (over 8 months). I never saw her do much of anything but talk on the phone, drink coffee and eat. She never contributed an idea, a kind remark or anything really. I'll bet she was pulling down at least $250k per year....likely more with bonus. I had to sweat all of the details, debug that mess and I made half of that salary rate in fees.
I believe you. I'm a stock trader, but I got into the game late. I always feel like everyone in our business who just sits on their butt (and collects a check from everyone else's work) all got their easy money in the 90s, had the sense to go buy HFT hardware, and milked that into today's situation. Now, there's no easy money left in the game and I am still at subsistence level. (For all intents of purposes, in our business, subsistence level is anywhere from 85k-200k, variable. Non subsistence is when you cross the 7 figure mark annually, at least twice.) So, basically, the thing that you and I are both doing wrong is that we timed our entries into this business incorrectly, and lower margins don't help at all. For serious money, we need a disruptive/strong edge or great technology. Otherwise we're generally going to limit ourselves salary wise. Are we underpaid in terms of effort relative to others? Probably. Are we underpaid in the broadest sense? Probably not; we made bad trades, timing wise. Of course, one could argue timing is almost luck, like when you got out of college and when/where you managed to find a job, but... generally speaking...