I spent over a decade in financial services. Data science, AI, risk — the kind of work that sits close enough to the money to see how it moves, but far enough from the front office to wonder why they earn three times what I do.
The naive story is simple: they earn more because they contribute more. Supply and demand. Your wage reflects your value. It’s clean, it’s intuitive, and I believed it for a long time.
I don’t anymore.
An M&A banker earns $2M arranging the sale of one company to another. The deal would likely have happened anyway — maybe with a different bank, maybe at a slightly different price. The banker captures value from the transaction. They don’t create the underlying value. Meanwhile, a public health researcher earning a fraction of that designs a vaccination programme reaching millions. The impact is enormous. The compensation reflects none of it.
What the market actually prices is scarcity, willingness-to-pay, and bargaining position. Not contribution. A nurse creates enormous value but is easily replaced, works for cost-constrained employers, and can’t withdraw labour without people dying. A crypto trader creates questionable value but is scarce and can walk to a competitor tomorrow. The market sees leverage, not impact.
Financial services stacks the deck in specific ways. Fees are charged as a percentage of notional value — 1% of a $5B deal is $50M, regardless of effort. The products are complex enough that customers can’t tell if they got a fair deal. Banks compete on prestige and relationships, not price — cutting fees signals weakness. And the buyers are spending other people’s money, so price pressure evaporates.
The tell is retail banking. Same industry, but the products are simple, customers can compare, and switching is easy. Result: margins have compressed, and it pays like a normal industry. The high-comp pockets in finance survive precisely where opacity survives.
If wages truly reflected value, then teachers became less valuable since 1970 — real wages fell — while finance workers became three times more valuable. Nobody believes that. The jobs didn’t change that much. The power dynamics did.
None of this is a reason to leave finance. I have a family to support, I live in one of the most expensive cities on earth, and the system doesn’t reward you for opting out on principle. You can see the game clearly and still play it. That’s not hypocrisy — it’s clarity. But I’ve stopped pretending that what I earn is a measure of what I’m worth. It’s a measure of where I sit in a system that prices leverage, not value.