I was an esoteric derivatives trader at an investment bank making money off clueless clients. We actualy prided ourselves, as a prop desk, on not being client facing. I went in expecting to parse global markets for inefficiency while pioneering the frontiers of 21st century finance. As time went on I found that the firm was content with mediocrity (as it could survive by simply existing in its role) and had no time for risky business like thinking.

You delude yourself into thinking you're inherently superior, a "Master of the Universe", even as you have never been able to explain to your mother what you do. Sooner or later you realise your colleagues are smart but terrifically insecure human beings, valuing their roles for who association with the firm's name makes them rather than what they actually do. Thus hierarchy is strictly enforced and innovation rages furiously in quaint, safe areas, e.g. introducing "new" leveraged/inverse hedged swaps, while ignoring fundamental assumptions, e.g. the trading floor should be siloed by product.

The bureaucracy and technical debt, combined with constant turnover in the under-paid operations and IT staff, mean that gaining understanding of the firm's as a whole as of no less than a quarter ago is a Herculean undertaking. And it's worse when you talk about the sales traders - none of them understand their product (they don't need to - the client's the one taking the risk), it's a miracle if they know a few shortcuts in Excel, and every one of them has an opinion on how xyz company (or country) should re-structure without having read a single term sheet or prospectus.

Luckily, there are start-ups that are raging equally furiously but with un-paralleled agility towards the financial sector. Alas, we'll have to find a new slot-in role a la consulting, investment banking, and sales & trading for insecure college graduates without hard skill sets to plump.

Note on recruiting

I've seen some comments tacitly saying Messr Smith should have known what he was getting into when he signed up for the job.

I was recruited by a very charismatic and values-driven MD when I was 19. Our desk merged with the rest of the firm's shitty culture when he was fired for being too ambitious. I didn't join for the six-figure salary - I turned down other offers that paid more at the time. There are lots of other people I know, brighter than I am, who were similarly drawn to the thought of a dynamic work-day filled with brilliant, ambitious people all working to solve difficult problems (that could be a tech company's recruiting ad...). Maybe I should have been more clairvoyant, but in the end what drives people to finance and what drives people to tech isn't all that dissimilar - the unique cultures change like to unlike from there.