London tech to finance
I have spent several years working as an engineer in tech and changed job a few times at startups and FAANG. But I don't like it because:
- the people (too nerdy and uninspiring)
- the work style & environment (too remote, low energy, lonely and disconnected from the real world)
- the work itself (prefer analysis to building, prefer bigger picture and wider skill set to hyper-niche, too much frustrating debugging/jira which senior engineers still deal with)
The only enjoyable or energizing parts are driving team process improvements and working under pressure into the early morning to hit deadlines or for on-call emergencies.
After uni (STEM at top UK target, not CS or econ) I fell into tech more or less by chance but have more interest in finance. I read the FT/Economist religiously, did CFAL1 literally for fun, build financial models in spare time, am introverted but like parties/networking lunches/etc (and people I meet often want to spend more time with me).
What should I do? I'm more early-MBA-age than MFin/MFE/MS-age, but there isn't as much of an MBA pipeline into finance in London as there is in the US. I'm a Canadian citizen and UK permanent resident, so London (or Toronto) is the simplest. Can I network into a TMT ER/IB seat even with several years unrelated work experience and no summer internship? Near-impossible given the economy? Trading would be better than tech and fairly easy to pass a CV screen, but quanty trading shops seem like mostly more of the same. As a final goal, something like RX / distressed PE / mezz PC would be ideal, but it's so far from where I am now I don't know if it's feasible.
Options I'm considering:
- US MBA --> NYC TMT IB or RX
- US law school --> RX, with patents/IP as a backup
- stay in tech with zero interest/motivation, even tech product management is of low interest
- quant trading
- network into anything vaguely finance, realistically at best boutique tech ER or HF quant/dev MO, then keep aggressively networking and trading up (boutique tech ER-->tech IB-->RX or a path like HF quant/dev-->...-->credit HF analyst?)
- management consulting to do more of the "team process improvements" I enjoy, then potentially lateral to PE/IB/etc
1&2 are big investments ($ and country change), so would prefer to only deploy these as a last resort. 3&4 don't develop a skill set I'm interested in, and have the problems mentioned earlier (especially tech). 5 seems extremely tough and low probability and 6 isn't really finance.
Thoughts?
Bump
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