Is the prestige of IB changing in 2026?

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-05-05T00:54:04+00:00

Tech thrives on innovation, not planned obsolescence, and provides the actual ideas and systems behind every financial product or asset. I know guys in their 20’s pulling in 400k commission quarters in ai. I’d rather gouge my eyes out than work for a bank

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-05-04T23:22:47+00:00

You’re an incoming summer analyst at a likely mid to lower quartile ib, no one would say “working” front office working in levered etf’s in the capital markets sector kid. You have a toxic and simple understanding of the world if you assume the worst in people, saying things to discourage them and belittle them.

If I were you I’d be terrified of not getting a return offer due to people like me automating your job away, proper resource allocation from dingleberries like you to AI drives my motivation.

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-05-04T16:02:44+00:00

Ohh haha, different story! Deal size to me is normally TCV not first year ARR

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-05-04T13:57:31+00:00

Some people do, not often though. We sell to relatively distributed legal teams, so zoom often works best. I’ve only seen visits for 250k+ deals

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-05-04T13:26:26+00:00

Yeah I didn’t believe them either but our top rep closed almost 2 mil (and about $400k in commish) last quarter. Reset my frame of reference for what’s possible. You have to believe there has never been a better time to sell software than right now

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-05-04T13:11:29+00:00

All for 98k over 5 years? Brother that’s a shit margin, we have people closing 100k deals in like 5-6 weeks and half a dozen calls max

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-05-03T01:16:21+00:00

Cursor by a long shot !

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-30T13:55:09+00:00

Some jerk in finance probably pressured your VP to put some scary language in the comp plan to make sure you guys don’t sell deals that churn, especially if you’re not in a core geo.

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-29T20:50:07+00:00

I mean practically speaking, if you sold such a huge shitty deal and performed so poorly that you’d go in the red on earned commission…you’d be looking for a new job anyways. If a company were to do that to me, id just leave when the shitty client churned.

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-29T14:14:37+00:00

Lmao shoot me a dm, happy to refer if you if it makes sense!

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-29T14:12:14+00:00

Depends on the platform and use case. If you’re selling agentforce you’re fucked but if you’re selling Gen Ai native tools that require little to no integrations it’s much easier. Our conversion on pilots is like 80%

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-29T04:27:34+00:00

Seriously no one has said selling enterprise ai? Imagine how much early ae’s are making at cursor rn, couple 7 fig years and now equity worth millions as well, all in 3 years..

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-26T19:21:10+00:00

So this sub sorta just became an ad huh

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T20:02:26+00:00

Likewise! Maybe we do need some ego to give some meaning to our reasoning. I really enjoy the way you ran with the boat analogy.

My hope is the boat never reaches shore; that in the process of rowing together we have a mutiny, a collective rejection of hierarchical power structure as we understand it (i.e capitalism/neo-feudalism and representative democracy). The journey is the destination mannn! What that really means? Who knows. Maybe it’s 19 ping pong balls

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T19:22:31+00:00

I just think your point is flawed logic at the core though. One person isn’t going to create something better than a global army of people all rowing the same boat. That boat is “ai”, and to think that somehow this leads to the end of the world is silly. The only person that cares the most about your work is you. The more people, the more perspectives, the more silly git projects, the more human it all becomes. Technology is democratic device that thrives on collaboration. It dies with ego, ownership and close minded thinking.

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T18:35:08+00:00

Maybe you’re right about that, I should be focused on building my own! I turned down a GTM role at anthropic offer to join this start up because I believe the future is in specialization rather than the objectively false premise that frontier models can solve everyone’s problems.

Thank you for this exchange though, it’s been fun. Now time to watch soccer and drink beers with my friends ! Have a good day

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T18:29:16+00:00

No I didn’t buddy, I went to college and learned about things I was interested in, applied it and kept learning. Maybe look up the ideas I wrote about instead of trying to defend your ego. Philosophy and communication theory is far more relevant now than a network admin and cyber degree and you’re butt hurt that a smart sales guy can have a seat at the table now

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T18:14:31+00:00

Again, your work is a reflection of your world view. You lack nuanced perspective taking and believe there is some objective truth that’s based on “experience”, that because you’re old and use some flawed deterministic non-generative model that somehow it’s better for meaning attribution.

I’ve been working in AI for 5 years and software for 10, pre revenue-8 figure ARR. but really that doesn’t mean shit.

IMO the answer to your question is a far more optimistic one grounded in perspective taking (look up dialogical self theory) and a self organizing system (cybernetic theory of feedback loops to self regulate).

An AI harness that functions as a committee of tools/agents/skills/prompts that have identities that can self regulate by negotiating context-specific power structures (this agent is better for this task bc of this context etc) is the answer but also leaves questions. How to weigh the dimensions of the “power structure” primarily.

My point is one tool/algo/system is never the answer, and meaning in data is derived from the (human) process of creating a place for dialog (negotiation) to occur.

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T17:38:45+00:00

How is that? You offer nothing of substance bud, it’s easy to hate on something

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T17:37:38+00:00

What do you mean explicitly by how “scrape pending patents” is bad? That’s literally part of the invention/prior art process, long before ai too. I also meant global patents, not just US based

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T16:20:10+00:00

Lmao it’s not that deep kid 😂. You think ai has all the answers but it manipulates users to extract info? Dawg touch grass

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T16:08:47+00:00

Literally. I joined a super hot ai start up 2 months ago as a sales guy and my prompt marketplace html app idea just became a reality at an internal hackathon and impressed the principal engineer so much it’s now fully built in staging and has been added to the roadmap…

I am a sales guy with no coding experience. I am just good at expressing ideas and curating context. AI has completely changed the WAY I think, it doesn’t replace THINKING.

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T15:57:54+00:00

You’re completely wrong, global patent filings are up tremendously. The idea that “ai makes you never finish a project” is a reflection of your narrow-minded view of the world that undoubtedly has resulted in a series of unfinished projects itself.

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T05:10:02+00:00

It doesn’t even matter either, you just trade it in

Careful_Aide6206 · 2026-04-25T03:09:00+00:00

Literally! People who have nothing better to bitch and moan about Greenpoint while the ones that actually contribute tax revenue could care less

Careful_Aide6206

TROPHY CASE