[BookmarkSaver]

>I'm only a hobbyist programmer myself.

There's also a very important point to be made here. Large-scale software development and self-directed programming have very, very little overlap in terms of time allocation and mental effort. To exaggerate the difference somewhat, it is like comparing building a go-kart in your garage with designing a factory that produces commercial, road-ready cars.

[aaavl2821]

I tried to make that point in the post, though I don't have experience building large scale software. If hobby programming is building a go kart in your garage then the analysis you do in banking is like playing Mario kart :)

There's a huge jump in intellectual challenge of hobby programming vs the analysis you do in investment banking, and I'm sure there's another huge jump between hobby programming and large scale swe. Though I don't know which jump is harder. And I'd imagine that designing the factory in your analogy probably is the work of very experienced engineers, and jr eng is probably more like designing and building the machine that attaches all the wheels as part of a massively complex automated system