I have spent the majority of my career in investments and have made good money doing so but maybe not quite as much as some others in the industry. Right now, I make an above 6-figure cash compensation but definitely below £200k then there is annual portfolio-related compensation which may or may not pan out in 8-10 years time. I like much of the day-to-day work even if sometimes I feel like I am bit of a round peg in a square hole. My issue is with the commuting into London (~3 hours a day) and business travel. Pre-Covid, I used to travel at least 1 week in every 3 and sometimes more (including 2-week trips where I get back jet lagged on a Saturday afternoon). I like where I live and don’t want to move because of family and friends and I would prefer to travel say only once a quarter for work. Once Covid is lifted, I really don’t feel like I have it in me to start traveling and commuting again.
I would like a largely remote role with some travel (or none at all) where I could go into a central office a few times a month or once a week. From what I can tell, this does not appear to be available in the investment industry but I could keep looking.
MORE BELOW - since I reached the character limit!
You have deep domain expertise and some coding skills. This combination is valuable. Everywhere across the investment industry, you see companies trying to get a little more clever with automation and code. There's a lot of opportunity that's never going to show up in job boards, but gets distributed through relationships.
Ideally, you'd want these opportunities to find you, or at least engage with the people who need this kind of skills combination.
And LinkedIn is just so great for this sort of thing. If you hone in on a niche - in your case that lies at the intersection of coding and investments - and consistently engage on these topics, you'll see this transformed into an audience, which turns into opportunities. It may not happen overnight, but clearly you have a long-term mindset.
If you'd like to read more on this approach, I've recently written about audience-building tactics on LinkedIn: https://medium.com/skill-strong/how-to-build-an-audience-on-...
A number of years ago, I launched a startup with a friend which lasted about a year after which I took an investment job. Before leaving to launch the startup, I worked evenings and weekends to learn Javascript, React, HTML/CSS, Git, and NodeJS. I solo developed an advanced MVP which was almost fully functional. I created a white-label frontend in in Javascript, Bootstrap, and React and deployed it to an S3 bucket with AWS CDN in front of it. The backend used NodeJS, Express, GraphQL/Prisma/MySQL, and Up to deploy the server to AWS lambda (it was a monolith and not microservices…think of it as being similar to Google App Engine). In the end, I did regret using GraphQL which was newer tech and would have preferred to have used REST API since it created data sync problems on the frontend. I did also use Mailgun with email templates and wrote my own auth because I tried Auth0 but needed finer security controls since the product had complex data access controls. Here I am basically trying to demonstrate that I have decent full-stack software experience.
Since then I have learnt Go and created a server with PostgreSQL and frontend with Vue.JS. I have also done a bunch of easy to medium/hard exercises with Go on HackerRank. I enjoy the immersive, problem solving aspect of programming that makes time fly.
As I see it, my two best options are to either find a remote investment role with less travel (which could be hard/impossible) or a remote software role for less money. I am guessing that I could start at an entry level role and work my way up to 100k p.a. or close in 3-5 years. I am smart and capable with good business sense and reasonable emotional intelligence. This gives me more confidence in being able to succeed in software where work for the next 5 years and then move to part-time or infrequent contract work. The alternative is that I could stay in investments and keep traveling….then FIRE in 3-4 years time. I am not sure I could stomach that since I want to prioritize family and friends. I want to be able to go my death bed having a lived a full life with wonderful, loving relationships.
Any thoughts on my situation? Is there anything I am missing? For those of you in software, would you consider hiring someone like me? Is there something I am missing? Should I try and go for something better than an entry level role?