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In Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, a book that is never far from me, the colours refer to two careers. The first is the army. The other is the priesthood. The setting is Bourbon Restoration France but it could be almost anywhere in the west, at almost any time until the dawn of industry, such was the importance of these vocations to the national order.
In our world, the two ruling careers are no harder to name. It is tech and finance, The T-shirt and the Gilet, that have first refusal on the ablest graduates. It is tech and finance whose executives are interviewed for their musings on politics and life. As the Google office in King’s Cross nears completion, London, an ancient financial hub too, is a useful place from which to assess these distinct clans.
And to learn to prefer, on average, the company of finance. There is a client-facing side to that business — the dinners, the silver-tongued sales calls — that instils a minimum of suaveness. In much of tech, the “client” is a vast and remote public. So no such practice.
Note that, while the world’s financial centres are almost all urban, tech often chooses a low-density setting, such as the Santa Clara Valley or the Fens. Even Bengaluru is India’s Garden City. Some of this is historical accident. But it is also the result, and perhaps a cause, of tech’s social diffidence. I needn’t dwell on the sector’s ultra-individualist political turn here. Or the Andrew Huberman-led zeal for health, whose logical endpoint is a scandalised recoil from bodily contact. Even on the warmer side of tech, that of effective altruism and people aching to do good, there is a trace of Beatrice Webb about the approach to humankind, as something to help rather than like. Tech’s real or potential achievements on behalf of us all might dwarf those of finance. But over a drink? Give me the FX sales-trade bod.
Another thing. Finance has more — don’t laugh too hard now — humility. Precisely because banking in particular has a bad name, at least post-Lehman, at least outside America, its practitioners have to tread gingerly these days. People whom the world is disposed to hate tend to learn a sort of pre-emptive charm. (Which is why the biggest snobs in Britain are almost never Etonians.) Tech hasn’t had its 2008 yet, and might never. It is high on itself to a degree that can be easier to respect from a distance than to be around.
“Humble” doesn’t mean interesting, of course. Nor does “suave”. Because I have to come up with ideas for a living, I will put up with a lot for a conversation that throws up a eureka moment. So, which side is more stimulating company? The raw processing power of the tech minds I encounter leaves me standing. But my test — am I still thinking of the discussion on the Tube home? — is met no more often by them than by bankers or hedgies or less gilded professions. One problem is the tech world’s impatience with history, which is inevitable when the grandest companies don’t much predate the millennium. The result is a fixation with transient events and “trends” that someone with a wider lens might recognise as froth.
The other conversational glitch is that undergraduate contrarianism you see all the way up from the local crypto bore to the billionaire class. Your finance bro is hardly immune. (“Putin just wants a warm water port.”) But something about belonging to an establishment profession will tend to take the edge off. The archetypal tech genius — fabulously credentialed, but somehow as overeager to impress as an autodidact — must be peculiar to a young industry.
All ethnographic observations about these two tribes have to be qualified, of course. For one thing, tech and finance can be hard to tell apart. (Where should we file Sam Bankman-Fried?). Still, much the biggest change in the world of work since I entered it is the relative decline of the one against the other as the prestige industry. If all finance retains is the social edge, tech will find it a trivial deficit, next to pay and power, if also much the hardest to overcome.
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