What are the good financial analyst companies?

How are analyst positions in financial companies for computer science graduate?

• Why do most people feel that those position are not that excellent enough for CS students.  I see that the financial analyst roles pay really well when compared to the sof tware engineer role at a technical firm.Why do top CS students always take up Google/Facebook/Apple over other well paying analyst position at Sears/Morgan Stanley etc.  --Just for a moment consider I /one which we are talking about is  equally interested in pursuing both career paths.

• Answer:

  Just for a moment consider I /one which we are talking about is  equally interested in pursuing both career paths. Let's say you are equally interested in both software/internet and finance and you're indifferent to: location (Bay Area vs New York) the types of people you'll work with whether you're crafting software or doing financial analysis prestige, i.e. you think both are as prestigious, or you just don't care Then I guess it'll boil down to which one pays more, and right out of school it'll probably be close, but I'm guessing investment banking is guaranteed to pay more in 5 years assuming you stick to standard career paths on each side (e.g. if you start a company after 2 years at Google and it takes off, that doesn't hold true.) Why do most people feel that those position are not that excellent enough for CS students? If it boils down to prestige (since when you say "excellent" it sounds like you're talking about prestige), investment banking has gotten a bad rep after the recent financial crises, etc, whereas tech/software/internet has really taken off recently--Apple is the most valuable company in the world, startups are getting more popular, Facebook is about to have a $100MM IPO, and there is insane demand for software engineers. Prestige is about how people whose opinions you care about perceive these careers, so relatively speaking, software has become more prestigious recently. Why do top CS students always take up Google/Facebook/Apple over other well paying analyst position at Sears/Morgan Stanley etc.? If you're a top CS student, chances are you're pretty great at programming, and since people are generally good at things they love, chances are you love to program. You don't get to program in an analyst role, whereas if you're a software engineer, it's what you get paid to do, and if you get better at it you get paid more. So most top CS students become software engineers because they love to program, simple as that.