What does it feel like to move from a big company (like Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) as a software engineer to Finance (Goldman Sachs, D.E. Shaw, Morgan Stanley, etc)?

1) If you want non-software engineering job at a bank, your best bet is to get a job as a software engineer at the bank and then make a lateral move.  Also about the difference in pay.  Yes there is.  If you are an experienced software engineer, and you move from a technology role to a non-technology role, you are likely to see a massive pay cut. Also, not sure what you mean by analyst.  There is analyst the job title, and analyst the rank.  The analyst as a rank is pretty low.  The analyst as a job title can depend, but in some banks, there are tech positions in which the job title is analyst. 2) Everybody I know has at least a masters degree in something.  You might be able to get in with a bachelors if you have extremely high software experience, but you'll probably be better off if you have a masters (in anything). 3) For a software engineer, it's the standard questions C++, math puzzles, algorithm questions. 4) Investment banks are very control oriented, bureaucratic places, but there is a reason for that.  First of all, banking is a highly regulated business, and the regulations got a lot tougher recently.  Second, when you are dealing with billions of dollars, and something that could destroy the world financial system, people end up being *extremely* careful. Hedge funds are often more like software startups.  There are some hedge funds that intentionally try to emulate a startup culture. The big benefit is that you are part of history.  I remember being at a conference a few years ago, and the speaker told us that it was important that we write down what we were seeing and what we were feeling, because future historians would find what was happening to be pretty critical. Something to realize is that the world of easy money in finance is gone.  The world as it existed in 2007 is gone and it's never coming back.  What the new world is like, people are still figuring out, but it seems to involve massive government regulation and control.