It’s easy to understand why Ruth Porat, the chief financial officer of the venerable investment bank Morgan Stanley and one of the most powerful women on Wall Street, would want to head west to become C.F.O. of Google.
She will be in charge of the finances of one of the world’s most valuable and most innovative companies. We don’t know her compensation in the new job yet, but Google can comfortably afford to match or exceed the $10.1 million in total compensation she was most recently paid at Morgan Stanley.
And, of course, the weather is far better in Mountain View, Calif. than in New York.
But the really interesting thing is not this one big defection from Wall Street, nor even a handful of other high-profile moves of people from finance and politics toward the technology world (Anthony Noto moving from Goldman Sachs to the Twitter C.F.O. job, and the former Obama advisers David Plouffe to Uber and Jay Carney to Amazon).
More interesting are the decisions of thousands of less famous names, promising young businesspeople and engineers who will shape the future of the American economy. And to add to the anecdotal evidence that working in Silicon Valley is the hot thing on elite college campuses, there is some solid evidence that Ms. Porat isn’t the only person deciding that technology offers a more compelling opportunity than banking.
Consider the records of where Harvard Business School graduates have gone to work. In 2008, 45 percent of M.B.A. recipients there went into financial services, versus 7 percent into technology. Finance still leads the pack, but the gap is narrowing fast; in 2014, it was 33 percent finance versus 17 percent technology.
More Harvard M.B.A.’s Are Going Into Tech
Percentage of Harvard Business School graduates working in field
%
40
30
20
10
0
Financial services
Technology
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
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