Here’s my favorite pair of charts from David Kochanek’s latest hedge fund compensation report. The first shows how much people get paid, by job title:
and the next shows how happy they are, also by job title.
Quite the inverse relationship, it seems! The accounting types get paid less than anyone else, but are also much happier with how much they’re paid than anyone else. Meanwhile, the portfolio managers and COOs, who get paid more than anyone else, are generally pretty unhappy people. Indeed, overall, a whopping 61% of the people in the hedge-fund industry are unhappy with their jobs.
Of course, it comes as no surprise to see the lowly analysts at the bottom end of both charts. But maybe people might (or should) be much less keen to become hedgies if they knew that only one in three hedge fund managing directors is actually happy with their lot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_d issonance#Boring_task_experiment
‘When asked to rate the boring tasks at the conclusion of the study (not in the presence of the other “subject”), those in the $1 group rated them more positively than those in the $20 and control groups. This was explained by Festinger and Carlsmith as evidence for cognitive dissonance. The researchers theorized that people experienced dissonance between the conflicting cognitions, “I told someone that the task was interesting”, and “I actually found it boring.” When paid only $1, students were forced to internalize the attitude they were induced to express, because they had no other justification. Those in the $20 condition, however, had an obvious external justification for their behaviour, and thus experienced less dissonance.[7]‘