Quote from coolweb:
Support people are important, just not important enough for me to pay them anything above then what gets them by average. And Yes, I actually run a business to know what I'm talking about unlike most of the evangelical posters here.
I don't think any of us would pay a support person a penny more than what he is "worth", we are not socialist hippies, afterall.
All I can say is that a good ops person is very hard to train and find, since there a lot of implicit knowledge here, there is really no manual. If you go to a credit derivative, even easier, a basket option ops group, those who actually know what options get cleared OCC and when, what options are kept OTC as journal entries, where to get prices for them, etc.; these kind of people are very rare. True that their work doesn't require a lot of analytical thinking (which is why they don't get paid the big dollars), but to a fresh kid would be utterly confused by how clearing and settlement works, it is freightening. By my estimate, we have had back-office people who are in the industry for 5-10 years and still have no clue as to how the whole thing works.
I owned swaptions as a part of my analytics group for a while. Tthe funny thing is that no one on the trading desk knows how the whole thing get settled and cash moved. At the end of the year the desk would often write off $5-6M in settlement errors that they ate (into their P&L!). It was funny (and sad). So a group of us ended up proposed to the head of derivatives to hire a good options ops manager (I paid for 50% of his 1st yr salary from *my* budget), and he was guaranteed $450k / yr, he was worth every penny.
In any other industry, telecom, utilities, etc, all the ops guys would do are just "super monkeys" (nuclear powerplant operators = super monkeys), they have a manual, and it is virtually impossible to deviate from the standard ops procedure. When I first got to finance (first in technology), I was amazed that no one in ops would know what the whole #$%! process is, it is truly sad. But this also made a person with good knowledge hard to find and therefore paid a lot more than average.