The big difference between I-banking and most everything else is that the employees get a pretty huge chunk of their value-added. You've got enterprises with relatively low numbers of employees and huge revenues. Add in a highly competitive hiring market and relative ease of starting small new companies in good times and you get big bucks for the workers and a relatively flat salary structure. The only thing that approaches it is the high end legal market. Last I heard, about a year or two ago, going rate for the first salary out of law school was 165K plus bonus. Your typical partner makes about ten times that at most, the top handful of rainmakers maybe forty times. Contrast with the salary structure in most other sectors.