In Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, a book that is never far from me, the colours refer to two careers. The first is the army. The other is the priesthood. The setting is Bourbon Restoration France but it could be almost anywhere in the west, at almost any time until the dawn of industry, such was the importance of these vocations to the national order.  

In our world, the two ruling careers are no harder to name. It is tech and finance, The T-shirt and the Gilet, that have first refusal on the ablest graduates. It is tech and finance whose executives are interviewed for their musings on politics and life. As the Google office in King’s Cross nears completion, London, an ancient financial hub too, is a useful place from which to assess these distinct clans. 

And to learn to prefer, on average, the company of finance. There is a client-facing side to that business — the dinners, the silver-tongued sales calls — that instils a minimum of suaveness. In much of tech, the “client” is a vast and remote public. So no such practice.