Glenn Hutchins, tech investor and co-founder of Silver Lake Partners, has some advice for young people starting their business careers. And it doesn’t necessarily include working for a big bank.

In a recent interview with me at the Asian Cultural Center in New York City, Hutchins spoke about banking and the beauty of now being able to do whatever he wants. One highlight was when I asked him about working at Chemical Bank where he started his career in 1977.

“It was awful,” Hutchins said.

Wow.

Why?

“Well, coming to New York and getting involved with finance and stuff, that was great and fun and interesting,” he explained. “And by the way, in those days, the investment banks had yearlong training programs, which were very much the equivalent of a first year of an MBA today. I focused on credit analysis. So that was pretty good. But I was clearly not constituted to work in a large organization. I was more of an entrepreneur, was more independent-minded. And in those days banks were very slow-moving, bureaucratic, lethargic, hierarchical. And it just wasn’t much fun.”

Hutchins, who helped run Silver Lake — the giant private equity firm whose portfolio companies have included Dell, Skype, Seagate and many others — also said that banking back then was an environment where golfing skills mattered. And it was at the expense of brainpower.

“I did quite well in the training program, which means: what you do with your best student is you give them the worst jobs. Right? And so I got a job as a credit analyst. So I would literally sit in the basement and have to do credit analysis of company after company, while all the people with lower IQs and lower golf handicaps than mine got to go call on customers and try to do business,” Hutchins said.

I wondered what happened to those people.

“They could get promoted because they were generating profitability,” Hutchins said. “I couldn’t because I was only generating intellectual product. And so I had to leave to get ahead.

“The business analytics that I took with me proved to be invaluable over the course of my career because it became increasingly less about a good handshake and a good golf game, and a lot more about analyzing cash flows and understanding enterprise values.”

“Put one foot ahead of each other every day”

I asked Hutchins if he thought it was at all worthwhile for young people to go work at a large Wall Street bank.

“I think so. I mean, it depends. Right? You can get very good grounding and experience and learn a lot about making investments, but you’re not going to move up as rapidly. You’re in much more of a hierarchical large set of organizations today than you were 35 years ago.