Wall Streeters are getting paid 'much less' than they'd expected

Wall Streeters aren't getting paid as much as they'd hoped.

Bloomberg Markets polled some 1,280 financial pros across the industry earlier this month and found that 48 percent of them are getting paid "less or much less" than they'd expected before entering the industry.

Those expectations aren't entirely unfounded - at least for those who got into the industry in the past 8 years or so.

For a lot of the banks, the financial crisis led to cost cutting and heightened regulation, which has meant lower employee compensation.

Last year, Goldman Sachs spent the least amount of money on employee pay on record - barring 2009, according to Bloomberg. Employee pay made up 36.8 percent of revenue (in 2009, in the midst of the financial crisis, compensation was 36 percent of revenue.)

Bloomberg did the math and that averages out to some $131,000 less per person than employees were making in 2007 before the crisis. So it's no wonder Wall Streeters are feeling a little short-changed.

But whether that shrinking compensation extends to the executive level is another question. Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein's compensation rose by $1 million last year from the year prior, to a total $24 million. Since 2010, it's risen an average 13.3 percent annually.

At Morgan Stanley, CEO James Gorman saw his pay jump by a third. And while CEO pay at the major banks has dropped considerably in comparison to the average employees', it's still at a healthy 124 times the average banker's pay.

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