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Friends Don't Let Geek Friends Work In Finance
theodp writes "If Vivek Wadhwa remade Pinocchio, instead of The Coachman luring naughty boys to Pleasure Island to engage in mischievous behavior and be transformed into donkeys, you might find Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein luring bright engineering grads to Wall Street to engage in mischievous behavior and be transformed into, well, asses. While the practice of poaching engineering talent slowed after the economy tanked in 2008, Wadhwa is dismayed to report that thanks to hundred-billion-dollar taxpayer bailouts, investment banks have recovered and gone back to their old, greedy ways, snagging engineering grads who might otherwise solve the world's problems, making them financial offers they can't refuse, and morphing them into quants, investment bankers and management consultants. 'Not only are the investment banks siphoning off hundreds of billions of dollars from our economy with financial gimmicks like CDOs,' writes Wadhwa, 'they are using our best engineering graduates [25% of MIT grads in '06] to help them do it. This is the talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing.' He concludes: 'Let's save the world by keeping our engineers out of finance. We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge.' Amen, but how 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the Engineering farm after they've seen Wall Street?"
Mama don't let your sons grow up to be bankers........
cd pub
more beer
Maybe if you skipped the Enviornment more of us would be interested. I await the day I can celebrate the last Enviornmentalist being strangled in the intestines of the last trial lawyer.
Phrasing!
Happy people make bad consumers.
As long as the government views the biggest firms as untouchables, this will continue on for some time....
Since when should people not get to choose their own career path?
Heavier taxes on finance income, or some sort of legal restructuring or limitation of finance itself. If you can't get money for nothing... you can't get money for nothing. The wealth gap in the US is absurd. And don't talk about ability, unless I'm completely mistaken these people are not taking any more risks or putting in any more effort than any of the other MIT grads that continue to work as productive engineers.
Emotions! In your brain!
...but how 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the Engineering farm after they've seen Wall Street?
Give them the opportunity to change the world.
If all Engineers just buy some silver, we can get back at the banksters.
Google: CRASH JP MORGAN BUY SILVER
You sir have discovered capitalism at work! Why do people demonize businesses who seek out the best and brightest and PAY them for their knowledge and skill. Perhaps because they didn't get those well paying jobs themselves.
Smartasses will always chip in.
Who is Goldman competing against here? Are they trying to snatch these people up with huge bonuses because there are other financial firms (any major ones left?), or is it just Goldman's desire to grow their profits, or both?
Are we talking about engineers or computer scientists? How is someone with the skill set to create renewable energy devices or develop new and better water purification techniques going to help a financial firm?
The author is blaming the financial industry of enticing smart people away from an industry that under-appreciates its talent. Horrors!
Finance needs effective oversight, they need watching. If you solve that problem then your engineers won't be getting the offers they can't refuse.
As a nerd that has a passion for finance, one thing worth considering is that the work of finance itself is tremendously fulfilling (outside of the demonizing that happens from some ill-informed quarters). The problems that you are presented with are fascinating, you are surrounded with motivated people of incredible ability, and have unbelievable responsibility at a young age - where else would I get to advise the CEO of a company on his strategy at age 25? If you have never helped a desperate company raise capital to avoid going bust by working consecutive 100 hour weeks, I suppose I can't really explain the feeling. Most of all, the work is just interesting. Or maybe I'm the devil.
One could certainly turn this argument around and say we need *more* smart people doing finance, since the current crop of bozos keeps making messes the rest of society has to deal with.
I'm sure there are plenty of smart engineers out of work right now because some jerk decided to put a bunch of no-doc loans in a CMO. What if someone at Goldman or BOA had the brains to figure out that this was a dumb idea and counterproductive in the long term?
I thought it said, "Friends Don't Let Geek Friends Work In France".
Never mind.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
The really smart AND creative engineers will be too bored with finance to stay with it or won't even be tempted by the great paychecks.
Why go to Wall Street and maybe make tens of millions when a highly creative engineer can go and make billions? Assuming of course those people are actually motivated by a paycheck.
If you look at the true greats in science and engineering, they were driven by their visions: if they got rich in the process, it was just a side effect.
Wall Street will just get the uncreative, albeit smart, lamoes.
The old idea that people working in some specific profession produce nothing of value to society. How many times over the years has it been used to blame innocent people for society's problems, usually in preparation for a movement to purge the scapegoats?
Or, to put it another way, should we be saying this of geeks who go into teaching, especially at the primary level? It is true that they're unlikely to have the time (and, in this case, resources) to invent The Next Big Thing or make The Big Breakthrough. But truth be told, even for those people who go into engineering or research, how many people ever manage that? The answer: not enough that a few more minds working on the problem are likely to make much of a difference. Even in today's increasingly anti-intellectual society, we still produce enough great minds that we can spare some of them -enough, in fact, to accommodate all who want it- to go off and do other things than research and invention. And even if we did not, those minds are not wasted. Society still benefits when those minds go into other fields, just in different ways.
Five years out of school and working as an engineer, I make a mid five figure salary. Friends I went to school with who now work in finance make low six figures.
America is not interested in keeping its innovative edge.
Problem is they are going to work for the wrong team.
"This is the talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing."
If this were true then engineers such as myself who now work for a financial institute would not have left college massively drowning in debt. You think we all wanted to move on to work for a finance company rather than working in a research lab or more innovative company? The fact of the matter is the all mighty dollar draws us in because of the massive debt that college placed on us after we left. This country did not invest ANYTHING in producing resources like us. Thats the major problem, you want these people to go elsewhere how about actually investing in them and ensure they don't have to make a decision based on the money.
Reality check, we go where the jobs and money exist so we can live a good life sooner. I'd rather not be paying my loans off and just getting by for 30+ years when I can pay it off in 10 years. Its a quality of life issue and the people bitching about Goldman and company sucking up talent have done nothing to improve the quality of life for this talent. Its not like they cant, how about investing in there debt and requiring a certain number of years from them early on. Beat these institutes to the punch.
1. RollingStone: "Why Isn't Wall Street in Jail?": http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/why-isnt-wall-street-in-jail-20110216
2. "Inside Job"(2010): http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1645089/
After reading/watching these, I found myself wondering why I spent all those years accomplishing nothing in IT, when I could have been robbing banks from the inside with no worries about being prosecuted.
So it's fine to live in hell to you, as long as you're on top and have clever workmates so you can feel all clever and young and powerful?
Emotions! In your brain!
Good to know that you can work your ass off getting through a tough engineering or physics program and then be told where you should make a career, or better yet, have someone crap all over you because you aren't doing what they want you to do. These guys aren't just having a pile of money dumped on them and they sit back and idly code away. That is a very high pressure and cutthroat environment, and they pretty much know what they're getting themselves into. Heaven forbid that some of them might even find modeling and trying to solve complex nonlinear systems to be intellectually satisfying as well as coming with a nice paycheck. It also isn't the case that if they don't follow a career in financial analysis that they'd be out saving the world. The ones who stay in the field, the ones who don't go into nice academic positions (remember, we're referring to the cream of the crop ones here) still enter as engineers and physicists into industry working on the same things most of their colleagues are working on, most of which isn't save the world stuff.
And who is to say that you can't save the world from within the financial sector anyway? A while back it was fashionable to blame the physicists on Wall Street for ruining the economy (those guys running the investment companies were just poor saps duped by those crafty scientists, and really are blameless for what happened). My favorite was in the 90's, Orange County went bankrupt and the Robert Citron, the Treasurer, blamed the physicists. Turns out that he was making all his financial investments based on consultations with psychics and astrologers.
Engineers can't push 5% real growth year over year, but banks who can print-up money can push 20%+ pseudo-revenue. Make the dollar a literal of something (oil, eavestroughs, carpets, metal, something as long as it's real) and watch banks magical profits turn to nothing. Why be a General Motors engineer where they can't empirically push 6% real growth year over year even working with an army of assembly line robots, yet General Motor's finance arm which received massive bailouts regularly boasts 20%+ pseudo-profits? Think bitcoin, when you have a hyperinflatable fraud-currency as the basis for 'profit' and Wall street can literaly print numbers out of thin air, watch what happens....
In Switzerland, the best graduates of their technological institutes
proposed to the best students workplaces there.
Very fortunately, Albert Einstein and many other individualists
went to other places.
Our science and industry need all the kinds of people,
from anarchists to yes-men.
If an H1-B visa guy has your job in the electronics industry, where else is an engineer to go?
"Why do people demonize businesses who seek out the best and brightest and PAY them for their knowledge and skill. Perhaps because they didn't get those well paying jobs themselves."
In some cases because some people feel that businesses do not operate with high enough ethical standards and object to their ways of undertaking their work. Some people don't want to work for such companies because they don't want to contribute to their success and feel that such companies broach their personal ethical guidelines.
For example, some Christians won't work for arms manufacturers because they believe this contradicts their religious beliefs, some people won't work for Nestle because they feel Nestle's promotion of baby milk powder in countries where there is no safe water supply is unethical, some folk won't work for companies that they feel are at odds with their political beliefs.
Lots of people make choices in life that are drawn from their personal ethical and moral beliefs, not just based on envy.
I'm a graduate from a top 10 engineering school in the USA. Wall street didn't come to recruit anyone in our program, but if they had, I'd ask:
a - Current salary
b - Advancement potential
c - In 5-10 yrs, can I take my skills elsewhere or to my own company
With most engineering jobs, "a" is low, "b" is promised, but seldom delivered, and "c" is impossible.
In finance, "a" would be high. "b" would be unknown and "c" would definitely be possible. With what I know about systems and investing, I think I could write software to help investors and/or traders. Sure, it isn't easy and without any "finance" background, nobody would pay me for it.
I'd be the finance route every time now that I'm in the middle of my career. When I started, I refused to take military engineering jobs. I was an idealist. Over the years, I've learned to enjoy stock investing, but I resent many "finance people" because their lives appear overly easy for the effort required. Petty, for sure.
Grow up. I'm a MIT grad and live in Indiana. I associate, and work, with people of all classes.
If you dont, you're just out of touch.
The software industry is working off the glut of grads who went into the business during the boom years of the '80s and '90s, many of whom had little talent for it. Some have since moved on to other fields but many others are ensconced as managers in big software firms, helping to choke off innovation with their endless meetings and bug report spreadsheets. In many companies, platoons of these middle-aged managers work at home 2-3 days a week - what useful work can a manager accomplish at home? For the last eight years or so, though software has lost its attraction for many college students, who are now more interested in traditional professional fields like law and medicine, and hot fields like finance and biology. Good. Let the masses go elsewhere, maybe we'll get our critical mass of people who actually want to come to work on Monday morning and help create something new.
If you want more engineers, make the field more attractive. If the industry sucks people are going to avoid it no matter how badly we need it.
And I took exception with the statement "This is the talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing." That makes it sound like we gave them loads of valuable training for free and then they wandered off and left us holding the bag. What a crock. Most of them graduated with smothering debt in order to get that education...so it seems that the greater part of the investment was their own. That debt just further drives them to an industry that will pay big.
Lately I have really been lamenting the fact that I chose to program computers for a living. I see how much money people in the finance industry make. They are in a higher income bracket, and yet they don't seem to be in a higher talent or workload bracket. Why shouldn't I be envious, and why shouldn't I leave my boss high and dry for a different job that pays twice as much?
What it really boils down to is society as a whole values that third luxury yacht more than something as trifling as clean water, based upon what each pays.
But wait, it gets better. Society also says that those with the ability to bring us into the 22end century should toil away in middle-class respectability while the financiers engage in a bacchanalia unlike any other time in history.
We pay those who are adept at twiddling their thumbs or some other related physical feat millions, as well as those who entertain us from paying attention to the very real, pressing needs on the planet, and have the gall to wonder why the best and brightest pursue other career paths.
Yeah, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, we just won't be here to see it.
Maybe these firms are just trying to limit the Fed's ability to inflate the money supply by preventing technological advancement and productivity improvement? They're really doing us all a favor in encouraging monetary responsibility. Think of it this way: if you worked on inventing some widget, it's value would just be stolen by the Fed's printing press and redistributed to some bailed-out group of failed bozos. This way, you instead spend your time working on models and bottles, monetization is kept in check by rising inflation, and we let the losers fail as Adam Smith intended.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
I just finished working for a Hedge Fund management company that 'merged' with a larger company in Denver. They were all Windows with 10 engineers (sys admin and developers) and we were LAMP and I was doing everything. At first, theirs was a typical response to that stack reacting like a deer in headlights and not wanting to touch it but then they decided that it was important to integrate the systems and get rid of the redundant IT (IE me). But since I ran everything and got tremendous results (employee of the month and such) their only option was to try and make me look bad so they tried to say it was my attitude and my emotional response to which I let them know I was bipolar and on medication and seeing a counselor regularly for several years and high stress situation (like mergers) made the condition worse and I was trying to correct for that but they needed to be accepting of a condition that is seen as a disability.
Long story short, both HR and upper management then colluded, ignored my requests and I documented everything and they were investigated by federal agencies. A year later, we settled through federal mediators for a years salary.
In the end, I found out that they were just a good old boys network and one person would protect the other to protect the other to protect the other. Lies upon lies upon lies to cover their asses. In talking to others, this is typical in finance. If this is something that you want and like in your employers, I say go for it. Otherwise stay far away.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
It's funny. You're either trolling or you're one of those people whose entire self-worth is defined by their bank balance. You lose either way. You're bi-losing, to borrow a phrase.
I'm sorry, but if these people were to work for the "betterment" of "society at large", what would that mean exactly? That would mean that middle Americans and other flyover territory morons would have better lives? ...probably. It would probably also mean that they would no longer be morons, because someone from MIT figured out how to educate them effectively.
Someone had to do it.
The dream ai that will find the most effective way to organize society of the future is on its way to becoming reality. What everyone is refusing to believe is that the way it will manage the flow of information is the same way it has always been done: through enumerable tokens of exchange (aka money). And for all it's complexity, Wall Street is in the business of going through an iterative process of becoming that AI. If you think that's not an engineering endeavor, or an endeavor which engineers should aspire to be part of, then you are not an engineer.
Who is to say that these 25% of MIT grads would have really done anything meaningful in an engineering field anyway?
Just because MIT is known for having a few sharp pencils in its box doesn't mean that all MIT grads are that way.
Math geeks weren't used all that much to "develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water". Medical devices? Biomedical engineers and physicians. Never mind the added taxes on these devices now. Renewable energy sources? Theoretical physicists and material science people. Sustaining the environment? Don't throw crap in the water. Purifying water? Again material science and don't throw crap in the water.
Math geeks historically have been used for cryptography (forward and reverse), ballistics (before and during the development of computers), and in the case of one Nobel laureate, John Nash, to develop economic theory.
IMHO, we'd be better served by severely curtailing athletics budgets in this country. Beyond that, severely capping class action lawsuits, changing of venues thereof in order to find sympathetic juries and awards thereof would go a long way to relieving the millstones hanging over everything produced and the loser pays.
As far as finance goes and the whole mortgage crisis, ask yourself why the mortgage system worked fine and dandy for decades before it blew up. Mortgage-backed securities were invented in 1981 and CDO's were invented in 1983. When you have government officials in direct collusion with activist groups threatening the small banks to issue risky loans, did you really think they would sit there quietly and take it up the a$$? As for why companies like Goldman Sachs isn't in jail, show me one law that they've broken (violations of someone's moral code doesn't count) and remember how many millions they contributed to the election campaign of the current administration. Why do you think that GE posted billions of dollars in profits yet this administration not only isn't going after them but is in fact embracing them and steering tons of subsidy money their way?
As an engineering PhD student in a computational math-heavy discipline at a non-MIT but nevertheless highly-respected institution that gets approached by these financial recruiters that also just happens to originally be from "flyover territory," I can safely tell you to shove it. You bash a generic "America" for greed and resources and desiring a better life, but suggest an individual pursuing high income over scientific and technological advancement is ethically superior?
We do face serious dilemmas with job offers; most everyone I'm involved with wants to apply their skills to the world's engineering problems, with energy being at the top of that list. The choice would be easy if the payscales were similar, but they're not. Academic jobs we qualify for are mediocre (but increasing) pay, engineering industry jobs carry considerably more pay, but financial engineering jobs are so far above in terms of compensation that we can't simply cast them out of mind.
(here in the UK, at least) ...is that actually, the ones who get sucked in by the finance sector easily are the ones who talk a good talk (and seem to do plenty of ass licking) but aren't any good at the technical skills.
I'm not just saying this because of sour grapes or anything like that - it does seem to be a trend that the jerks who everyone dislikes (or the jerks that are awful at working in a team) get picked up by financial firms. So to be honest, 'nothing of value was lost' springs to mind
The problem is an example of what is happening in STEM (Science, tech, engineering, math). Various folks say we need more students in these subjects, but there aren't so many great jobs on the other end. Not as many jobs, say, as those studying finance and business. The system doesn't really reward people graduating in these subjects (at least not those people going on to create new technologies, as you suggest). That has to change.
I can talk for science, physics - you work hard, make quite interesting things, and of you are good, people in the field respect you very much. But your salary rises linearly, at best and has a cut-off. There's no difference here between a brilliant scientist and average one, the brilliant one is not financially rewarded.
So I urge everyone smart to simply _run_away_ from the (academic) science. It is a system designed by enthusiasts (and great minds) who cared about making progress for sake of progress, and their own curiosity. It works for greater need but doesn't really doesn't care about the individual. YOu will be only working ant. Also your boss takes nobel prize if you ever reach that level. You have zero chance of becoming rich, because they pay you just enough to have a pleasant life, not a dime more. Governments don't care. There's influx of chinese etc. and they all find condtions better then in their own country.
Yes and we should force all the doctors to work on actual cures and stop the surge into all this cosmetic plastic surgery nonsense. Plan the economy properly and we won't have any problems at all, ever.
We go through early life focusing on personal achievement, and one has to in order to succeed in the highly competitive application process to make it to MIT. You go through a intense regimine of MIT, where despite a number of classes where Teamwork is necessary you are still judged on your individual accomplishment aka Grades.
Is it so wrong then when an MIT graduate looks at the job opportunities arrayed in front of them, that they see 3 possibilities:
1) Start a new company/work at a startup, try to create something that will change the world. Payoff potentially astronomical, chance of success relatively slim. Ability for individual success to translate to financial success, medium.
2) Work for a big corporation, more than likely creating something which addresses the corporations needs, which may or may not help society. Payoff potential medium, chance of success high, ability for individual success to translate into financial success, low.
3) Enter the world of finance. Payoff potential high, chance of success mediuam, ability for individual success to translate into financial success, Very High.
Finance remains one of the few industries, where a contributer is able to directly monitor their value added and thus demand/receive incentives to match said value. What upside is there for me to go work for a GE, where even if some radical new design i create revolutionizes their jet engines and makes the company billions over the next 15 years, I'll get a decent paycheck, maybe some stock or options but in reality there is no real upside for my success.
Until society/companies puts emphasis on engineers and inventors in terms dollars, people will be less inclined to create/invent.
- An MIT '05 who works in finance.
Heavier taxes on finance income, or some sort of legal restructuring or limitation of finance itself.
Be careful with what you want, because you may get it.
Check this graph in TFA. Notice the sharp drop in the financial sector right in the middle of the graph. See how it ends?
That's right, the biggest slump that ever happened in the financial sector ended in the biggest war ever. And that's not coincidence, when the economy goes bad people will fight for the crumbles.
And before people start blaming the free market and claiming that regulation would have avoided that, take a look at the sharp rise in the 1920s. That's no coincidence either, that big rise that preceded the big fall happened when the British government tried to hold the pound to an artificially high value.
As Wikipedia says:: "The gold standard was suspended at the outbreak of the war in 1914, with Bank of England and Treasury notes becoming legal tender. Prior to World War I, the United Kingdom had one of the world's strongest economies, holding 40% of the world's overseas investments. However, by the end of the war the country owed £850 million (£30.7 billion as of 2011).[13], mostly to the United States, with interest costing the country some 40% of all government spending. In an attempt to resume stability, a variation on the gold standard was reintroduced in 1925, under which the currency was fixed to gold at its pre-war peg, although people were only able to exchange their currency for gold bullion, rather than for coins. "
Had the Bank of England never been allowed to issue fiat money to finance WWI, and had they not been allowed to try to set an artificially high value to that money after the war, neither the Depression of the 1930s or WWII would have happened.
Finance would not be so lucrative to work in if the markets were not so inefficient. Instead of financial reporting standards, force public companies to constantly publish standardized raw financial and operational data as it is captured. Force all market transaction data (including OTC) to be public and free to everyone. Eventually everyone would be on a level playing field and profits would disappear to some lower equilibrium point (marginal cost of maintaining automated arbitrage programs). As a plus, the markets and economy overall would be a lot more stable.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
increases in violence, anger, greed, objectification, and corruption are all natural byproducts of a decaying resource-constrained society.
studies exist showing a general, global societal decay after the first "peak oil" energy shocks of 1973. the energy sector is feeding off of, and bleeding resources away from, the humanitarian and quality of life sectors. things are projected to get worse in the coming decades.
the news and reporting industries are collapsing. look at the quality of recent journalism -- the collapse of print revenue has led to click chasing, and an increase in the use of hysteria-inducing weasel words and over-dramatic, unscientific, unreasonable language.
all of this lowers the quality of life in society and increases the pool of persons willing and eager to crush each other in a "winner take all" rat race. sad to see, but we are born into the time in which we burn -- not all people are lucky enough to live in a time of renaissance.
the optimist hopes for a breakthrough in AI that results in a massive machine IQ increase. such a breakthrough could yield dramatic improvements in food and energy production leading to a near-immediate reversal in the above mentioned resource constraints. a new hope.
Anyone here think that America having fewer resources means that America can start much less trouble in the world?
Yeah we'll stop invading oil rich countries just as soon as gas prices skyrocket.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Friends don't let friends have principles. Once you turn down an opportunity for any reason other than greed, the spiral towards the gutter has begun.
It is that simple. If you want them to stay in engineering, pay them appropriately. Part of the whole problem in engineering at the moment with companies screaming, "There aren't enough engineers in the US that we can hire", leaves out the rest of the sentence "because we don't want to pay them what they can make elsewhere".
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
With engineering and sciences being outsourced to cheaper grads in Asia, WTF not take the damn money if you can get it? You can likely earn enough in less than 10 years to set yourself up comfortably for life, and if I could do that, god damn right I would.
How many engineering jobs are out there anyway that are "change the world"-level in the first place, that grads can conceivably get? Being in a 5-person team designing a door handle on some POS Government Motors junker won't change the world anytime soon...
The idea is fine. Roll together a bunch of mortgages (debt obligations) backed by property (collateralized) and you have a security. It's actually a useful idea because it gives banks another market to sell these to. It gives people with money to invest another place to invest it.
The problem was basically fraud. Wrapping steaming piles of dog crap together and claiming they weren't risky was an outright lie. CDOs plus outrageous lies were the problem. I still remember well just being amazed at things like low-doc and no-doc loans. I remember applying for a loan from my bank and they offered me more than double what I could actually afford.
We want to blame the finance guys, but the problem was banks giving loans to people they knew couldn't repay them because they could just sell the loan to someone else and not care. The problem was the liars who falsely represented those CDOs that were composed of crap as being safer than they were. The problem was investors not doing due diligence, seeing anybody with a pulse getting $100k+ in money to buy a house, even if they didn't have a job and NOT being damn sure those types of loans weren't in the CDOs they were buying. The problem was investors not seeing a massive streak of systemic risk running through adjustable mortgage rate backed securities. When rates go up, defaults go up on ALL of them. Systemic risk, which is exactly what bundling things together is supposed to mitigate.
People, the very same issue would exist if this happened with savings accounts. There's nothing wrong with savings accounts, but if a chain of people did stupid things with the money in them causing it all to be lost, would we be up in arms that savings accounts are bad, or would we be up in arms about the criminals who misused them? I hope the latter.
As an upcoming graduate with a computer science degree, I have been interviewing a lot. One thing I get asked by interviewers is "what type of job are you looking for?" I tell them that my school's job board is divided between finance sector and startup-midsize development companies or teams and I KNOW that I do not want to go into finance. It just doesn't interest me, I say. I have just been hired to a really cool non-finance job so I'm happy and I guess it works :) But it's just funny because I was noticing this while applying and making it a point in my interviews to say I didn't want to do that sort of thing which is why I'm interviewing here and not there.
I graduated top of my class in electrical engineering, one of my teachers lined me up a job with Intel.
Instead I went into finance, and less than 3 years out made $15m. Seems like i made the right decision.
"Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic."
read: Vivek Wadhwa is a failed entrepreneur.
All bankers care about is more money for me!. I would suspect that engineers, and most scientist have a much better altruistic background, sense of integrity and can see further than the end of their wallets.
For these reasons I suggest that the best thing we could do would be to inject some science and engineering skills and disciplines into the finance industry.
The big problem then is whether the bankers all start doing genetic or nuclear research and kill us all off with some of their famous screwups. Maybe it would be better to just get rid of them altogether.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
I can clearly tell the communist party in America is alive and well.
Innovation and efficiency in the financial services industry [...]
I'd tend to call those "services" disservices myself most of the time.
And calling science this mixture of voodoo and greed just adds insult to injury. I studied Physics. I don't want to be seen near to that
They can do math, which puts them well ahead of MBA graduates.
You seem to get your info on MBAs from TV and movies. May I suggest that Hollywood portrays MBAs no more accurately than they portray hackers and computer programmers?
... uh ... the air.
I'm a sort of recent MBA grad. Previously I used to hold the typical arrogant engineer's attitude towards all things business. Part of the reason I enjoyed business school so much was that I was amused to see how wrong and ignorant I was. For example a marketing class was *not* about using psychology to trick and manipulate consumers. It was about how to scientifically determine actual "wants" rather than stated "wants" (actual and stated desires are not necessarily the same - a common problem with surveys) to build a prioritized weighted list of features and to build a mathematical model for a market. Running a simulation on the market as it exists and after new products with new features are introduced was then used to make informed decisions. The methods, math and science used was comparable to classes I've had in the traditional sciences. These methods have their limitations and inaccuracies, they are after all just models of extraordinarily complex systems, but I was thrilled to learn that forecasts of consumer market can be based in science and math as opposed to numbers just pulled from
I'm sorry, but if these people were to work for the "betterment" of "society at large", what would that mean exactly? That would mean that middle Americans and other flyover territory morons would have better lives? ...probably. It would probably also mean that they would no longer be morons, because someone from MIT figured out how to educate them effectively.
Elitist!!! How dare you imply that people in America need to be educated! I will do everything in my power to cut your public funding, and boycot any company that sponsors you!
Engineers are not magicians. Don't expect them to solve all your problems for free. You can't educate people who think ignorance is a virtue. Think I'm wrong? Use up your own life trying.
I regret not going into finance when I had the chance. I thought the work would be borring, and I didn't like the ostentatious wealth on display at the interview. I love physics and CS theory, and had a job doing those things that payed about 60% of a finance job. I was happy.
Then the years of rolling layoffs came. The worrying keet me up at night. I finally gave up, and got a job at a web company. Web work is incredibly borring. There is no CS or physics to it: you just move small amounts of borring information from one place to another. I spend my days trying to understand bugs in IE6. I hate IE6. My job is worthless and contributes nothing to society. Had I taken the finance job, I could have retired years ago. Or kept working, and funded research I care about.
While the GP is putting the point very harshly, I think it was that "Just because I'm smarter than you doesn't make it my job to solve your problems".
I do have quite a few exceptions to that, I think basic needs (food, water, clothes, shelter, healthcare etc.) should be available for everyone, that there should be institutions like police and courts and rights to an attorney, that opportunities should be given like public education, that there should be systems to take care of the sick, elderly, physically handicapped, mentally insane and so on. But then I'm one of those European commies ;) However on the whole I don't feel it's my job to improve the life of a McDonalds worker who is so reasonably getting by flipping burgers. He earns his money, he can live out of his paycheck and I live out of mine. I don't owe him anything just because my job is better than his, I'm not going to make a different career choice to make his life better.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"how 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the Engineering farm?" um, lessee, uh, maybe by PAYING them?
This has been going on for Decades people. Even our own government has been rapaciously consuming our best talent for who knows what purposes.
Upset people hate your guts for ruining the world economy with your greed and stupidity?
And exactly what has goldman sachs financed recently except themselves? VC funding has nothing to do with the likes of you. You are a leech not a true banker.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Oh, no. Worse than that: they actively work towards creating hell if it helps them be on top.
With offshore outsourcing rampant and the GOP lobbying for yet more H-1x visas, workers in the IT field should welcome choice. Let's not byte the varied hands that feed us.
Sure, we'd all like to be the next Google, but reality is not always that glamorous.
Table-ized A.I.
The following are world-class universities the equal of MIT: Northwestern, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Minnesota, and Purdue. They're all located in the Midwest.
"Flyover country" is a term that you should avoid. To anyone from the interior or knowledgeable about it, that term immediately marks it's user as a provincial coast-dweller, who is poorly traveled, ill-educated, ignorant, and yet full of an unearned sense of intellectual and cultural superiority.
I work for a financial company and am currently looking for a new job. Basically I find the work to be soul draining, and a very poor use of my skills. The majority of the work is just basic number crunching. If you work on a high speed trading system then sure there are massive scalability/optimization concerns that could use some computer science knowledge. But there are many others areas where people make financial models and you just crunch some data and provide projections for those models. Also lots and lots of reporting (SQL queries and then crystal/SQL reporting services/custom XML for homemade reporting programs, etc.). It's really not that interesting and is actually mind numbing, the work is almost the same. From a finance point of view, it is interesting the ways they find to structure investments, that is where "creativity" plays a huge part. Nevertheless for me it is just not that interesting at all, but some people love finance and that is okay. Also at the big companies people are super specialized so you don't even get that much variety....
But truthfully, I go where I can and in the NJ/NY area financial companies are one of the most popular places for computer science people to work. The other is the pharmaceutical industry, but they seem even less ethical than the financial companies. The financial companies rip us all off, but the pharmas will let people die to hide defects in their drugs. They also keep the prices artificially high to steal from us too, which since some people depend on drugs cause more death. There it seems like there are more opportunities for embedded software and monitoring software to run their operations.
Still at this point anything seem better than finance. I wonder if the mafia are hiring....
Sure, the big investment banks may be "luring" some engineers into finance, but I think the biggest problem is systemic. Speaking as someone who has moved from physics to finance, I can say that there simply aren't enough opportunities for bright engineers and scientists. For me, it was a number of factors, but I found that finance had ways of thinking that were similar to physics, so the leap wasn't particularly hard. The real deciding point for me, though, was seeing a friend of mine who had a PhD in physics. He was brilliant, doing basic research on spintronics, but he was also working for peanuts and could expect to do so for nearly a decade. Not that money is everything, but it is certainly necessary to pay for things like rent, food, and beer. The biggest problem, it seems to me, is that there aren't nearly enough opportunities for scientists and engineers in this country and they aren't paid nearly enough for all of the hard work they do. This is not a new trend. This country is basically throwing away talent because basic research is severely undervalued. See also the NSF and NASA and how their budgets get treated by Congress.
Your argument doesn't have the exact form of the Scotsman fallacy; but that's the closest one I could think of.
The Soviet Union and the USA were always mixed socialist-capitalist economies. There were and are industries regulated by the state in the USA, and there was limited independant business in the USSR.
True, the USSR took state control to the extreme but those advocating regulation of finance are not suggesting that we regulate industries to the same degree the USSR did.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Noooooo!!!
Do you want to make healthcare more expensive? Are you trying to keep us paying for the boomers for an extra decade or two?
We'd save quite a bit if we went the other way. Health care was perfectly fine in 1985. We could go back to that, except for those few advances that are both better AND cheaper.
We could even go back more. Health care got to be pretty decent as soon as they figured out that surgeons should wash their hands and stop taking some kind of twisted pride in wearing a shirt smeared with pus.
Engineers solve problems and take orders.
The problem given: maximize the return, given that big profits can be kept (salary, stock options, and bonuses) while big losses can be eliminated via bankruptcy or bailout.
Engineers are mighty good at optimizing that problem. :-(
Damn I just ran out of mod points before reading this, mod this up please!
It would have Eve chopping down the whole damn tree.
We are still committing the Original Sin, and you all know what happens afterward. No more Eden for you!
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Personal Experience Working at Goldman Sachs
I worked for this company as a contractor trying to do Windows Server administration but I was so disgusted by the work ethic, environment, co-workers, corporate ideology, and managers that I flat out gave up on this contract and walked off after 3-months of working there to go to another finance firm only to be refreshed with a sane and enjoyable working environment that paid even more money.
There is something seriously wrong at Goldman Sachs and many of the people who work there are either complete asses or are slowly having their personalities changed to become asses before they graduate to pricks, assholes, and further on.
Honest Hope for Assholes
If you're an asshole and have finance, computer, math, or engineering skills but are having a hard time finding or keeping a job because of your asshole personality, then you should definitely go and work for Goldman Sachs because you'll be right at home.
Interview Process
The interview process was long since it required 7-separate one-on-one individual interviews which included hour long technical quizzing by all these people. I should have realized that something is wrong when I learned that the last person on the interview list was a technical director who had no knowledge or background of technology what so ever and who was only appointed to the position 6-months ago. (Ding!)
The HR hiring process was unusually long with a thick book of paperwork to sign including a lot more legal documents than any other financial firms. I retained a copy of all the documents and I'm amazed at the layers and layers of legalese in these documents. Of course it took the department a month and a half to actually complete the whole process, which is insanely long when it comes to contractors in NYC, and I was about to take another job because of the long wait. (Ding!)
Turn Over Rate High
The department that I joined had only 8-people, 2 of them were there for a few years, 1 for half a year, and the other 5 joined within the last few months. They obviously had problems retaining employees since only two guys were employees and the rest were contractors. The two guys who were there for a while were completely unhelpful, uninterested, unmotivated and generally behaved as pricks to the rest of the new guys. (Ding!)
Management
The manager was an Indian guy who's only management motto was "just get it done" without telling you anything useful or trying to connect you with the people from other departments who you needed to get things done or even tell you who they are (corporate address book was too much for him). (Ding!)
Help Desk, Desktop Support for Server Administrators
I didn't get to start right away in my role doing Windows Server administration but instead had to go through a useless initiation process of working 1-week in the desktop support department literally carting monitors and PCs to people's desk to set up new users and then perform desktop application installations and troubleshooting people's dirty mouse ball problems. (Ding!)
When I finally finished the week and was shown my cubicle in the server admin department I was happy to start real work, only to be told that in Goldman Sachs the server administrators duties included directly supporting the users and desktop computers as a first-line of help desk for the 300-servers that I was personally supporting for all issues, alerts, upgrades, and hardware replacements. I also supported the developer department because of some of these servers were development boxes and this included development application installations and repairs on these desktop, including Microsoft Visual Studio troubleshooting. The users of those desktops and servers would call me the admin supporting them and I would have to contact the other departments on behalf of the users if I couldn't resolve the issues on their desktops. This is an unheard off work assig
Engineers are not magicians. Don't expect them to solve all your problems for free.
True, we are not magicians, and we do have to feed, clothe,medicate ourselves as well as get some R&R. so we do need money.
You can't educate people who think ignorance is a virtue. Think I'm wrong? Use up your own life trying.
Just who is being elitist here?
Yes, you can work to disrupt cultures of sustained ignorance. Less an engineering discipline than that of sociology and political science, but the general problems confronted by the OP are present in other fields as well.
My sympathies that your career path did not work out. However, at least you aren't faced living with the guilt of financing CS research with your cut of a stolen pension fund.
Someone had to do it.
It's always easy to tell someone else they should take a job that pays them less to conform to ones ideology.
CDOs in themselves weren't sufficient to cause the meltdown, but there were a necesssary element without which the meltdown would not have ocurred.
Also, of relevance, was that the mathematical model used to calulcuate risk was deficient. It missed an entire area of risk. So part of the reason that the ratings of these rarified financial instruments looked so good is that they were being evaluated in a way that unintentionally hid many of the problems.
Take away CDOs (and other similar instruments) and you've lost (a) a mechanism that inherently hides several levels of risk, (b) the inability of institutions to farm out the risk for less than it ought to cost them to farm out that risk, (c) multiple levels of abstraction that allow for more shenanigans.
I'm an academic research mathematician who'll soon be leaving his postdoc to look for work in the financial sector.. or any other interesting sector. I've had a lovely time doing postdocs in interesting new cities, but I'm done with the moving, long distance relationships, etc. I love programming too since like age 7, so anything goes. I promised myself however that I'd try several interesting things before taking any job that required a security clearance, i.e. NSA.
Inside academia, there are literally hordes of well qualified PhDs who'll never ever get proper research jobs simply because the number of good secure research positions grows slower than the national population while every such position produces numerous qualified people (ignore the hordes of under-qualified people graduated by some faculty). We understand this population model when we call the variable rabbits, yet we ignore it when we say academics.
Academia and industry may be losing many of the best-of-the-best to Wall St. but we've more than enough qualified people for all the high level jobs. If society wants more people in a particular field, then society must allocate the resources. You could for example quadruple the NSF's budget by shaving off just over %2 of the $900 billion military budget.
Don't like how Wall St. extracts so much money from the venture capital and IPO process? Fine, allocate $10--$50 billion for federally backed public interest venture capital operations, hell back it from social security, surely better than 3%. There will be no shortage of young engineers choosing $60k per year working on their own ventures over whatever salaries Wall St. offers. Just don't complain about people not doing socially useful work in saturated job markets, especially ones so supersaturated that all the young people end up in long distance relationships.
p.s. If we actually invested like $20 billion of social security receipts towards, then we'd see employers complain even more about a lack of qualified people, meaning people who'll do highly skilled work for little money.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Acquaintance at Goldman Sachs
I still have an acquaintance, a friend of a friend, who still works at GS after getting into the company during a college internship and just staying around after 10-years. He has turned from behind a shy and friendly guy who would hang out with us and be generally cool and enjoyable to an absolutely unreliable and lying prick who never talk to us or calls us even though we knew him since elementary school. He has developed a slew of personality problems and his personal life is a swish cheese of shambles, failures, neuroses, and personal obsessions. This definitely had a personality change at this company after all these years even though he lived for much of that time in the same place and spent time with the same people as he did in elementary, high school, and college. There was a definite but slow and gradual personality shift over the years.
It wasn't just the investment bankers who caused the huge mess. As the bad mortgage avalanche was building, I personally watched as people who had no damn business doing so were buying huge houses that were way beyond their means. If our public education required a couple of semesters of common sense, these people would surely have thought their decisions through a little better.
Another non-financial player in that fiasco was our financial regulators. If it were a crime to issue grossly inaccurate credit risk ratings, then all of these companies would have thought twice before giving AAA ratings to CDOs. Similarly, if it were a crime to lie about your assets on a mortgage application, folks might not have been given mortgages that were way beyond their means.
To place the entire blame for the financial crisis on the greed of the finance industry is simplistic and incorrect.
relatedly, here is data to show that top marginal tax bracket does NOT correlate with GDP: http://www.slate.com/id/2245781/
Meaning, in a capitalist system, profit is the result of efficient productivity. Whose production efficiency increased, as a result of your work, to the point that it was worth $15M (in less than three years) to him?
As long as the bankers have the politicians supporting the bleeding of the workers, this will continue. As it has throughout all of history.
Someone is going to be doing the leeching.
Governments subvert and pervert. Its what they do.
Politicians pervert religion to subjugate people and steal from them. (The Spanish inquisition and Crusades weren't about religion, corrupt politicians subverted religion)
Politicians pervert banking to subjugate people and steal from them. (previous and current market problems are from political manipulation, an exercise in power.)
Politicians pervert social justice to subjugate people and steal from them. (nationalized healthcare, social security)
The founders of the US understood this and designed a government system whereby people would be governed first by themselves, then by their community, then by the State, and finally, in an extremely limited manner, by a federal authority. The government closest to the people governs best. Of course, the politicians have corrupted even that, and the US has abandoned that fundamental concept. Our federal government has become a wealth-sucking citizen subjugating monstrosity that would make the founders weep.
Want to reign it in? Take power back from the federal government and reinvest it in the individual sovereign states. As long as Wall Street and the Beltway collude to rob the rest of the nation blind, many of the best and brightest will go there to take their cut.
What about protecting people from working in marketing/sales?
display that with MONEY. Anything else is shit. If you value what a person does you pay them. End of story.
If society doesn't value engineering, there is no reason to be martyred for a bunch of Fox News-watching oafs. There is, if you can get away with it, every reason to break one off in the collective public arse and get rich doing it.
Someone has to say it:
Society breeds sociopaths because it genuinely fucking deserves them.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
No company is worth 100 hour work weeks, much less consecutive ones.
If you *aren't* working for a company you would gladly work a 100 hour week for, why aren't you looking?
Or on a smaller scale you can find a project you like enough in a company that working 100 hours on it in a week provides a real sense of fun and accomplishment, then if the company got some benefit from it, so what? So did you.
You sound like the kind of person who always carefully weighs the exact amount of benefit you will get vs. "The Man". Stop thinking like that and you'll be a lot happier.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are you aware that you've probably just violated your non-disclosure agreement? These are a strong reason why engineers don't warn other engineers about internal issues where they work: the non-discluser agreements for finance companies are quite dstrong.
Does these "neuroses" perhaps involve adverse, hysterical reactions to garlic or sunlight?
Emotions! In your brain!
Moral accountability with the truth of your role in the world and acceptance of the consequences of your actions is the only path towards true freedom. You actively profit from killing foreign nationals who have never even laid eyes on an American unless they were in uniform and carrying a gun. The ashes of the dead may not be on your windshield, but the blood of innocent people is still on your hands, regardless of how much you like to rationalize your empty loyalty that you trade for something as paltry as a bunch of dollar bills.
You're an empty vessel, a worthless fuck, and I hope you one day experience the terror you help to impose upon others.
And no, just because someone pays taxes doesn't make them as accountable as you. You choose to help kill people for a living. I recommend you come to terms with that and see if your life still has meaning beyond the material possessions you like to pretend make you a better person.
Amen, but how 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the Engineering farm after they've seen Wall Street?
By publicly shaming them at every opportunity. (Best in a non-threatening, friendly or even humorous way.)
Free Manning, jail Obama.
This is an unbelievably simplistic view of things and also shows a serious lack of understanding of economics:
1. If finance jobs pay substantially more, that means that they are more in demand. If industry was lacking engineers and needed more badly, salaries of engineers would go up and more people would go into engineering. The fact this is not happening must mean that industry is getting enough engineers at current salaries. If everyone "avoided" finance/business, no doubt engineering salaries would fall even more.
2. Finance is an important industry. Not all of it is black magic. Most of it is a valuable service - running stock markets, providing methods for startups to raise capital, providing innovative investment options for individuals and businesses, etc. Yes, it got *too* creative before the crash, and yes, it should be regulated, but that doesn't change the fact that Wall Street provides an important and valuable service. Liberals, especially geeks, seem to think finance is a bunch of fat cats sitting in a 50th floor office figuring out how to steal money. There's a little of that at the very top, I'm sure, but most of finance is something else entirely.
3. Not everyone who gets an engineering degree or science degree wants to be an engineer or scientist. Many people realize they find it interesting from a subject matter point of view, but don't like actually doing the work. You can, for example, be knowledgeable about computers, find them interesting, know how programming works, etc, but not like to sit at a computer and code. For people like this, finance and business provide excellent opportunities. They can do something more business / operations related, but in an area where their subject matter expertise is helpful. So, for example, someone with a CS degree and a MBA might be ideal to do investment banking for tech startup clients. We should WANT people with a technical background in the management chain and on the finance side.
I never worked at GS and have not signed any NDAs with them, and I can freely point out that a fair chunk of people that I knew at GS were ... ahem ... needlessly difficult, and the good people I knew there generally did not like the environment.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Here in London, a software developer working for an investment bank can earn 40-50% more than a dev working in non-banking. I imagine it's the same for New York, Hong Kong and many of the largest financial centres in the world. London (or NYC, HKG, etc) are not cheap places to live. What do you want us to do?
Which gets back to the crux of this. If you want the best, you have to pay up for it. Pure computer/engineering jobs are usually located in boring areas of the world (Silicon Valley in the US, Reading in the UK are a prime examples of this) and is it really a surprise then why ambitious people gravitate towards global cities and investment banking, which is usually the best paying industry in these global cities?
Could be a tough call on an indivual by individual basis. Anecdotal, biased and selected evidence is enough? Okay...
A year after graduating I moved to a city with a big financial institution presence. After several interviews I had two job offers. One for a consultancy. One for a bank. One was 50% more than the other. What would you do?
Is it just me, or are Slashdot summaries becoming more and more vitriolic lately?
Unlike some of the posters, I do not have a clear opinion or understanding of exactly finance does for us, especially the part of finance that is done by MIT graduates. I have heard two opposing claims which I put into two opposing categories.
Is it:
* Finance is a fraudulent game designed to fleece others out of their money using complex financial instruments that cannot be understood by those who have the responsibility to prevent fraudulent activities in our financial institutions.
or:
* Finance more efficiently distributes money into investments in our economy so that our resources are more efficiently organized to maximize productivity. Complex financial instruments are used to distribute risk and allow creators of goods and services to protect themselves against risks which would otherwise potentially destroy their ability to provide those goods and services.
The problem is that I believe each of the above statements are true at least to some extent. What I don't know is the percentage to assign to each category or to some new category in between these two polar opposites of categories of results. In particular, I do not how mathematical financial engineering is distributed among these categories in terms of effective output.
If the best and brightest are being hired merely to create profit for the few and have no positive impact on the wealth of the many, then I believe that is wrong and I cannot see justification for this as a moral good. I cannot see any essential difference between this and successful recruitment efforts by the Mafia for new well paid enforcers. An enforcers job might be fun, have good comradeship, work with the "best", and be well paid, but it still does not make it a morally acceptable choice of occupation.
So for me, the key question is whether the mathematically complex part of finance is actually performing in the way capitalism is intended to perform or are the complex algorithms used to better enable parasites to enrich themselves at the expense of the larger body politic. Factual information on this is actually somewhat hard to come by. Certainly I have seen a lot of claims about CDOs, risky mortgages, investment pools, arbitrage and the root causes of recent failures. But when I try to dig a little further, real information based on real data is quite hard to find.
I'll give an example. One typical trick for extracting unfair money from others is to design an investment that pays better than average as long as a seemingly unlikely event does not occur. You get others to put money into the investment by lying or disguising the true risks about whether the event will occur. You then take a portion of the money that investment as your own (as a "fee") and then create a complex derivative to bet against the investment by buying "insurance that pays off if the event occurs". How much of the profit made by financial companies is made from tricks of this sort?
In particular, what percentage of the recent instability was caused by CDOs that packaged risky mortgages and how well did some of the principal players understand the true nature of the risk? Again, I can get vociferously stated opinions on this but I am finding it hard to find real fact. However, in defense of the financial industry, it seems very few were aware of the true risks of the mortgages and many of them lost considerable money (maybe not as much as they should have) after the crisis. But there were some who knew what was going on and many (even though ignorant about what was truly going on) who profited while the times were good who did not suffer proportionally when things went bad (the "private profit" and "socialized risk" that a couple of posters alluded to).
I do have one more thing to say. There is an old saying, "Democracy is the very worst form of government with the exception of all others". I have a similar opinion about capitalism. Capitalism is prone to "bubbles" that grow and burst and this seems to be inherent in its nature. When seen this w
It's only logical that in a technological economy that they might be looking for people with a clue. And academia isn't the real world. Just because you get an engineering degree doesn't mean that's where your talent is. For instance chemistry and physics graduates sometimes find out they have a talent for computer programming and for some reason psychology graduates gravitate to business management.
Now if only law schools recruited engineers there might actually be hope for the future.
25% of MIT grads in 2006!
But the industry had crashed by 2008
So how is that 2006 figure relevant today? What are the current figures, and where is there even a link to an article that this behavior has returned?
But wait! Apparently it was 8% in 2009 (page 6), so why omit this relevant information?
My own take : globalization has pushed pure technical work offshore, now finance is backfilling. Why don't they offshore? Because Goldman Sachs probably thinks they would have a better chance pursuing legal options here if need be, rather than 'over there', wherever that may be
It's obvious "why" engineering grads will become financiers instead. There's money in it, immediately, as in now. It requires no ingenuity, no inventiveness, no tinker time, no being robbed of credit for your idea by less productive peers (no having to come up with ideas in the first place), no dealing with the impossibly thick and almost conspiratorially inept and skewed patent and trademark office, no long and drawn-out research and development, and on, and on.
If you don't want to be an inventor "solving problems" then there are only so many engineering "jobs" out there, most of them in the military. How are you supposed to apply your engineering degree if there's not really a huge demand for engineers? Why don't you put the blame where it belongs, and stop scapegoating the graduate.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
From the article: "This is the talent that our country has invested so much resource in producing."
Really? So, the country pays for college, makes sure that people who take graduate degree programs and such, not only do not have to pay for their education, but actually gives them a stipend to live on that exceeds the poverty line? They also go so far as to provide free, high quality medical care, insurance, and ensures that everyone involved in education are provided with a higher standard of living and guaranteed employment.
Isn't the investment on the part of the 'talent' ? Don't they take the risk, expend the effort, pay the price? How many people do you expect to attend college with the goal of complete altruism? Baring altruism, why is there a belief that a purchased education leaves the graduate with a debt to the country/society? That's a bit presumptuous, don't you think?
The author is displaying his bias pretty heavily. He's a professional academic. He's got honorary positions at prestigious universities, he's got tenure, and as far as he's concerned - free access to a great deal of resources. He can't even make the connection anymore with students and the athletic clubs being responsible for his salary. He seems to imply it comes from thin air, or a magic coddling government to which we all owe a social debt that can only be repaid by devoting your life to.
There's no other way to say it; his statements mark him as delusional.
"We need them to, instead, develop new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge.' Amen ... "
I think a lot of engineers go into engineering because they want to build space ships and supersonic jets and make enough money to afford fast cars and classy vacations.
In other words, they want to be engineers because they want to have self-esteem.
You do not recruit engineering talent by TELLING them that they're going to be working as (basically) a technician in the development of a heart shunt or a better packed bed water purifier or a more efficient air conditioning unit. You appeal to their sense of selfishness, in exactly the same way that Wall Street does.
After reading the story, the logical conclusion is Bankers are Pedos.
Liberty.
25% of MIT students have no friends
As long as the crooks in the finance industry know they can get away with it, they will.
They created the Federal Reserve specifically so that they could get away with it. It's purpose is to prop up failed banks.
Deleted
Perhaps you speak a different dialect of English to me. From said act, emphasis added: ...encourage such institutions to help meet the credit needs of the local communities in which they are chartered consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institutions.
Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act#Relation_to_2008_financial_crisis
See particularly the mention of commercial real estate, which was never within the scope of the act. I guess all those sources that basically conclude that you, Ron Paul and all your ilk are full of shit are all part of some [insert bogeyman here] conspiracy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Freddy and Fannie deserve about 50% blame for the real estate mess.
Unless you ask someone who actually knows what they are talking about, which will lower that percentage number by an order of magnitude or two.
Someone had to do it.
I'm just quoting, don't give me karma, give it to the reddit posters.
Growing up to be bankers is one thing. Often, for those lucky enough to be in on whatever is the scam of that decade, it's very lucrative. Mama might not be proud, but she might get a fat retirement condo from a grateful banker offspring.
But engineers don't make that much off the scams. I worked deep in Midtown Manhattan's hedge fund world through last year. I worked directly on the production database for one of the world's 10 biggest hedge funds, which has continued to make $billions in profits each year through the "collapse" and bailouts. I made a good amount of money. But when I left to run tech at a smallish NYC company in the energy management industry, I started to make a lot more money. My share of this new company's profits I could claim to enable is thousands of times smaller than at the hedge fund gig, but I get a significantly larger share of it.
And I'm not covered in evil the way I was before. I get paid better to do more good. I feel much better about the whole thing. If these banksters would just pay the losses they created, while I continue to get paid to help people save, I'd feel entirely good.
--
make install -not war
Where else are we supposed to send the engineers that just don't quite cut it? Finance and business are great places for those kids that did really well in math and science in high school, and then discovered that they were terrible at engineering. I'm not saying that's where all finance and business people come from - just that an above-average number of bad engineers end up there (as well as some good engineers, and some people who never wanted to be engineers, etc.).
I've done some screenings on engineering students near graduation - some of them are just terrible! Now it's possible that some of them were just looking for the wrong type of engineering job when they came to see me, but I was asking questions that they would have known if they had paid attention in their required classes. Maybe I don't work in the area they like and excel in, and they'll find a job with a different company that suits them better. Or maybe they are horrible engineers, forget everything they learn in a class once the final exam is done, and need to find a different industry. The point is that there are a lot of them, and they'll be looking for jobs wherever they can find them. The ones that love and excel in engineering will probably end up there. The ones that stink, or love something else, or whatever, may end up in finance, business, or whatever. (Like one of my friends, who went into nursing after he finished mechanical engineering, once he realized that he didn't enjoy engineering - and thus probably wouldn't have made a good engineer if he had stayed.)
Go ahead and encourage the good ones to stay in engineering, but it's completely natural that some will always drift to other professions.
We can start by showing them what an empty, void of a life Wall Street people have. Am I right?
Just like that scene in Big Daddy.
The parent's post is very detailed and informative.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
As Notorious B.I.G. put it, Mo Money Mo Engineers. I'm just finishing a book that has a long section on this exact topic and I'll karma whore with a link to this excellent paper with handy charts:
http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/papers/pr_rev2.pdf
"Skill Biased Financial Development: Education, Wages and Occupations in the U.S. Financial Sector." Scroll down to Figure 6 in particular, which compares the salaries of people with graduate degrees when they go into finance or engineering. They were roughly equitable for decades and then split in the late 80s. Currently, controlled for education level, people with grad degrees make 110K in finance vs 80K for engineers. Even the tight tech job market of the dot-com years didn't close the gap much. The paper also has good stuff on job risk and other factors.
After talking with plenty of people in both sectors, I was surprised the bankers are quick to admit that it's a "quants beget quants" situation. The more sophisticated analysis and arcane devices they come up with, the greater the demand for math and similar hard science PhDs to figure them out, improve them, and keep up with the competition. (MIT and other schools are now offering Financial Engineering, of course.) The managers of the banking companies have even less understanding of these things than the average Fortune 500 tech CEO has about the cutting edge engineering going on in the company he runs. They can only go on what the models and results say, which, considering how unregulated these markets are, means they are basically testing powerful new drugs on the general population.
All of this research hasn't made me think more regulation is the solution, however, at least not how people take that to mean. Monitoring and making data public is essential. Even the banks would appreciate an outside agency that could provide perspective on an industry that is still basically a black box even to the participants. (Current derivative market: $1.4 quadrillion. Enjoy.) That's really what is lacking, sunlight and the context to understand what is really happening system-wide. Goldman and others figure out ways to shave points here and there, but they're making money on concessions, not on the movie tickets.
Getting vaguely back on topic, the conclusion of the book I'm working on is that this is a cultural problem, not just a money problem. Risk aversion is at a peak after building for decades and the relative sure thing of a good salary on Wall St is beating out the chance to change the world or become the next [insert tech billionaire here] in Silicon Valley. This isn't about the current downturn, it's been going on for decades. The American appetite for risk is disappearing. In the same industry, this is why we see half of Valley startups being launched by immigrants these days. Not just because they are qualified, which of course they are, but because they have the entrepreneurial spirit.
Two of the book's co-authors are VC and angel veterans (Max Levchin, Peter Thiel) and they argue strongly that this is having serious effects even among those staying in tech. Instead of working on a big idea for years, some of the best and brightest are cashing out in various ways. Selling their IP, going with a quick-to-market improvement instead of the Big Idea, etc. It's hard to criticize someone for making a buck, but cumulatively it's a slow-moving disaster for innovation -- both by having less in tech and by having more on Wall St.
Posting as an AC to protect the guilty.
My cousin is in Fiance. He's worked in it in various forms for places like BoA, a few investment houses, and most recently a 'high tech' finance company. (They mostly sell software packages that manage finance for other investment houses.)
He's about as right wing as you can get and let me tell you the whole industry is like that as far as I have seen. Not crazy Glen Beck right wing but more like Bill O'Reilly right wing. Smug assholes who are thoroughly convinced of everything they say, regardless of what it has to do with reality. None of them are much above stepping on each others backs to get to the next step on the ladder so you can only imagine how they view everyone else.
Every now and then when I see him I will press him on some of the more egregious issues of the day. It is funny to watch as he runs out of talking points when I use logic and reason with him. He's not stupid and puts up a good fight but in the end it's hard to argue for pure greed being a virtue.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
Judging from your resume, you are NOT someone who knows something. So I'll go ahead and assume that your claims are entirely based on your comfort-zone despise for the people who solve more difficult problems than you and who, thus, make more money.
Well... 7 figure bonuses for Engineers might help. Instead of toiling 50-60 hours a week for a 3% raise a year.
Education is sneered at and intelligent people are accused of being elitist.
Don't get fussy when these bright young folks don't come rushing to the aid of society.
Start looking at the possibility of drug use issues (cocaine) as result of his personality changes. Folks don't just change unless there's something like that driving it. People get better as times goes on as a function of maturity no become more assholes thinking their ego is the only thing that has any effect on the world.
What else are this country's top engineering students going to do? We hardly produce anything in this country any more, and what we do make, probably doesn't need "the best". That limits their job options to other fields, or to positions overseas.
Some more BS. Engineers are not working on Wall Street, they are working where they are earning the highest compensation. Duh. Stupid article. How 'bout this: if you want to, you go and hire the engineers by offering them more money, and maybe they will come to work for you. Wall Street is awash in money for other reasons - namely the retarded Federal Reserve pumping massive amounts of money into the banks. That's how the nut cases on Wall Street earn so much money - it has nothing to due with competition or innovations, just plain old graft.
It's their choice. What business is it of yours if an engineering student decides to go where the money is? You want them to stay in engineering be ready to pony up the big bucks.
Anonymous coward eh ? After my experience with the financial industry, can't believe anybody that has any real engineering skill would work for complete fuckers like GS and other institutions in those fields. All of that crap is a extension of this Connecticut private school and Ivy league school elitism that has no basis in any of the good American values we'd normally express to other human beings we care for in our community.
Some of it is east coast versus west coast. I went to a UC, we have highly ranked science/engineering schools and we simple do not feel inferior to that east coast mentality while paying 1/3rd the costs for higher education and 1/100th of the attitude problem.
Oh, btw we have Silicon Valley
Re-calculate the future value of your current wage in a society in which you have sucked all the value out and left your "rich" (spoiled, counter-motivated) kids with a tax burden beyond the ability of 400 million extreme over-achievers to pay back.
(And ask yourself who your kids are going to owe that tax burden to.)
Seriously, you are not just part of the problem, you are one of the enablers of the problem.
And if you think poor people are just lazy, I have a pyramid scheme or a dozen that I could sell you right away, I'm sure.
Think again, man. Think again.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
But that would require creating a bunch of engineering jobs and paying them well! We can't have that, so let's just complain about those damn kids and their financial greed.
I can't believe you like money too. We should hang out.
To fix our ailing economy in so many ways, simply reinstate usury law as it existed in the 1960s and earlier. Do not allow lending of any kind with interest rates over a reasonable maximum, such as 10%. This will drastically reduce the profitability of the financial sector, allowing other sectors or our economy to compete for both capital and talent. It will also do wonders towards fixing the problems we are current increasing with consumer debt.
-josh
Got a desert? Irrigate it and it's much more valuable.
Got a large land mass? Add transportation infrastructure and people can get around easier.
Computing is a new environment that is an extraordinarily awesome environment to be engineered in.
Finance is another complex environment that can be made more valuable with engineering. If the tech companies are really hurting for the smart folks, they'll start paying competitively.
Friends don't tell friends not to go into finance if they think it's in their best interest. It seems like interesting, challenging, profitable work. I don't see why that's wrong.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Smart Americans would be stupid to pursue STEM careers. Unless you have a top-secret clearance, you will just end up training your H1B replacement, or having your job offshored.
Less job security as well. Tech is being offshored, and inshored, to death. Why get an engineering degree, just to train your H1B replacement, or have your job offshored? Wadwha should know this better than anybody.
Who wants to compete with 3rd world wages?
Any engineer worth his salt would scoff at being some BS banker. I like to think of this as a form of social Darwinism: bad and under-motivated engineers flee to wall street, leaving the heavy thinking to the real brainiacs.
I have been there and done that with investment banking. It sucks. It's a sweat shop with companies that think forced ranking does great things for their companies. Investment banking does wonderful things for our economy. For the longest time we have not had to pay for checking services, much less crazy bank fees. The dodd frank bill is going to bring back all that stooped nickel and dime stuff that was once gotten rid of by investment banking. The whole reason why the banks failed is the were forced to make loans to people who could not pay them back. (subprime) Acorn would protest on a bankers house just to get him to give loans to people that could not pay. What happened to earn your own way? You want to make sure banking does not fail? Simple. Make only one type of home loan. No variable rate or teaser rate stuff and no sub prime stuff. Maybe a 10% down, fixed rate type of loan. If you don't like the payment, then put more down and lower the rate that way. But thinking your going to have some type of leftist ideology to fix investment banking will only get you more of what we already got now.
Who actually believes this foolishness?
Oh, that guy again. A few weeks ago, he was acting like an authority on web search. Last week, he was giving talks about how Boston is failing as a high-tech hub.
His actual career was in tools for modernizing COBOL programs. Even that wasn't too successful. Read "Mouth piece: Vivek Wadhwa''s talent for trumpeting his company shines, but observers want to see another kind of performance ".
you might find Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd C. Blankfein luring bright engineering grads to Wall Street to engage in mischievous behavior and be transformed into, well, asses.
At first glance, I read Assets
Same thing, reallly.....
Where is the recycle bin I can put this unneeded "T" in?
I worked in finance, as I thought it was better than being unemployed.
Being unemployed again, I am not so sure it is worse.
My pay in finance was much lower than any other engineering job I had.
Kim0+, Physicist.
I am wondering whether you can start out in finance to make your money cushions against the silliness of life, then later switch back to doing work you like - or are science candidates washed up at 35 having grown comfy with finance side paychecks?
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If I only had mod points available for you. You are so right. The majority of those subprime loans were made into derivatives BY the investment banks, not Fannie and Freddy. Once again we focus on the small-time Madoff's of the world, and ignore the master thieves like Blankfein.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Here's the problem, don't become an academic mathematician. That's a guaranteed dead end job with little mobility. There's biology ? have you thought about those intractable problems that can't be contained in some goofy algebra and other sciences ?
... end up in long distance relationships.
With modern broadband and VNC it doesn't matter where in the world you are it's almost the same as being right with her back in mom's basement.
You are wrong on several counts :
First, mathematics and physics are among the most 'mobile' educational options available, that ain't the problem.
Second, academic biologists are overall actually worse off than mathematicians, commonly spending like 10 years as postdocs, like twice as long as mathematicians. I guess they move labs less frequently than mathematicians though, giving them more options for raising a family. I'd imagine mathematical biology or applied math postdocs are marginally better paid than pure math postdocs, but their still paid abysmally relative to the private sector, and they relocate as frequently as mathematicians.
Third, there is no great sea of employment in mathematical biology because the problem is intrinsic to academia's population model, i.e. each professor produces offspring much faster than existing professors retire. For sure, there are brief periods of time where any mathematician or physicist can jump into a new applied academic field that's too young to reproduce itself, but that time has long passed for mathematical biology, just as it passed for computer science. Ironically, mathematical finance is the only field that's that hot right now, but it's kinda fake, i.e. schools want them for their teaching, not their research.
We cannot greatly increase the number of academic jobs without a major political shift. We might consider drastically reducing the number of PhDs awarded, but (a) that'd fuck up our universities's service course budgets, and (b) all the hordes of small teaching oriented collages need PhDs that aren't quite good enough, don't love doing research enough, etc. So only viable option is : Most PhDs must get jobs in industry.
For sure, there are numerous of industry jobs for mathematicians and physicists that don't involve either finance or a security clearance, especially the industrial side of all those fields that've spun off from mathematics and physics, ala computer science, biotech, etc. Wall St. and the NSA have however made a name for themselves for preferring smart people, math PhDs, etc. Ergo, you should expect that virtually every serious mathematics researcher leaving academia will seriously consider one or both options.
As I said, the issue isn't that people are doing bad things with their education, but that society doesn't provide the funding for the activities the idealists wish they were engaged in. In particular, academics are not usually the most well suited people to run off and start their own company, non-profit, etc., well not until they've spent a decade in industry clearing away the academic purity anyways.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
are science candidates washed up at 35 having grown comfy with finance side paychecks?
It's very tough to break into the scientific community when you're not fresh out of college. Usually the best bet is to go back and get another scientific degree and try to springboard off of that but even then it's not easy.
I actually started off as a chemist, worked in industry for about 10 years, and then switched to a non-profit educational provider when the company I was working for went south. I did that for about another 10 years and then tried to get back into chemistry. It proved very tough to get employed because (and I was told this a few times) of the break.
Eventually I went back to school and got a masters in computer science, that's when I got hired by a financial services company. I had even applied to some positions in the chemical industry to do computational chemistry or to support a R&D department. The jobs just aren't there in research any more and even when they are there the pay is pretty low compared to other computer positions, such as in finance. I got picked up relatively quickly by the company I'm now working at and, honestly, it's a much more fun/rewarding job than the ones I had in chemistry R&D.
Sapere aude!
I'm a Harvard grad who landed in Insurance Brokerage six years ago in exactly the manner described. The money was good, but the career isn't. This is not what I went to school for, and it doesn't match my prior experience. So the question is for me, how do you get a geek out of the black hole of a now established career and back on the right track, using brain power for the benefit of all living beings and the advancement of humanity rather than in the fulfillment of the dreams of a bunch of people with limited education and gluttonous financial appetites?
If I work at GE, it's likely that the radical new design I create used their supercomputers, their wind tunnels, their team of engineers. Sure, I had a brainwave, but there's a lot more to it than that. And for every design that pays out, there were likely a lot of expensive failures. R&D costs real money. When dealing with physical objects there's a sort of "inertia" involved. It costs a lot to go from idea to physical construct. Because of this the two choices are basically as you outlined--either you pick stability or you risk it all for a high payoff.
In finance (as with software) there is no "inertia" because there is no tangible product. The barrier to entry is lower.
While this may make it easier to make money, the flip side is that many people see what Wall Street has done and is doing as unethical. Just like I wouldn't work on missile guidance systems, I'm not going to go speed up high frequency trading.
You're not really an engineer if you don't have the passion to create.
all the money in the world will not buy you:
"[...] new types of medical devices, renewable energy sources, and ways for sustaining the environment and purifying water, and to start companies that help America keep its innovative edge."
The cut price quants and bankers from India will be along shortly. It's just that we've gotten off to a late start. I'm studying with a lot of them (Me, I chose to go with Operations. I find Finance terribly boring. I'd have to be paid a lot more to do it. My classmates aren't as discerning though.)
Do not expect any recognition for your successes outside of your field and perhaps within your company. Don't expect your employers to grasp just how major an invention or discovery you have made.
Don't expect too much credit: they're legally required to admit who did the work on some of the legal forms, but that's it.
Basically, we're running off the Edison Labs model, where somebody hires a bunch of engineers and scientists to do the actual inventing, and then gets the credit & money. We've just cut out most of the (meager) rewards of the original version, by having management become disconnected from the employees & all too often from the practical reality of what they're managing.
A lot of the suggestions here come off as sheer railroading: "Let's make the alternate career paths sucky!" It ignores the fact that, frankly, the problem is that engineering & inventing are thankless, unrewarding jobs and about the only way to make it the most appealing job to be gotten with those degrees will make the degrees themselves unappealing--why get an engineering degree if you're only going to be everybody's bitch, and not even a well-paid one?
I'm not a scientist. I write software for scientists. This gives me an advantage, since I didn't have to go through eight years of postdoc, trying to play the tenure lottery game.
Everyone around me fall into one of the following categories: those started in academia and just moved across from the University to the lab, are exiles from the formerly-monopolistic-telco labs (or equivalent, e.g. defence labs, meteorology centre etc), or sat it out in a bunch of failed startups and bumming around universities before finding their home. So yes, anything in possible in this business. But the real question that they're going to ask is: Is someone from the finance industry smart enough for this business? There's a feeling that anyone who is smart enough to do the serious high-tech R&D has either already done it, or has just never had the opportunity. Someone who did have the opportunity and didn't take it may not be right for this gig.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
Apologies for the atrocious grammar in that post, BTW. I really should have proofread.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
So has America invented anything?
This started out as a lighthearted troll, but I'm starting to wonder if it isn't acually true. Surely someone can think of some genuinely American innovation?
The Hubble telescope is not an array telescope. It is a Ritchey-Chretiene double hyperbolic reflector telescope which is an American design. Well, partly. Chretiene was French. But Ritchey was American!
Having perused some of the books while Borders is thrashing its last gasps, there are tons of smart people in high end finance. A lot of the confusion is that the smarts are hidden by emotionally charged dealmaking. Because money itself is at stake, it's apparently far faster to make money than depending on the political cycles of R&D. However, the definitions of "smart" are becoming more and more vague - IQ tests don't gauge vulnerability to bad decision making etc.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If being an engineer is your life long goal, i doubt that going to work for a bank will be challenging for you enough to stay true to that dream, does this mean many sell out, sure....but the real ones stay put and do not leave their trade, no matter how much money is thrown at them.
Well considering that something like 25% of all wealth generated in the USA is through wall street its not all that surprising.
I dunno, in this economy, you're better off going for the job that pays well. I wouldn't mind working in finance...
http://www.jobvirtue.com