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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?"
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.
I'd upgrade that to
As long as the government views the biggest firms as untouchables, and pick one or two as examples/targets, this will continue on for some time....
Letting a few of them fail in the last debacle would have been better for the economy
Momma might actually like to get him out of the basement.. ;-)
The truth shall set you free!
Or perhaps because many of these businesses can only afford to pay these people so much because they corrupted the government and got bailouts and handouts? I also don't begrudge sports salaries because I don't make that much, I begrudge them because they can only exist due to the hundreds of millions of dollars corrupted government officials dole out to them to build their stadiums (in some cases, after referendums specifically on the funding were voted down). Take away the corruption, takes away the billions of dollars in unnecessary handouts to these companies, and suddenly the playing field becomes much closer to level for more productive professions.
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.
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?
If the career path you choose is to be a thief, robbing the country blind, then yes, the government has every right to try to discourage you from that choice.
Yes, but there's fascinating work elsewhere too. And when you're done, you've built a system that does something, as opposed to shuffling money around. I realize that everything comes back to money if you're going to get paid, but most other places have a layer of "actual product" in between their work and the money it generates, and that product has some intrinsic value in itself. My sincere feeling is that working in Finance, you miss out on creating a tangible product that's useful to people outside your 20-person company.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
I'm sure bank robbers (not you, the types with guns) get the same thrill.
The demonizing isn't coming from ill-informed quarters. It's coming from the people who know what you do, know where you get your money from. The cash you get from HFT isn't just magically appearing from no where. It's being stolen from legitimate investors. You're all a bunch of thieves, skimming money off the top of every transaction, and using every loophole you find so that you don't even pay taxes on it. You've drained the country of its lifeblood, and in a few decades will leave it a rotting husk while you move on to another nation to loot. If telling yourself that I'm just "ill-informed" is what lets you sleep at night, then go ahead. Keep lying to yourself. But when your middle-class friends and family (do you even have any?) are suffering, know that it's because you helped your company loot their savings and run their employers out of business.
It is not completely ridiculous.
While investment banks and the like do make important contributions, their industry just recently had a negative effect on the WORLD economy due to their shady practices. Then when it hit the fan, they used their influence to socialize the risk/losses while still keeping the profits. So the taxpayers lose, and they still win, even when it was their poor decisions that caused the mess.
Some would say that because of the above, any benefit they provide comes at too steep a cost. I certainly understand that not all participants in the finance industry should be painted with this same brush. But none of this has to do with "communistic ideals". And you don't have to find money distasteful to find it distasteful when taxpayers are footing the bill for the mistakes of others.
I'm not saying that I agree with the article (I haven't read it yet). But I would hope that it is not that hard to understand why the finance industry is not very popular...when you put everyone on the planet at risk, that is the kind of blowback you can expect.
The old idea that people working in some specific profession produce nothing of value to society.
I take it you've just come back from Mars: currently, "producing nothing of value to society" would be such a massive improvement for the finance sector that even I wouldn't begrudge them a bonus...
The inventor of the mobile phone fart app has more to be proud of than the inventor of the CDO.
Of course, some people in finance might still be doing useful work - e.g. taking deposits from people with surplus cash and lending it, at a slightly higher rate, to people with short-term cashflow problems. Maybe such people should find a new name for what they do, because that sort of thing ceased to be the main business of the banks when they found that they could play insane money games with our cash, keep the winnings and send us the bill if they lost.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
WTF?
Look, it's ok. You feel guilty of having sold out, but really, it's alright: we are all free. There is nothing reprehensible in deciding that you need money to support your family/loves/drug habits (bar useless mentions).
However.
Money for research overwhelmingly comes from government and industries. Not the financial sector. And the point of research is that all of Humanity benefits: ideas created/crafted/refined there benefit all. Only in theory is the investment baking industry responsible for better investment. Because as it happens, they are way too much into short-term (crazy short) benefits for that. And they sustain themselves through fees, meaning that they have a strong incentive for the creation of opaque products no-one really knows how to price (but the fees are charged anyway :) ).
If Nash had been a quant, a couple billions would have been added to the bottom line of some Wall Street firm, and the Nash equilibrium would have been called the Smith (or Jones) equilibrium. And been invented later. And game theory would have lost a couple decades. And the whole of Humanity would be a couple decades back in that respect.
This is precisely why it is particularly bad that the financial industry hires the brightest: if they were into banking for the love of it, chances are, they would be indeed be interested in better investment strategies. But most of them hate their jobs, and compensate by loving their lifestyles and trying to be extra-clever for the sake of their egos. Thus the mess we are in.
Did you know? Monetary incentives prevent people from lateral thinking and seeing the big picture. Doesn't it explain a lot?
I take strong exception to everyone in the financial sector being labeled a thief. I've worked for some excellent financial firms that have helped people to manage their finances and invest for the future. That there are amoral scumbags in the world is no shock, but just as most of the lawyers I've known are good people who try to do good in the world through their work (while their profession is tainted by the loudest minority), bankers and other fiduciaries provide an essential service which all too often does not receive the respect it deserves.
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.
You're describing the financial sector as it existed in the 70s. Back then, it really was about helping businesses grow and finding the next big idea. These days, the pigs on top have discovered that they can get WAY more money by playing around with "creative" instruments. Like bundle a bunch of bad loans, sell them claiming their good loans, and then bet money that they'll fail. Or buy a healthy company, make them layoff of a bunch of their workers so that their stock price jumps, and then sell. Shit like that doesn't create wealth; it just steals it.
Whoa, really? Sounds like it's been explained already.
No company is worth 100 hour work weeks, much less consecutive ones.
Investment banking is less and less about investment which is good for the economy, and more and more about arbitrage and pumping transactions to make a fee, ...
So when was it different? There have been many explanations that a great part of the recent worldwide financial disaster wasn't because the finance industry wanted to commit the shady deals that caused it all; it was because the government's financial regulators (and the judicial system) has for several decades been looking the other way. This gave the financial industry permission to do the things that they've wanted to do, but knew they couldn't get away with.
In a sane world, the people who committed the shady financial deals would have been prosecuted and jailed. This has happened to a few, true, but very few. Most have been rewarded, including at taxpayer expense.
The saying "Bad money drives out good" is rather old, and should be recalled at times like this. As long as the crooks in the finance industry know they can get away with it, they will.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
OK, I accept that, especially the part about working 100 hours a week to help a company raise enough capital to avoid going bankrupt.
However.
It depends on what the company is doing. If they're developing a new drug to alleviate suffering, fine. But if they're patent trolls who are gaming the system to figure out a way to sell needed drugs for 100 times their cost http://www.arthritistoday.org/news/colchicine-gout-drug-price053.php not so fine.
What percentage of the companies financed by Wall Street are actually producing something socially productive, and what percentage are just manipulating the system and grabbing a percentage for themselves? I honestly don't know, but sometimes the percentage of manipulators seems to be awfully high.
And the more you get into financial instruments and stuff, the less I can follow it. I do know about mortgage default swaps. Sometimes it seems that the more socially harmful it is, the more profitable it is.
Put all the little investment projects together and you get a system that may or may not be doing good for society in the long run.
And of course, the industry protects itself from government oversight and regulation, and even criticism, by huge campaign contributions to politicians. Hell, many of them are ex-politicians.
I know this is Slashdot and all, but how did this get modded 5 - Insightful? Pointing out that the wealth gap in the US is absurd and suggesting that we should work to shrink it or just restrain its growth is not the same as advocating communist-style wealth redistribution (which I assume is the indended comparison).
One can easily imagine a scenario in which extreme lack of oversight/regulation results in a wealth gap that grows until the disparity between rich & poor yields undesirable living conditions and possibly even social collapse (perhaps where the US is headed), while too much oversight/regulation and "wealth redistribution" (shrinking the class gap too much, down to near across-the-board equality) stifles competition and financial incentives for improvements in efficiency (i.e. your envisioned communist scenario). Trying to strike a balance in between that maintains most of the capitalist incentive structures without promoting an ever-widening class gap is a rational middle ground. The US is probably leaning more toward the "ultra-captialist" end of the spectrum than that ideal middle ground at the moment, as demonstrated by statistics showing that the class gap growing at an alarming rate, and is substantially wider than historical levels. A more progressive income tax rate is one possible way to counter-balance that growth without unduly harming overall productivity.