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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
Phrasing!
Happy people make bad consumers.
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.
since when is attempting to convince people to make a specific choice considered slavery?
Since thievery became a profession.
Emotions! In your brain!
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'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
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?
The implication I got from the summary is that by working for these firms which have been working to "Game" the system in the past, those engineers are working against our collective interests, whereas normal engineers work for our collective interests(this is the common belief, one I won't comment on).
They would be competing against firms like IBM, Oracle, SAS, SAP, CSC, etc... Who "merely" charge a premium of 25-30% on a candidate's rate and bill the client.
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.
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?
It's not slavery. Working for the betterment of mankind instead of its hasty demise is liberating. On the contrary, working for greedy pigs is slavery, no matter how much money they give you.
I used to work for the military-industrial complex. It paid very well, but it's a soul-sucking job. After one of my kids developed cancer and 9-11 happened, I decided that I couldn't go on in that line of work, and left the industry. I now work at a university for 1/3 the income, and feel much better about what I do for a living.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
...and with with and and and with with!
I like this game : what are we playing?
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.
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.
(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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Agreed, the 99% of them do make the 1% of you look bad.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
So you don't like working for the DoD because of personal ideological conflicts? I'm a left leaning life-long Democrat who has worked for the DoD for 20 years. My job is very satisfying, I am not a slave, and am well-paid for my work. As a patriotic individual that believes in a strong national defense, I am also supporting the welfare of my country. Don't assume that all "right thinking Liberals" think as you, and those that don't are somehow dupes of the Right Wing Nutters.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Good point W.R.T. college loans.
The good folks in Goldman and lots of other high level "fiscally conservative" executives have made sure that all but the few who chose their parents very carefully are saddled with mountains of debt on graduation.
That way, the executives can wave a few jobs around that pay well enough to let the grads pay the debts off in ten years instead of 30. The grads compete their asses off for those few jobs.
The rest can fend for themselves in private enterprise where, unsurprisingly, other executives are managing the competitive job marketplace with great effectiveness... If by "effectiveness" we mean how well their offer works: "take what you get son and don't bitch about it or I'll move what remains of this company elsewhere." Now *that* an offer we can't refuse!
"how 'ya gonna keep 'em down on the Engineering farm?" um, lessee, uh, maybe by PAYING them?
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.
"I now work at a university for 1/3 the income, and feel much better about what I do for a living."
Of course that's your choice and exactly for that reason it's not and can't be considered slavery.
On the other hand, others that might feel exactly like you, opted to be on the banking business and they feel now as good as you out of their early retirement with the money they earned while at their soul-sucking jobs.
Do you remember what freedom is about, don't you?
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"?
Yeah, I know left-leaning people who work for the military, usually because they wound up there at some point years ago and made a commitment. They thought they could do some good, then George W. Bush got elected.
But. Human beings are evolved to work together in groups to accomplish goals together. They get great satisfaction from doing that. The military does that in a big way.
However, it makes a difference what the goal is. It's one thing to protect your country during WWII. It's something else again to do what Smedley Butler described, which is overthrow elected governments and replace them with dictators in order to let American corporations get rich.
The war in Iraq killed 150,000 (if you believe the New England Journal of Medicine) to 600,000 people (if you believe the Lancet). That's a lot of tragedy. Do you feel sorry for those soldiers coming back crippled from IEDs? There were probably a million Iraqis with similar injuries, who will have to struggle without the benefits of artificial limbs, rehabilitation and disability pay. We destroyed one of the most developed countries in the middle east, and turned it into a battleground for al Qaeda. We attacked Iraq with the excuse of weapons of mass destruction, which turned out to be a lie.
You know all of this. You've obviously reconciled yourself to it. I don't tell my friends to quit the military. It's their decision. Military medicine is less directly responsible for the evil ends than other branches, and easier for me to accept.
But I wouldn't want to support these political ends of the military myself. And I wouldn't like to see my friends do that either.
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
It is not. However, Vivek Wadhwa does have a point. As someone who went from a tech/engineering background into management consulting, I have reached a point where I wish I had remained in technology, and in building something tangible.
Yes, the salary is better and the incentives are great -- I get to travel, I get to work on a variety of problems (marketing, revenue management, even technology recommendations), and in my late 20s, I work with C-level executives. It's great exposure.
However, as I near my 30s, I have to ask -- have I done anything tangible? Have I built something that made a true difference to the world? I wish I had joined a tech company and worked on my programming capabilities, so that I can build something, even if in my spare time. I wish I had used my undergrad engineering degree in working on VLSI design or something. And with the 60-80 hour work weeks and travel Monday through Thursday, I wish I had enough time for personal interests or activities -- in a past life, I used to do a lot of rock and ice climbing; it's been 2 years since I did any. Open source contributions? Zilch. Even playing with Lego seems like a chore, because I've 3 million other things to do. And you know you've a problem when you start getting worried about play being a chore, since it takes time away from other "important stuff" -- i.e. building pointless decks and excel models.
The other problem with most of what you do in finance and management consulting is that your skills are limited in the outside world, and you are so busy with your work that you've little time to learn other things.
So, I've decided to go the entrepreneurial route. I may try and fail, but at least I would have tried. With a couple of my friends (both of whom, incidentally, are from i-banking and quite burnt out themselves), we've decided that it's about time that we started throwing ideas at the wall to see what would stick. I live in Boston, so we're working with college students in the Cambridge area who are interested in working with us for a little equity and cash, and trying to develop new and interesting products.
The first of which is slated to go live end of this month -- Deal Umpire -- and a couple of others being worked on. It has been an immensely fulfilling experience.
Building a 50 page deck that no one will ever look at beyond the first two pages, a complex excel model that you spent weekends developing that gets forgotten and locked away, or making recommendations that get ignored because the client will do as the client pleases anyway -- none of this comes close to the thrill of building something on your own, something tangible and worthwhile (now, arguably, there are definitely clients and engagements that are truly interesting, and the client genuinely cares about what you are building -- but those are rarer than you'd think),
We have investors eager to fund, but we do not want to take up their offers, because we are afraid that it will be back to building decks and models to do someone else's bidding. So, we're at it on our own.
If you are an engineer, you probably went into the profession because you like to build things, because you like to open things apart and learn, and because you like the fact that creativity and analysis can often team up in building some pretty awesome stuff. You will not find that in either of those two professions. Yes, you will have money and the perks, but if you don't kindle that spark of creating something, you will soon extinguish it for greed. And that is very, very unfortunate.
Thankfully, I've a very understanding wife who is a geek herself, and she has been very instrumental in helping me keep my act together. And just the thought of working on something fun and interesting goes a long way to rekindling creativity I'd thought long gone.
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."
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.
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
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."
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.
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?
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
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