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Just had the realization that Starfighter believes there's a huge market for the sort of talent matching they want to do in finance. Why else would they pick th

Just had the realization that Starfighter believes there's a huge market for the sort of talent matching they want to do in finance. Why else would they pick this topic?

gk1 11y ago
Patrick often makes the point that the majority of lucrative development work is in big, (usually) boring, business applications. That's where the money and employment is, so it makes sense to start there.
- tikhonj 11y ago
  I don't think quantitative finance is what he means though. It's a small, selective sector which is well-known and at least a bit glamorous. There's certainly money there, but far more hopeful candidates than positions.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
patio11 11y ago
We're actually not terribly interested in finance qua finance. We're interested in finance qua "it allows us to do anything in engineering in a fiction-consistent way, plugging into anything else." Networks. Compiler theory. Language design. Web APIs. Caching layers. Core algorithms. Packet switch microcontrollers. FPGAs. CRUD apps. Big Data. Anti-abuse tooling. Application security. Machine learning. Any topic you possibly want to throw an engineer at, an investment bank is already throwing a team of engineers at. Our Chapter 1 release includes levels which have you jailbreak multiple chips (AVR microcontrollers) on a custom handheld device given to minimally trusted gophers to own up a stock exchange through their REST API. And that isn't even a theoretical attack. Additional factors which tipped the scales include "finance has a default goal function which is really easy to understand", "some subsets of financial work are surprisingly easy to model" (like a stock exchange is), and "finance has narrative choices which allow us to excite people without getting typecast as A Video Game For People Who Played Dungeons and Dragons In High School" (which is, for a variety of reasons, important to the team, including to me, the ex-DM). Other strong contenders for our first game were "Like Dwarf Fortress but with code" (harder to build than a stock exchange; includes the word "dwarf") and "a nuclear power plant" (slight problem: we know nothing about nuclear power plants).
- pavlov 11y ago
  Any topic you possibly want to throw an engineer at, an investment bank is already throwing a team of engineers at. This comment makes me feel that I must live in an alternate universe of software engineering. I've spent 99% of my career working on things that would be of no interest to an investment bank: GUIs, graphics, video, audio, GPU rendering, mobile platforms, CAD, content creation tools... (It's not the first time I've had this feeling. At one point years ago, when I had been doing professional programming for maybe 3 years, a friend and colleague asked me a question about databases. I had to confess that I had never worked on software that interfaced with one; that all my work exclusively dealt with local files and network streams. He almost wouldn't believe it.)
  - patio11 11y ago
    I've spent 99% of my career working on things that would be of no interest to an investment bank: One of the many interesting conversations I've had over the last few months is with a guy who leads a team of X00 developers out of one bank's 1X,000 developers, which does minimally GUIs, graphics, GPUs (for rendering and simulation), mobile platforms, and content creation tools. His #1 problem right now is that you are representative of many, many developers who don't know that his sort of group exists. I think he'd describe his job as "We're the thin edge of the wedge hitting the really hard problems so that our customers in the bank can focus development on the really valuable problems." (I don't know if I'm cleared to talk about them until contract negotiation wraps. Sorry, not trying to be coy here. Take it on faith that many of the big guys run shops which have those needs and more besides.)
    - bostik 11y ago
      > GPUs (for rendering and simulation) I'd like to provide a data point for this, btw. There are exchanges for sports gambling (we run one), and some of the most succesful betting syndicates run clusters of hundreds or even low thousands multi-GPU servers to crunch the incoming data on their real-time simulations. The results of this type of crunching are feeds, signaling and strategy shifts for their market makers. I have no doubt investment banks, who operate on an order of magnitude more data, would have something similar. Even if majority of it was used for backtesting.
tikhonj 11y ago
I'm sure that's one consideration, but there are a lot of other compelling reasons. It's fun, it's relatively accessible, it's easy to scale difficulty and it's easy to add competition. Performance is directly quantifiable along multiple axes and they can release multiplayer scenarios in the future. I can't think of many options with all of these properties that also require the particular technical skills they're looking for. It feels like doing a market simulation reasonably well is actually easier than their other track (a security CTF). One particularly nice aspect is how many skills an exchange simulator can test. You have low-level programming and optimization, interesting algorithmic problems and high-level data analysis. That's applicable to a lot of jobs outside of finance. As a game, it's surprisingly open-ended. Personally, I'm glad they chose this. I actually wrote a market-making bot for a mock exchange as part of an internship. It was fun and a great learning experience and not just for finance. I'm glad somebody is bringing this experience to the public at large.
mrchicity 11y ago
I run a mid-sized (5-10 employees) trading desk for an automated market-maker. My first thought upon reading about this game, not knowing what Starfighter is, was "holy shit, I'd love to hire someone who excelled at this or even attempted it." I've worked with tons of extremely bright, well credentialed people who get lost in the weeds of analysis paralysis or trying to build the world's most complex model. Many fail. The best hires I've made internalize the nuts & bolts quickly, work hard to try many ideas, and are "smart enough." They're probably just as smart as the other guys actually but use intelligence as a tool rather than an end unto to itself.
- MichaelGG 11y ago
  Really? Aren't most of you at real cutting edge, like coming up with FPGA designs to implement the trade strategies?
  - mrchicity 11y ago
    A lot of research is done in higher-level languages.
- pjlegato 11y ago
  Hey, send me a message, pjlegato at databaselabs dot io.
- tomjen3 11y ago
  I am definitely one of those people who would assume you have to be a genius to do work in finance because I imagine that if your product isn't perfect you will be eaten alive in the markets. That said there is also one other thing that prevents me from looking at a career in that kind of business: I imagine the traders as the kind of people with no empathy who are just looking to metaphorically stab you in the back the second they get a dollar in bonus for doing so.
  - kasey_junk 11y ago
    I've found that traders are no more or less empathetic than any other cross section of users you might encounter in other industries. There are some trading desks that are more bro'd up than others and each trading desk has it's own culture, but the same is true of startups, which correlate pretty well with small trading desks in lots of ways. Further, the very concept of what a "trader" is has fundamentally altered in the last 15 years. A trader is just as likely to be a physicist or hold a PhD in signals processing today as they are to be your typical "Tall Guy With Aggression issues". I'd also point out that lots of people co-mingle different industries. Trading is not investment banking, which is not asset management. There are interesting software problems and good people working in all those fields.

Just had the realization that Starfighter believes there's a huge market for the sort of talent matching they want to do in finance. Why else would they pick this topic?

gk1 11y ago

Patrick often makes the point that the majority of lucrative development work is in big, (usually) boring, business applications. That's where the money and employment is, so it makes sense to start there.

tikhonj 11y ago
I don't think quantitative finance is what he means though. It's a small, selective sector which is well-known and at least a bit glamorous. There's certainly money there, but far more hopeful candidates than positions.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

patio11 11y ago

We're actually not terribly interested in finance qua finance. We're interested in finance qua "it allows us to do anything in engineering in a fiction-consistent way, plugging into anything else." Networks. Compiler theory. Language design. Web APIs. Caching layers. Core algorithms. Packet switch microcontrollers. FPGAs. CRUD apps. Big Data. Anti-abuse tooling. Application security. Machine learning. Any topic you possibly want to throw an engineer at, an investment bank is already throwing a team of engineers at. Our Chapter 1 release includes levels which have you jailbreak multiple chips (AVR microcontrollers) on a custom handheld device given to minimally trusted gophers to own up a stock exchange through their REST API. And that isn't even a theoretical attack. Additional factors which tipped the scales include "finance has a default goal function which is really easy to understand", "some subsets of financial work are surprisingly easy to model" (like a stock exchange is), and "finance has narrative choices which allow us to excite people without getting typecast as A Video Game For People Who Played Dungeons and Dragons In High School" (which is, for a variety of reasons, important to the team, including to me, the ex-DM). Other strong contenders for our first game were "Like Dwarf Fortress but with code" (harder to build than a stock exchange; includes the word "dwarf") and "a nuclear power plant" (slight problem: we know nothing about nuclear power plants).

pavlov 11y ago
Any topic you possibly want to throw an engineer at, an investment bank is already throwing a team of engineers at. This comment makes me feel that I must live in an alternate universe of software engineering. I've spent 99% of my career working on things that would be of no interest to an investment bank: GUIs, graphics, video, audio, GPU rendering, mobile platforms, CAD, content creation tools... (It's not the first time I've had this feeling. At one point years ago, when I had been doing professional programming for maybe 3 years, a friend and colleague asked me a question about databases. I had to confess that I had never worked on software that interfaced with one; that all my work exclusively dealt with local files and network streams. He almost wouldn't believe it.)
- patio11 11y ago
  I've spent 99% of my career working on things that would be of no interest to an investment bank: One of the many interesting conversations I've had over the last few months is with a guy who leads a team of X00 developers out of one bank's 1X,000 developers, which does minimally GUIs, graphics, GPUs (for rendering and simulation), mobile platforms, and content creation tools. His #1 problem right now is that you are representative of many, many developers who don't know that his sort of group exists. I think he'd describe his job as "We're the thin edge of the wedge hitting the really hard problems so that our customers in the bank can focus development on the really valuable problems." (I don't know if I'm cleared to talk about them until contract negotiation wraps. Sorry, not trying to be coy here. Take it on faith that many of the big guys run shops which have those needs and more besides.)
  - bostik 11y ago
    > GPUs (for rendering and simulation) I'd like to provide a data point for this, btw. There are exchanges for sports gambling (we run one), and some of the most succesful betting syndicates run clusters of hundreds or even low thousands multi-GPU servers to crunch the incoming data on their real-time simulations. The results of this type of crunching are feeds, signaling and strategy shifts for their market makers. I have no doubt investment banks, who operate on an order of magnitude more data, would have something similar. Even if majority of it was used for backtesting.

tikhonj 11y ago

I'm sure that's one consideration, but there are a lot of other compelling reasons. It's fun, it's relatively accessible, it's easy to scale difficulty and it's easy to add competition. Performance is directly quantifiable along multiple axes and they can release multiplayer scenarios in the future. I can't think of many options with all of these properties that also require the particular technical skills they're looking for. It feels like doing a market simulation reasonably well is actually easier than their other track (a security CTF). One particularly nice aspect is how many skills an exchange simulator can test. You have low-level programming and optimization, interesting algorithmic problems and high-level data analysis. That's applicable to a lot of jobs outside of finance. As a game, it's surprisingly open-ended. Personally, I'm glad they chose this. I actually wrote a market-making bot for a mock exchange as part of an internship. It was fun and a great learning experience and not just for finance. I'm glad somebody is bringing this experience to the public at large.

mrchicity 11y ago

I run a mid-sized (5-10 employees) trading desk for an automated market-maker. My first thought upon reading about this game, not knowing what Starfighter is, was "holy shit, I'd love to hire someone who excelled at this or even attempted it." I've worked with tons of extremely bright, well credentialed people who get lost in the weeds of analysis paralysis or trying to build the world's most complex model. Many fail. The best hires I've made internalize the nuts & bolts quickly, work hard to try many ideas, and are "smart enough." They're probably just as smart as the other guys actually but use intelligence as a tool rather than an end unto to itself.

MichaelGG 11y ago
Really? Aren't most of you at real cutting edge, like coming up with FPGA designs to implement the trade strategies?
- mrchicity 11y ago
  A lot of research is done in higher-level languages.
pjlegato 11y ago
Hey, send me a message, pjlegato at databaselabs dot io.
tomjen3 11y ago
I am definitely one of those people who would assume you have to be a genius to do work in finance because I imagine that if your product isn't perfect you will be eaten alive in the markets. That said there is also one other thing that prevents me from looking at a career in that kind of business: I imagine the traders as the kind of people with no empathy who are just looking to metaphorically stab you in the back the second they get a dollar in bonus for doing so.
- kasey_junk 11y ago
  I've found that traders are no more or less empathetic than any other cross section of users you might encounter in other industries. There are some trading desks that are more bro'd up than others and each trading desk has it's own culture, but the same is true of startups, which correlate pretty well with small trading desks in lots of ways. Further, the very concept of what a "trader" is has fundamentally altered in the last 15 years. A trader is just as likely to be a physicist or hold a PhD in signals processing today as they are to be your typical "Tall Guy With Aggression issues". I'd also point out that lots of people co-mingle different industries. Trading is not investment banking, which is not asset management. There are interesting software problems and good people working in all those fields.