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A New Breed of Trader on Wall Street: Coders with a Ph.D
- samfisher83 11y agoI think wall street has been hiring PhDs to code for a long time. I don't think this is a new phenomenon.
- zitterbewegung 11y agoYea isn't the old joke that quants are composed of Physics PHD dropouts ?
- scott_s 11y agoNot that I've heard. Quants tend to hold PhDs in technical fields.
- Bill_Dimm 11y agoHere is the breakdown for the quants at the bank I worked for in 1995-1999 (I may have forgotten a few people): Cornell physics PhDs: 3 Harvard physics PhDs: 2 Princeton physics PhDs: 2 Univ of Penn physics PhD: 1 Other physics PhDs: 2 Cornell applied math PhD: 1 Other applied math PhD: 1 Cornell mechanical engineering PhD: 1 Univ of Chicago finance PhD: 1 So, if by "dropout" you mean that they didn't complete their PhDs, then no, that's wrong. If by "dropout" you mean people leaving physics, then yes, it's very common (especially for theorists -- all physicists on the list above where theorists except maybe one or two).
- lvs 11y agoOn the assumption that their dissertations were not on relevant topics, I can't help but feel this is such a terrible waste of highly specialized education resources.
- robotresearcher 11y agoAre there lots of unfilled physicist jobs where you are?
- lvs 11y agoYes, very snarky, but I can promise you that science faculty do not consider it a good use of their efforts and resources to train students for jobs moving money around in circles.
- infinite8s 11y agoDon't worry, they do. Who else will write their publications/advance their research agendas?
- 1812Overture 11y agoBeats training students to work at Starbucks. Not everyone can become a professor.
- robotresearcher 11y agoWe get to train them, not choose what they do afterwards.
- lvs 11y agoThat's not in dispute. I'm saying it's a waste, not that I know how to fix it. More relevant jobs is obviously a part-answer.
- scott_s 11y agoI hope the same faculty understand that here are not many science jobs available.
- digler999 11y agonot necessarily, I often feel the same way about people who are experts in literature. But just mastering SOME topics is still a contribution to humanity and can be applied in other areas.
- huac 11y agoin the sense that they've dropped out of academia
- whatok 11y agoNothing remotely new
- Amorymeltzer 11y agoNot new. A high school (early 2000s) physics teacher told us all that if we wanted to make money with physics, we should: 1. Get a physics PhD with 2. Some experience in computer modeling 3. Get hired by Wall Street Even with the downturn in '08, I've seen no indication he was wrong.
- jorgecurio 11y agoPretty ironic since salaries for quants have gone down and getting replaced by outsourced overseas PHD graduate.
- adwf 11y agoYeah, half my friends from university graduated straight out of their Physics degree and went straight into finance. Didn't even bother with the Masters or PhD.
- hackuser 11y agoQuants were around before then. Look up the story of Long Term Capital Management (IIRC, they were quants).
- ska 11y agoLot's of "nothing new" comments here, but I think that may be missing the point. Wall Street has been hiring physics & math graduates for a good while now, but typically as quants, not traders. Those were (are?) hugely different positions, in terms of responsibility and dollars realized. Not my area, so I may just be missing something too. But when I had acquaintances going into this sort of things, they weren't getting anywhere near a trading desk. At least, not for a while.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- scott_s 11y agoAgreed - I've had colleagues (with PhDs) go to financial jobs, but they were not traders.
- kasey_junk 11y agoThe line between trader and quant in electronic trading scenarios is pretty vague and has been for some time.
- jorgecurio 11y agoOne gets you fired when you lose money and the other gets you a speaking opportunities at universities where kids are discovering Gordon Gekko.
- mrchicity 11y agoYou want it to be that way, but it's the other way. If you're just a "cog in the machine" doing research or writing software for a trader, and he ends up sucking, the firm will probably shuffle you around to work under someone else. You have generally useful technical skills, cost less than the trader, and recruiting good technical people is expensive. If you're a supposedly brilliant trader but cost the firm money taking stupid risk or fail to make any profit to justify your inflated salary and bonus, there's not really much they can do with you.
- melling 11y ago"Writing computer code, or at the least being conversant in the firm’s program of choice, OCaml, is a requisite for all traders. Indeed, new traders must complete a monthlong OCaml boot camp before they start trading."
- crnt2 11y agoThe first three comments were all variations on "this isn't new" so let's take that point for granted, and see what else this article gives us. It's not new that Wall Street is hiring Ph.D scientists and mathematicians (that's been happening since the 80s) but what's changing is the kind of role they are getting hired for. From the 1980s up until 2005 or perhaps even later, most Ph.Ds were hired in "quant" roles, that is, to build mathematical models that could price and manage the risk of derivatives. They were generally not in trading roles. More recently (i.e. in the last decade) it's common to hire Ph.Ds as traders - that is, to write algorithms that are used to make trading decisions. This requires a rather different set of skills - instead of being skilled in stochastic calculus, partial differential equations and numerical methods, the quant trader is skilled in statistics, data analysis, optimisation and machine learning. It's true that Wall Street has Ph.Ds hired to build trading models for many years (e.g. Renaissance) but the change is that this is no longer an esoteric fringe pursuit. It is seen as standard that trading desks at investment banks will have a large number of quant traders. Large European investment banks have heads of trading who are quants. Quantitative hedge funds are no longer mysterious and exciting - many of them use well understood models that have been widely replicated across the industry. To be honest, I am surprised that it has taken this long. Finance is so obviously suited to these kinds of quantitative methods that only an aggressive rearguard action by voice traders has been able to keep them at bay. The question is no longer whether quantitative traders and their algorithms will largely replace voice traders, but how long the voice traders will manage to hold out. Jane Street is an interesting special case. From my (somewhat limited) interactions with them, they are neither wholly voice traders nor wholly algorithmic. Instead, their researchers and traders build algorithmic trading systems which can be "driven "by humans. For example, the system will continually calculate a set of useful metrics that a human trader uses to make a final buy/sell decision, and trade is then immediately executed by high frequency execution algorithms. Or the human trader decides to make a complicated spread bet (e.g. long an ETF vs. a cost-optimized basket of the underlying stocks) and the algorithm goes out to execute the basket as effectively as possible. I think there's an interesting parallel to "Centaur chess" [0] where the combination of a computer and a human is much more powerful than either of them acting alone. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Chess
- 11y ago
- 6stringmerc 11y agoWait, the article cites Knight Capital with a straight face and doesn't bring up the whole "Whoops we lost $440 million due to bad software" [1] as a significant caveat to putting so much emphasis on the role of technology? That doesn't seem very contextually fair. Programmers, no matter how great, can still make costly mistakes. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-17/knight-capital-reports-net-loss-as-software-error-takes-toll-1- http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-10-17/knight-cap...
- kasey_junk 11y agoThe Knight Capital responsible for the Knightpocalypse basically went out of business due to it, and was bought by Getco a different trading firm. Getco switched names because in some places the The Knight brand was stronger than the Getco one.
- solaarphunk 11y agoThey actually did this to reverse-IPO, giving all of the PE firms and partners a way to get liquidity since KCG was already public.
- kasey_junk 11y agoDo you know how they ended up splitting up the ownership stakes? I've been curious but never tracked it down?
- josh2600 11y agoIt was a devops error. I wrote a blog post about this once: http://blog.terminal.com/knightmare-prevention/ http://blog.terminal.com/knightmare-prevention/
- johngalt 11y agoI would draw the opposite conclusion. If bad software can cost you hundreds of millions, that places a greater emphasis on the role of technology.
- erubin 11y agoIf there's one place where just about everyone I know has done job interviews, it's jane street. They cast a very wide net.
- dmix 11y agoI see their advertisements everywhere. Probably because I searched OCaml at some point.
- jorgecurio 11y ago1986,87 also saw a boom in quants, mainly engineers, even nobel prize laureates. They put them in one room, come up with ways to make money using quantitative models. There was a lot of buzz for decades until the collapse of LTCM. Peter Thiel said MBAs flocking to certain tech as warning signs of a peak, likewise wall streets have had PHDs flocking as a measure of it's peak. I fear that with a double whammy of low oil prices and low commodity prices, it will spark a long period of economic stagnation in the near future, as more jobs disappear in increasing numbers and social benefit falls and governments around the world struggle to monetize their aging populations. The countries with young and increasing birth rate will feel the impact the worst, and we are already seeing such demographic in Europe packing up their bags and joining jihadi movements.
- zzleeper 11y ago> I fear that with a double whammy of low oil prices and low commodity prices, it will spark a long period of economic stagnation in the near future, as more jobs disappear So if commodity prices go up, it's bad because Europe can't afford those commodities. But then if they go down it's also but because...? Heck, it's not a double whammy, it's good news for most countries in the world. A different story might be why are these commodities going down (because China's demand has been drying up), and that might actually be bad news, but it's another argument.
- gnaritas 11y agoLow commodity prices are a good thing, they don't cause stagnation.
- botterworkshop 11y agoDifferent evidence, same fear. Assuming trend continues, is there any alternative to war?
- bluishgreen 11y agoThis seems to be the wall street equivalent of transitioning sysadmin roles into devops.
- toephu2 11y agoHow are people bypassing NYT and WSJ paywalls these days? The Innocuous Chrome Extension posted a few days ago on HN no longer works, and coming from Google isn't working for me either.
- noobermin 11y agoThis may surprise you, but some of us actually have subscriptions. I don't have one to the WSJ but I have one to nyt.
- Nicholas_C 11y agoWhat made you subscribe to the Times versus other newspapers? I've been debating a Times vs. WSJ subscription.
- thesimpsons1022 11y agoWSJ seems a lot more conservative and hacky. NYT is more liberal.
- hackuser 11y agoSome differences, from someone who knows far more about news and the news industry than they should (and I'm not in the industry): * Very generally, the Times focuses more on investigative journalism and non-business news; the WSJ's priority is business news. But they both cover plenty in all fields. * The Times is generally a little more prominent, the leading newspaper (and news source) in the world and the "Newspaper of Record"[1] for the U.S., but I'm not sure how that reputation benefits you, the reader. * The Times' arts coverage is unquestionably the best and most sophisticated of any newspaper, if that matters to you, from film to theater to music to exhibitions to other 'fine' arts. However, it is somewhat New York-centric (it is the New York Times, after all, and NY is the center of the U.S. and global art world). * Editorial: Even the best newspapers' standards of accuracy on their editorial pages are far below those of their journalism; they often are happy to print outright lies and propaganda either to push a political issue or because it's influential. IIRC, maybe a decade ago the Times decided they would raise the standards somewhat on their editorial page. Regardless, I find the Times publishes less outright bullsh-t; they have a politically diverse roster of columnists but the unsigned editorials are definitely liberal. The WSJ regularly pushes things like climate denial and other bizarre ideas (that serve the conservative, wealthy busiess elite) such as this one:[2] Personally, I don't read any editorials in any paper - they are so regularly ignorant of or lying about the facts and full of propaganda (that word again) that I never know if I'm becoming more misinformed by reading them. * Other options: Also, I'd consider the Financial Times, the leading international competitor to the WSJ, which I think is just as good as the other two and provides a more diverse perspective coming from the UK. Certainly there is more overlap in coverage between the NYT and WSJ than between either and the FT - check out their site and you'll see many important stories you'd oterwise miss. The Washington Post also is excellent. I can't think of another source of serious news, in English, in the class of those four. * IMHO: The WSJ is owned by News Corp (Rupert Murdoch), the same company that owns Fox News. Their demonstrated willingness to lie and push propaganda at Fox News, as well as openly use it to control the political process, makes me doubt that the same owners would have more integrity at WSJ. Their editorial page confirms my doubts to a degree. I don't trust it, though many others do. I don't completely trust the NY Times either, of course, but much more than their Manhatten neighbor. I hope that helps. ----- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_of_record https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_of_record - don't believe some Wikipedia editor's attempt to equate the LA Times and Washington Post with the Times. If any challenges its position, it's the WSJ. [2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/30/wsj-defends-kristallnacht_n_4694727.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/30/wsj-defends-kristal... - It describes and links to the original, which is behind a paywall.
- mrdrozdov 11y agoReads like a recruitment piece for programmers, or maybe that's how I read too many articles being programmer. I was a little confused by this: > For example, Jane Street, which is privately held, has increased its shareholder’s equity, or net worth, to more than $1 billion today from $228 million in 2007. Is this supposed to be an impressive stat? ZocDoc has become about $2 billion company in basically the same time frame, which seems more impressive given that ZocDoc didn't start from that $228M handicap. My perception is that it's also much more expensive to run a company like Jane Street.
- jakarta 11y agoyou are confusing valuation with shareholder's equity
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- amelius 11y agoBut, what has science got to do with it? None of the "experiments" can be reproduced.
- keyle 11y agoInterested to find out why OCaml. Not that it's wrong in my view, but why, next to so many choices.
- keyle 11y agoAh found an answer... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKcOkWzj0_s&feature=youtu.be&t=25m25s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKcOkWzj0_s&feature=youtu.be...
- cellularmitosis 11y agoYaron Minsky of Jane Street gives some insight here https://vimeo.com/14313378 https://vimeo.com/14313378
- awongh 11y agoI don't know much about ML, but this was a good talk!
- KMag 11y agoI imagine it's because until about 5 years ago, there weren't many choices that were significantly safer than Java (no null references, failing to account for all cases in a match statement is a compile error, etc.) and generally within a factor of 2 of C's speed. Haskell's laziness by default can mean less predictable performance, or at least fatter tails on the performance distribution.
- thecage411 11y agoWhat would be the choices now? Most references to alternatives suggest Haskell.
- gohrt 11y agobecause Yaron Minksy is super-smart and he likes OCaml. Other companies do well without OCaml.
- ryporter 11y ago
- runn1ng 11y agoEvery time I hear about algorithmic trading, I keep thinking back about Enron.
- hackercomplex 11y agoI wonder if their recruiting tactics are as aggressive as some of the firms I've seen portreyed in film.. MARCY DAWSON: I admit we've been too aggressive. But all I ask is that you give me five minutes. As a token, accept this. MAX: I don't want your money MARCY DAWSON: The suitcase isn't filled with dollars, or gold, or diamonds. Just silicon. A Ming Mecca chip. MAX: Ming Mecca? They're not even de-classified yet. MARCY DAWSON: You're right, they're not. But Lancet-Percy has many friends. Beautiful, isn't it? Do you know how rare these are? MAX: What do you...? MARCY DAWSON: Mr Cohen? MAX RUNS DOWN INTO A SUBWAY (taken from π screenplay by Darren Aronofsky)
- remyp 11y agoI don't deal with petty materialists like you! One of my favorite movies.
- zump 11y agoThis industry irks me. What's the point of doing engineering anywhere if you don't get paid as much as these guys to shift money around?
- OscarCunningham 11y agoProviding something useful to the world. Reasonable hours. Not having to do any statistics.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- minimax 11y agoThe pay in these sorts of articles is always overhyped. As with any business, the people making the most money at these kinds of firms are the owners of the firms. Consider this line “As a trader, if you do well, you will retire before you turn 30,” said one employee on an industry message board. That is basically 100% unattributed, unconfirmed bullshit.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- geofft 11y agoYeah, I feel like "As a founder, if you do well, you will retire before you turn 30" is the sort of thing I could totally expect to read here, even though there would be plenty of "what are you talking about" replies.
- mrchicity 11y agoYeah that sounds like complete bullshit to me. I know some top quant traders who make high-six/low-seven figure comp consistently at that point in their careers, but they're nowhere near able to retire with a comfortable lifestyle, and that's an extremely biased sample. For every person like them, 100 others fail early on, 10 stick around making a nice but not much higher than Google salary, and 5 have a couple busy high comp years then get pushed out by greedy management, have their edge eaten by competitors, or quit when the markets slow down. Getting to that level is like making partner in a law firm. You have to do much better than "well" and anyone who gets there would be a fool to retire and likely wouldn't want to anyway due to the personality traits/defects required to get there in the first place.
- lindbergh 11y agoI'm currently enrolled in a MSc program with a thesis on portfolio optimization using statistical learning. It might even lead to a publication! But now, the question is, should I go onto a PhD in stats or CS or just settle with it. I know I probably have the chops to complete it, it's just that 4 or 5 five more years in school is somewhat risky. Sometimes it's hard to assert your worth on such a competitive market. On a side note: omg janestreet is such my dream job. Writing functional code, working on immensely interesting problems (what is the market distribution?) and being paid for it.
- hackuser 11y agoI'm not sure I understand these jobs in an economic sense and I still am not sure of the value they provide to society. Does solving liquidity or arbitrage issues a few microseconds, or even seconds, faster than someone else improve productivity? Or when it doesn't depend on speed but on seeing some tiny market inefficiency, how much does that help the world? (And I'm sure I'm overlooking other economic activities in these firms - what are they?) There's the economic question of why the market rewards them so well (not that, in the real world, the reward is usually proportional to the value, but it's something to think about). Is it essentially the equivalent of rent-seeking - that is, they get their hands on the resource first and then sell it to others? Or perhaps it's simply the free market, but working on a timescale of microseconds, where efficieny does't really benefit a society of humans that live on timescales orders of magnitude larger. Finally, there's the concentration of wealth that results from these activities, which is a serious concern. (I'm not saying everything everyone does must contribute to society, or that I'm a saint who lives on nuts and berries and tends to lepers, but it's a consideration.)
- tryitnow 11y agoThis is the crux of the matter. No, there's no evidence that these activities produce economic value of a magnitude that justifies their compensation. A certain number of "speculators" are needed to provide liquidity to capital markets. It's unclear what that number is, but it is most likely nowhere near the level we currently see. In essence, it is gambling. These funds are supported on an ongoing basis by asset management fees. This provides a nice living for the fund managers and employees. They are structured so that the players experience all upside and no downside. If they lose millions of dollars it's not like the employees and managers are responsible for making it up (although sometimes there are clawback provisions, but not nearly as often as you would want). But if they make millions they take a cut of their gains. This most likely leads to unnecessary risk-taking. (unnecessary in the sense that there's no net economic benefit from it). So if this is largely a zero-sum game, who are the losers and why don't they do anything about it? Good question. Most directly it is the institutions and wealthy individuals who invest with hedge funds. These institutions/individuals do it because as a species we have a flawed reasoning capacity and overestimate our ability to exercise good judgment.
- sjg007 11y agoThis is because of the shift to HFT.
- gnaritas 11y agoIt's really not, HFT doesn't require quants, it's all about latency arbitrage, not about predicting future prices with quantitative analysis. It is all about the shift to algorithmic trading, of which HFT is only a small sub-category.
- makeset 11y agoThe total size of the HFT pie is indeed minuscule, considering the amount of hype it gets. Past the high infrastructural barrier to entry, and assuming they can stay ahead of the competition, the consistency of returns does seem lucrative, but the actual magnitudes of the opportunities are hard-limited by the nature of the time scales. You can't move any significant amount of capital in milliseconds and expect to profit. Compared to the average hedge fund, they are playing with pennies.
- mrchicity 11y agoNonsense. Most HFTs are market-makers, either official or unofficial and have to predict price movements to quote competitively. If you only make quotes where you have an immediate arb in another product/exchange, you won't get many trades: https://ptportal.kcg.com/kresearch/do/research/getDownload?attachmentId=4003&username=8FEW5ecT13JTdHAY7Qm0TA== https://ptportal.kcg.com/kresearch/do/research/getDownload?a...
- gnaritas 11y agoHFT market makers aren't doing complex quantative analysis in microseconds it takes to do trades, and latency arb isn't "an immediate arb in another product/exchange", that's just normal arb. Quants are used for longer term stuff, not microsecond level stuff. HTF's are doing order book stuff and flipping the spread, nothing hugely complex, just fast.
- chad_strategic 11y agoI have been doing this for a while, as has Wall Street. Coder * (self taught) + MBA * (human communication skills) = $$ http://www.strategic-options.com/trade/ http://www.strategic-options.com/trade/
- mutandi 11y agoHonest question, is this site satirical? The average gain is "$9.19%"
- kelvin0 11y agoI haven't figured out what the (self taught) part brings to this equation. The way I interpret it is that self taught has a factor > 1.0 which is better than someone who would have learned in college or some other form of learning? I get the (human communication skills)... that makes sense in the equation. Care to explain it? I figure if you take the time to write an equation, it might as well be explained in terms more formal? :)
- OscarCunningham 11y agoNote that the site linked to looks highly dodgy, and so the above post is essentially spam and hence unlikely to contain too much deep meaning.
- chad_strategic 11y agoKeep watching CNBC bro. ;)
- chad_strategic 11y agoYou call me dodgy, but this guy isn't? You most definitely a rockstar! http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-19/david-einhorns-confession-we-lost-money-every-quarter http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-19/david-einhorns-conf...
- chad_strategic 11y agoSelf taught really should mean someone that has the initiative, drive, determination and passion for their particular project. I don't think any self taught coder, starts off wanting to write code, they just need to move their particular project into code realm. My passion was stocks, when excel couldn't handle my calculations, I had to teach myself code to handle the calculations. Being self taught allow me to think in non traditional ways, to solve code problems. I also get a lot discrimination in the web development world, because I don't have a CS degree. I was once told from an interview, "We would like to hire Chad, he is well educated and smart, but we can't cause he doesn't have a CS degree." It wasn't a requirement. Since then I embrace the fact that I'm self taught, some might see it as weakness, I see it as a strength. Finally, I really like Jack Dorsey quote: http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-on-programmers-2013-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-on-programmers-20...
- crb002 11y agoWhat's new is that they are using FP instead of C++ to deliver results quickly and more reliably. These aren't the quants from the 90s that were Physics PhDs applying the latest and greatest in differential equations and whatnot. These are programmers who know how to make the complier do more work for them so they achieve results faster.
- hackercomplex 11y agoFast execution with very terse code, and also the code that is produced by a diciplined OCaml programmer can be easier to grok in many situations because it may read close to what the math formulas look like on paper relative to other languages. To be honest this is the same argument people make for Haskell and I'm only assuming the argument applies to OCaml equally well.
- Ericson2314 11y agoYay FP! I wish the article had made clear that the OCaml was a programming language. Could be some proprietary junk GUI the way it was actually written.
- narrowrail 11y agoAs a swing trader, this interests me. The volatility of the market presents opportunities I don't think would otherwise be possible. Certain news items will push a stock significantly below market value, as determined by 10-Qs overtime (and some knowledge of a given industry). I happen to believe the current AI-led trading induces extra volatility in the market that is eventually corrected for which ultimately leads to swing trades.
- tetraverse 11y agoSeriously, are you serious, these are the people who bankrupted an entire generation.
- madengr 11y agoTitle mentions PhD yet only 1 of the 6 guys in the article has one.
- masudhossain 11y agoTrader+coder here. This article is missing something very important, the fact that coding doesn't mean you're going to trade better. A coder doesn't know how to trade right off the bat, they'll only know how to code in a specific trading rubric (most trading algos aren't even good unless we're talking HFT) that has been told to them from someone that already knows how to trade successfully. Anyone that's a real trader and has managed clients money will instantly be able to tell you that this is articles title is misleading.
- mathgenius 11y agoI've been in and out of coding for finance at a few different shops for about 10 years now, and recently have been working more on the front-lines: coming up with my own trades and the software to do those. I can tell you from personal experience that this is a completely different experience than writing code for someone else (a trader) who then is responsible for making/losing the money. Imagine this for a daily routine: 1) oh shit this is awesome: x times $1000000 means i'm going to be so fucking rich! 2) run code live on the XYZ market, trying not to shit bricks 3) hang-on i found a bug in my analysis/data-preprocessing/ML pipeline and i'm not going to be rich. 4) spend hours (or days) fixing bug & re-running analysis 5) go back to 1). After a few months of this one gets seriously fragged.
- esaym 11y agoha ha, I did that basically with bitcoin.
- GoodJokes 11y agoA new breed of horrible people. Seriously, how diluted do you have to be to think what you are doing is at all, I don't know, good for the world. Tech is supposed to be some panacea of hope, but its shit like this that proves otherwise. Gross Gross Gross.
- bitmadness 11y ago"Writing computer code, or at the least being conversant in the firm’s program of choice, OCaml, is a requisite for all traders." nytimes... why u so noob?
- _lpa_ 11y agoI'm coming to the end of my PhD, and have been contacted by a few recruiters for various hedge funds. It seems like a shame to leave academia. Realistically though, most people will be stuck in a series of ~18 month postdoc contracts, with little prospect of getting tenure. Add to this the poor pay, and hedge funds start to seem pretty attractive!
- andy_ppp 11y agoI occasionally meet bankers here in London and I can't help but think to myself what a waste of time and effort when there are actual problems to solve. Bit rude I guess but a whole generation of bright people reducing the latency of trades or compliance software or a new trading algorithm does not move us from zero to one, maybe more zero to -0.3 or something. How people can claim the market allocates money correctly I do not know, it doesn't seem possible with the rigging and illegal activity that's been going on.
- IndianAstronaut 11y agoIncrease or maintain good funding for the sciences. A lot of people in the sciences aren't greedy, they just want to earn a decent wage doing what they love. Problem is that the grant situation now is so bad in scientific research, people are leaving in droves. I was doing research on environmental effects on organisms and their offspring with huge implications in development. Now I am using my talents to get more clicks for a website.
- plg 11y agoI think the same thing when I meet coders who spend their time on ways to get consumers to click on more ads. Or ways to track consumers. Or ways to trick consumers into providing their personal information.
- manigandham 11y agoAs someone who works in the ad industry - by far the best way to get people to click on ads is to have better ads that are more relevant and interesting and correct for that person (and which tracking plays a supporting role). In this case, they serve as a very efficient market to connect people with the goods and services they want/need which only helps the greater economy and benefits everyone.
- atemerev 11y agoWell I am a quant strategy developer, a libertarian, and I am quite proud of my job (except for the compliance part). I see no "rigging and illegal activity" where I work. (Being legal is not equal to being moral, by the way, and vice versa).
- JackFr 11y agoTo all the "Nothing new here" people - really? Yes there is nothing new, in that you physically cannot write the words "Jane Street Capital" without subsequently writing the the word "OCaml". But seriously, an OCaml reference in the New York Times. Someone must be celebrating.