10 ms·

Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents to have society employing you full-time to make rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets rather tha

Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents to have society employing you full-time to make rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets rather than something more beneficial to society? I don't blame you at all (I'm sure your quality of life is magnitudes of order better, and I'd do the same in your position) and this isn't personal at all, it just pains me that our brightest graduates are working in finance rather than something like curing cancer.

aswanson 10y ago
The market set a cost in payoff in terms of quality of life and remuneration for both roles. He made the rational choice for himself and his family. Also, there are former financial engineers like David Shaw that have taken their earnings to literally try to cure cancer.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  One might argue that the market fails to price (and compensate) information goods efficiently or accurately. http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.html#SECTION00030000000000000000 http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.h...
  - aswanson 10y ago
    I'd agree with that. I don't believe in the efficient market hypothesis. The "market" given his limited information, professorship salary, and the compensation offered him to do other work clearly showed a large spread which he was rational to exploit. I also believe society as a whole is being shortsighted in creating such a wide spread, but its not within his power to correct it; it's societies failure to think long term and his duty is to his family first.
reverend_gonzo 10y ago
Do you ever feel that maybe you shouldn't talk about things you don't understand? Working a prop trading firm is nowhere near "making rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets". Furthermore, the majority of software/engineering jobs out there are not doing "something more beneficial to society". How many companies are really just ad-driven, marketing-driven. Yes, it would be nice if the entire world could focus on "something like curing cancer", but other things need to get done. And the majority of people have bills to pay. I am very similar to the OP, except I bailed halfway through the PhD, because I realized that, in academia, I will work 80 hours a week for $40k, or I can go into finance and work half that and make multiples more. I can now donate/spend my money to causes like "curing cancer" or "making art" and let somebody who really wants to devote their life to that craft do so.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  Yes!!! You will undoubtedly make a greater impact by earning as much as you can and donating it to causes later in life. Some people think research or science is the only path to a better society but in all honesty it may just take paying people in a poor country to plant trees.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Linus Torvalds. Richard Stallman. Martin Luther King, Jr. Nikola Tesla. Dr. John Snow.
    - jawilson2 10y ago
      I assume this should this be read in ascending order of importance ;-).
      - dredmorbius 10y ago
        The contributions, conditions of those contributions, and the rewards and incentives for pursuing those contributions matter vastly more than the order of sequencing. The list is extremely partial. I'd be much happier seeing other contributions to it than sniping about significance.
  - RodericDay 10y ago
    Your left hand is inarguably taking, or helping take, more than your right hand is giving.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Indeed. Research may be the thing that directly betters the society, but in current economy, one can often do more by applying their skills on the market and using the gains to fund researchers. I think things are fine as long as we have both researchers and people funding research, each working to the best of their specialized skills. That said, research is seriously underfunded.
whenwillitstop 10y ago
this thought process is pure brainwashing by the left
- fsloth 10y ago
  Why is wishing for a world where it would be better to help eradicate suffering rather than work to accumulate imaginary play chips bad?
  - whenwillitstop 10y ago
    Because that idea is a fantasy, it has never come to fruition and never will. Progress is made through real incentives. Wouldnt it be nice if nobody stole from eachother? Sounds great doesnt it? Then why doesnt it happen? The play chips are not imaginary, the rich have better lives in almost all aspects.
    - fsloth 10y ago
      You are confusing philosophising about a better way to live with knowledge of empirical results in politics and economy. I know very well communism as such does not work, and that at our current stage of development we need prices and markets for resource optimization. And laws and judicial systems and so on. But. The play chips are imaginary. We play by the rules due to convention, not due to a law of nature. The rich are better off not because only a marginal percent of population can be better off, but because how the current economic system stochastically distributes the captured value from various economic processes. Their main happiness comes not from being "better" than anybody else, but because their resources enable them to avoid the lower rungs of maslow's hierarchy of needs and focus on self actualization. Society can change. Anything else is misogynic fantasy. USA was born out of hate of kings and aristocracy and the taxes imposed thereof, of the hate of existing status quo of hereditary benefits and cronyism of state power. Sure, it was not better for a large category of population, but it was a society designed, that functioned differently than anything else before it, and remains functioning to this day. It was born into a world where anything else but a strong monarchy was a whimsical daydream. Change happens. There is no reason to accept status quo if it seems unsavory. One must remain a realist and a humanist while one is at it. Saying "nothing but the current system is possible" is delusional denial of empirically proven changes societies and economic systems can go through.
jawilson2 10y ago
I hope you aren't downvoted for this, as this is basically my exact thought process for the last few years. > make rich people richer It is prop trading, so we are making ourselves richer, technically. We do a lot of charity work and donations with schools, etc. > Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents Absolutely. However, I also like not having to beg my toddler to eat the food in front of him because payday is 10 days away, every credit card is maxed, and who knows how we will get to the grocery, which is what happened sometimes during my postdoc 3-7 years ago. Student loans were coming in at ~$1500/month when I'm making $2500/month. It was very difficult, and I was deeply depressed. When I finally landed that professor position, my workload got worse, and while there was a pay increase, I still wasn't going to be buying a house anytime soon. This was NOT an expensive area. We ended up living with my parents for a while (me, my wife, and 3 kids). The math just wasn't adding up, and there wasn't an end in sight. Adding in trouble getting grants, not wanting to restart the faculty job search, I started looking at industry. I applied at a few prop trading firms on whim, and mine ended up being a great fit. I was pretty successful doing the actual research, but my particular niche (neuroscience+software methods and tools) isn't really funded by grants. I even got several rounds of good publicity for some of my PhD work, and did international interviews, etc. I was a very good scientist, but that doesn't cut it any more; new investigators are competing with established labs and members of the AAS who are submitting 30 grants per cycle. I was doing some very cool work with kids with epilepsy, which would greatly improve outcomes. I was a very valuable member of our collaboration; that research more or less came to a halt when I left, though I have been able to help out through consulting from time to time. So, what I did was in high demand and highly worthwhile, but there was a disconnect with getting the funding. Am I being greedy? Maybe. There is that saying "you have to love yourself before you can love others." I think that might apply financially as well, particularly with regards to your family. It wasn't worth seeing my kids live in the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, going to crappy schools in crime-ridden areas that we can afford, with the added possibility of losing their dad because everyday he wonders if today is the day he drives off a bridge on the way home or something. If that means that my epilepsy research doesn't get done...then so be it. Vote for people who will increase research funding. So, when the offer came in and it was 3X what I was making as a prof, without considering bonuses, the weight of the world left my shoulders.
pvaldes 10y ago
The problem is that pursuing this things that could be benefical to the society, is also making you a pariah in the same society.
tikhonj 10y ago
This question comes up in most discussions about finance and trading. I think it's the wrong question to ask. Academic research jobs, despite poor pay and conditions, are still some of the hardest positions to get. The demand for those jobs far, far outstrips supply. It's hard to get into a decent PhD program and then basically impossible to get a decent faculty position (or join MSR or whatever). Candidates aren't draining away—they're being pushed away, either at the selection stage or through terrible conditions. (When taking on real firm-wide risk with millions of dollars is less stressful than basic research, you know something's gone terribly wrong!) The macroscopic problem isn't that finance and industry are luring people away, it's that so many more people want to do research than the system can possibly support. You could argue that finance is luring away the most qualified candidates, but I don't think that's true. More importantly, since research careers are so impacted, institutions can get away with really noisy selection processes—if you thought tech hiring was bad, just look at how faculty members are selected. The other part, of course, is that trading is not useless. I recently started a job working on supply chain optimization, and the problems we solve and the models we build actually look a lot like what certain kinds of traders do. I don't think anybody would argue that doing math to eke out a 10% reduction on spoilage at grocery stores is socially useless, and yet that's very similar to the sort of efficiencies that come out of better markets—it's just that the value is more abstract, in large part because the public markets are much more decentralized and abstract than physical supply chains. Look, I'm not saying trading makes a marginal impact on par with basic research, either at an individual or a global level. But it's not useless, and I wouldn't be surprised if a trader at some small firm was just as useful to society as the 10,000th engineer at Google. (Not that we can really measure that.) The markets, after all, are a gigantic, distributed coordination system running large swathes of the economy. That's pretty important too!
- jawilson2 10y ago
  > just look at how faculty members are selected. Plus, they typically only post openings once a year. If you miss the fall interview rounds (to start the following fall), you pretty much wait until the following year. So, you're looking at 2 years out if you don't have something lined up after your postdoc, or if you "finish" (whatever that means) your postdoc in late winter.
IndianAstronaut 10y ago
I was working in an area of cancer research regarding how non genetic traits can be inherited and possibly lead to various cancers. Now I work on trying to get more clicks to my company website.

aswanson 10y ago

The market set a cost in payoff in terms of quality of life and remuneration for both roles. He made the rational choice for himself and his family. Also, there are former financial engineers like David Shaw that have taken their earnings to literally try to cure cancer.

dredmorbius 10y ago
One might argue that the market fails to price (and compensate) information goods efficiently or accurately. http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.html#SECTION00030000000000000000 http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hal/Papers/japan/japan.h...
- aswanson 10y ago
  I'd agree with that. I don't believe in the efficient market hypothesis. The "market" given his limited information, professorship salary, and the compensation offered him to do other work clearly showed a large spread which he was rational to exploit. I also believe society as a whole is being shortsighted in creating such a wide spread, but its not within his power to correct it; it's societies failure to think long term and his duty is to his family first.

reverend_gonzo 10y ago

Do you ever feel that maybe you shouldn't talk about things you don't understand? Working a prop trading firm is nowhere near "making rich people richer via gambling in the financial markets". Furthermore, the majority of software/engineering jobs out there are not doing "something more beneficial to society". How many companies are really just ad-driven, marketing-driven. Yes, it would be nice if the entire world could focus on "something like curing cancer", but other things need to get done. And the majority of people have bills to pay. I am very similar to the OP, except I bailed halfway through the PhD, because I realized that, in academia, I will work 80 hours a week for $40k, or I can go into finance and work half that and make multiples more. I can now donate/spend my money to causes like "curing cancer" or "making art" and let somebody who really wants to devote their life to that craft do so.

eanzenberg 10y ago
Yes!!! You will undoubtedly make a greater impact by earning as much as you can and donating it to causes later in life. Some people think research or science is the only path to a better society but in all honesty it may just take paying people in a poor country to plant trees.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Linus Torvalds. Richard Stallman. Martin Luther King, Jr. Nikola Tesla. Dr. John Snow.
  - jawilson2 10y ago
    I assume this should this be read in ascending order of importance ;-).
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      The contributions, conditions of those contributions, and the rewards and incentives for pursuing those contributions matter vastly more than the order of sequencing. The list is extremely partial. I'd be much happier seeing other contributions to it than sniping about significance.
- RodericDay 10y ago
  Your left hand is inarguably taking, or helping take, more than your right hand is giving.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Indeed. Research may be the thing that directly betters the society, but in current economy, one can often do more by applying their skills on the market and using the gains to fund researchers. I think things are fine as long as we have both researchers and people funding research, each working to the best of their specialized skills. That said, research is seriously underfunded.

whenwillitstop 10y ago

this thought process is pure brainwashing by the left

fsloth 10y ago
Why is wishing for a world where it would be better to help eradicate suffering rather than work to accumulate imaginary play chips bad?
- whenwillitstop 10y ago
  Because that idea is a fantasy, it has never come to fruition and never will. Progress is made through real incentives. Wouldnt it be nice if nobody stole from eachother? Sounds great doesnt it? Then why doesnt it happen? The play chips are not imaginary, the rich have better lives in almost all aspects.
  - fsloth 10y ago
    You are confusing philosophising about a better way to live with knowledge of empirical results in politics and economy. I know very well communism as such does not work, and that at our current stage of development we need prices and markets for resource optimization. And laws and judicial systems and so on. But. The play chips are imaginary. We play by the rules due to convention, not due to a law of nature. The rich are better off not because only a marginal percent of population can be better off, but because how the current economic system stochastically distributes the captured value from various economic processes. Their main happiness comes not from being "better" than anybody else, but because their resources enable them to avoid the lower rungs of maslow's hierarchy of needs and focus on self actualization. Society can change. Anything else is misogynic fantasy. USA was born out of hate of kings and aristocracy and the taxes imposed thereof, of the hate of existing status quo of hereditary benefits and cronyism of state power. Sure, it was not better for a large category of population, but it was a society designed, that functioned differently than anything else before it, and remains functioning to this day. It was born into a world where anything else but a strong monarchy was a whimsical daydream. Change happens. There is no reason to accept status quo if it seems unsavory. One must remain a realist and a humanist while one is at it. Saying "nothing but the current system is possible" is delusional denial of empirically proven changes societies and economic systems can go through.

jawilson2 10y ago

I hope you aren't downvoted for this, as this is basically my exact thought process for the last few years. > make rich people richer It is prop trading, so we are making ourselves richer, technically. We do a lot of charity work and donations with schools, etc. > Doesn't it feel like a waste of your talents Absolutely. However, I also like not having to beg my toddler to eat the food in front of him because payday is 10 days away, every credit card is maxed, and who knows how we will get to the grocery, which is what happened sometimes during my postdoc 3-7 years ago. Student loans were coming in at ~$1500/month when I'm making $2500/month. It was very difficult, and I was deeply depressed. When I finally landed that professor position, my workload got worse, and while there was a pay increase, I still wasn't going to be buying a house anytime soon. This was NOT an expensive area. We ended up living with my parents for a while (me, my wife, and 3 kids). The math just wasn't adding up, and there wasn't an end in sight. Adding in trouble getting grants, not wanting to restart the faculty job search, I started looking at industry. I applied at a few prop trading firms on whim, and mine ended up being a great fit. I was pretty successful doing the actual research, but my particular niche (neuroscience+software methods and tools) isn't really funded by grants. I even got several rounds of good publicity for some of my PhD work, and did international interviews, etc. I was a very good scientist, but that doesn't cut it any more; new investigators are competing with established labs and members of the AAS who are submitting 30 grants per cycle. I was doing some very cool work with kids with epilepsy, which would greatly improve outcomes. I was a very valuable member of our collaboration; that research more or less came to a halt when I left, though I have been able to help out through consulting from time to time. So, what I did was in high demand and highly worthwhile, but there was a disconnect with getting the funding. Am I being greedy? Maybe. There is that saying "you have to love yourself before you can love others." I think that might apply financially as well, particularly with regards to your family. It wasn't worth seeing my kids live in the stress of living paycheck to paycheck, going to crappy schools in crime-ridden areas that we can afford, with the added possibility of losing their dad because everyday he wonders if today is the day he drives off a bridge on the way home or something. If that means that my epilepsy research doesn't get done...then so be it. Vote for people who will increase research funding. So, when the offer came in and it was 3X what I was making as a prof, without considering bonuses, the weight of the world left my shoulders.

pvaldes 10y ago

The problem is that pursuing this things that could be benefical to the society, is also making you a pariah in the same society.

tikhonj 10y ago

This question comes up in most discussions about finance and trading. I think it's the wrong question to ask. Academic research jobs, despite poor pay and conditions, are still some of the hardest positions to get. The demand for those jobs far, far outstrips supply. It's hard to get into a decent PhD program and then basically impossible to get a decent faculty position (or join MSR or whatever). Candidates aren't draining away—they're being pushed away, either at the selection stage or through terrible conditions. (When taking on real firm-wide risk with millions of dollars is less stressful than basic research, you know something's gone terribly wrong!) The macroscopic problem isn't that finance and industry are luring people away, it's that so many more people want to do research than the system can possibly support. You could argue that finance is luring away the most qualified candidates, but I don't think that's true. More importantly, since research careers are so impacted, institutions can get away with really noisy selection processes—if you thought tech hiring was bad, just look at how faculty members are selected. The other part, of course, is that trading is not useless. I recently started a job working on supply chain optimization, and the problems we solve and the models we build actually look a lot like what certain kinds of traders do. I don't think anybody would argue that doing math to eke out a 10% reduction on spoilage at grocery stores is socially useless, and yet that's very similar to the sort of efficiencies that come out of better markets—it's just that the value is more abstract, in large part because the public markets are much more decentralized and abstract than physical supply chains. Look, I'm not saying trading makes a marginal impact on par with basic research, either at an individual or a global level. But it's not useless, and I wouldn't be surprised if a trader at some small firm was just as useful to society as the 10,000th engineer at Google. (Not that we can really measure that.) The markets, after all, are a gigantic, distributed coordination system running large swathes of the economy. That's pretty important too!

jawilson2 10y ago
> just look at how faculty members are selected. Plus, they typically only post openings once a year. If you miss the fall interview rounds (to start the following fall), you pretty much wait until the following year. So, you're looking at 2 years out if you don't have something lined up after your postdoc, or if you "finish" (whatever that means) your postdoc in late winter.

IndianAstronaut 10y ago

I was working in an area of cancer research regarding how non genetic traits can be inherited and possibly lead to various cancers. Now I work on trying to get more clicks to my company website.