8 ms·

One thing HN might care about: 3 years ago, 25% of Goldman employees worked in the IT division. They probably had more developers than Facebook and LinkedIn com

One thing HN might care about: 3 years ago, 25% of Goldman employees worked in the IT division. They probably had more developers than Facebook and LinkedIn combined. http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-has-more-engineers-than-facebook-2015-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-has-more-engine...

deleted 10y ago
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jbob2000 10y ago
It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to stock trading. All that programming and the only thing we get for it is that we can correctly value a company.
- NikolaeVarius 10y ago
  Its insane that you think this is the case. The markets are an incredibly important part of the economy and this technology does not only simply value a company.
  - zzleeper 10y ago
    I thought it was satire. Although you might make an argument for why reducing time-to-trade from 50ms to 100ms would not be the end of the world
    - witty_username 10y ago
      That would make markets less efficient and thus allocate capital in a worse manner.
      - aleeds 10y ago
        Less efficient for literally 50 ms. Then it all balances out.
        zeveb 10y ago
        The world GDP is about $76 trillion; that means that the global economy produces about $120,000/ in 50 ms. Reducing the time to work on a trade from 100 to 50 ms gives a trading algorithm that much of an edge, which ultimately helps increase the size of that $76 trillion pie.
    - eej71 10y ago
      I didn't think it was satire as I believe it to be a popular viewpoint both in the larger world as well as among many folks here on HN.
  - jbob2000 10y ago
    GS is an investment firm, their job is to find things that are under valued and cash in on the value left on the table. What else would they do with this technology? They aren't an agri-business, looking for a drought resistant strain of wheat. They're not a biotech company, folding proteins to cure cancer. They aren't an engineering firm, looking for a device to clean and desalinate water. They program computers to eek out another 0.1% on their portfolios.
    - minipci1321 10y ago
      > What else would they do with this technology? Why, the same as all other hi-tech companies -- remove the human from the chain, replace them by the computers, automate processes. Will we still be able to speak about "greedy bankers" once it is all computers everywhere trading?
  - simonh 10y ago
    Though even if all it did was value companies, a 1% improvement in accuracy on the NYSE would correctly allocate $200 Billion dollars of miss-allocated capital to do more work for the economy. And that's just in the US. Globally it could route half a trillion dollars into more deserving companies, creating new jobs, services and products and pushing down unnecessarily high prices. This is why a well functioning finance industry is so vitally important.
    - Bartweiss 10y ago
      > a well functioning finance industry I'm fully prepared to argue we don't have that, though. Traders are throwing many millions of dollars at projects without even a pretense of improving market accuracy, or adding meaningful liquidity. Algorithmic trading hasn't been especially good for accuracy - we suddenly have flash crashes with markets dropping 30% and recovering, based on no change in fundamentals. High speed trading hasn't been much good for it - paying to move your trading servers slightly closer to a T1 backbone doesn't improve liquidity meaningfully, or accuracy at all. And we already have serious, systematic fraud: was the money Goldman Sachs spent buying insider leaks from the Fed really good for the industry? I take your point, and I don't begrudge finance its enormous economic role. But suggesting that the industry's growth in the last ~decade is about improving accuracy seems pretty questionable.
      - simonh 10y ago
        > But suggesting that the industry's growth in the last ~decade is about improving accuracy seems pretty questionable. Finance companies overwhelmingly make money by more accurately allocating capital whether that's channeling investment, arbitrage, executing a trade before the other guy, whatever. In every case that's money that went to a better place to do more economic work faster. It's what finance companies are for. Yes there's the occasional dodgy deal or rip off, but to read your post you'd think that is the only thing financial companies ever do. In reality trillions of dollars spent on research, technology, infrastructure, business growth and jobs got there via financing. Better financing means more and better quality of all of those things.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    Honestly, there's still a point there. Having a well-priced, liquid stock market is obviously important. Mises even set it as his threshold for socialism - a country that has an independent stock market is not socialist. But that's not the same as appreciating the current state of stock trading. Sinking millions into millisecond improvements does not improve pricing. Identifying large trades and running pump-and-dump just before they clear doesn't improve liquidity. Running years-long fraud to get early leaks of Fed decisions helps no one. A lot of what happens in high speed trading today is actually harmful to the market as a pricing and liquidity tool. Insider leaks from the Fed weaken market confidence for everyone. Flash crashes are a new horror born entirely of algorithmic trading. The list goes on. I think it's entirely reasonable to appreciate free markets, even libertarian economic policies, and still consider the start of trading today alarming and detrimental to the economy.
  - zhte415 10y ago
    Indeed it is, and indeed getting it all wrong because on is chasing 5 basis points on a quote from LIBOR, and creating synthetic upon synthetic based on this quote. The quote being a single analyst calling up a trading desk for a market rate, sometimes getting a reply, sometimes not, if getting a rate often from not the stated markets contact, and if not getting any response just inputting the rate from the day before. Organisation setting LIBOR was doing no wrong, those playing it were, but those depending on it diverting any accountability to a black box of interest rates which was clearly not a black box. Absconding selves of responsibility. Markets are indeed allocations of capital. But only when markets dont' get wound up in local optimals. As LIBOR. And bring havoc to everyone.
- SegFaultx64 10y ago
  Not going to comment specifically on the judgement (I agree in general terms). However that is a vast mis-understanding of what a lot of the brain power at an investment bank goes towards. It isn't just equities it is fixed-income and economics as well. But beyond that it isn't just about valuation. It is everything from working on how to actually clear transactions, building dark pools and similar platforms, research and building very real tech on blockchain, building security and infrastructure tooling. Goldman literally invented a programming language (although it is showing it's age at this point). They make very robust Open Source contributions: https://github.com/goldmansachs/gs-collections https://github.com/goldmansachs/gs-collections (just an example). Regardless of if what they do is immoral or silly or both, they are building interesting stuff and solving hard problems. A better organization to direct a dig like that at would someone like Bridgewater, they really are just trying to value equites, and fixed-income.
  - jbob2000 10y ago
    Right, but all of what they are doing is self-serving. They develop these things to give their client portfolios an edge over other investment firms. They aren't developing these technologies to apply them to healthcare or general science, it's just to give them an edge in the investment business. For a company of their size and wealth, their open source contributions are paltry. A handy way to deal with arrays in Java? Wow, that's game changing...
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - scrollaway 10y ago
      What you are saying applies to a lot of companies. Most companies in fact are essentially only self-serving, and if we're talking about open source contributions I can make an argument that outside of the big 3, nearly every valley company's FOSS contributions are paltry "for their size and wealth".
    - andrevvo 10y ago
      These firms inject capital into the economy efficiently and effectively, which then allows firms access to the financial resources to develop technologies to apply to "healthcare or general science". Can you think of a better way to accomplish this? Have the state choose? I think we all know how that turns out.
- melling 10y ago
  Why do people always say this? It's such an thoughtless thing to say. You know what's a real waste of brainpower? 3.5 million truck drivers. People driving cabs. Fast food workers. We can, and should, train more software developers. It's the one job that might be useful in 30 years. At the very least, people will hopefully have enough education to move to another field.
  - branchless 10y ago
    Innovation occurs at the edges. Far be it from me to suggest all truckers are dumb, I'm sure many are not, but the fact is that finance is sucking in many of our brightest and best who might carry the west forward. Instead they are not even doing something pointless, it's appropriating wealth away from other productive endeavor.
    - melling 10y ago
      GS employes 9000 programmers and engineers. I'm sure they only hire the best, just like everyone else. You are exaggerating the opportunity cost of people working at other firms, like Facebook, Google, or Apple, for example.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Based on my experiences over the past year, the real shortage seems to be in competent contractors, plumbers, and electricians--at least in areas with growth.
    - optionalparens 10y ago
      Only anecdotal, but I have observed as much over the past few decades. It's hard to be certain why as there are so many factors at play, but I suspect that a part of it may be due to how we perceive certain jobs. There's a certain stigma with most traditionally "trade" jobs like electricians and plumbers. Many of these type jobs actually make more, especially if you own your own business or have a fee structure that is tied to your actual work. I've known journalists, biologists, programmers, middle managers, government employees, and many white collar jobs to scoff at or look down on other jobs. In some conversations I have reminded these same people that the filthy guy in line they are making fun of might be pulling more than twice their salary, and often may still be university educated or have needed to go through some rigorous training. I am not sure what makes some people think they are above certain jobs or better than other people. The Obama administration sentiment that everyone needs to go to college has done no favors helping certain classes of jobs. White collar jobs or being a celebrity, athlete, or famous in some other way is seen as success, while anything else regardless of quality of life, salary, long-term prospects, independence, and so on is seen as failure, second-class, or even undesirable. I respect anyone who works hard, and especially those that do things that I can't do. I need these people to survive or at least have a better quality first-world life, therefore I always make sure to treat them well. It helps when you come from a culture that considers it rude to not at least offer to feed your plumber or make a coffee.
- wtvanhest 10y ago
  The same could be said for 95% of active companies, especially the large ones. FB - It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to sharing photos. Twitter - It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to sharing single comments. etc. etc. etc. The reality is that we live in an world with inefficiencies. If there are large enough inefficiencies in the value of assets that people can get computers to find them and eliminate them, that is likely a good thing. Just like we live in a world where sharing information used to be really hard, but many 'pointless' companies have made communication incredibly easy. It is better to not judge what you don't fully understand.
- minipci1321 10y ago
  Then you might get a food for thought from reading the recent thread of comments of Google employees (about what they dislike about Google). This is not to cast a shade on Google, but more to get some insight about how the brainpower may actually be spent.
  - pc86 10y ago
    Link?
    - minipci1321 10y ago
      https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-negatives-in-working-in-a-too-good-to-be-true-offices-like-Google https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-negatives-in-working-in-a...
- exstudent2 10y ago
  There's nothing "disgusting" about people exercising their free will to take a job they enjoy and/or pays the bills. Is programming to serve ads better? Is being a dishwasher or delivery person? It's become quite popular to whine about the career choices others make ("we need to _make_ more X become programmers). I think our industry as a whole would benefit from a heaping helping of "mind your own business".
- dexterdog 10y ago
  I know. They could be using all of that intelligence to get people to click on ads instead.
- ranman 10y ago
  FWIW I don't think most of it goes towards trading. They do a lot of other analysis and tool building... as well as operational stuff. I imagine there are a very large number of poorly payed staff classified as "IT"... and a very small number of highly compensated staff classified as "engineering". I'm not privy to the internals though so I'm just guessing. Would be interested if anyone has actual data.
- rayiner 10y ago
  > It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to stock trading. s/stock trading/advertising.
  - branchless 10y ago
    Isn't this capitalism though? Companies are competing on products and it's cheaper to advertise than to innovate, leading companies inexorably down this route.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- justin66 10y ago
  > It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to stock trading. Is it more or less disgusting to you to spend brainpower on banner ads, or social media exchange of cat memes, or something? I'm honestly curious.
  - jbob2000 10y ago
    For one individual to make their own decision to do those things, no issue. But when a group of wealthy elite make it their mission goal to vacuum up money from everyone below, that's disgusting. The executive team at GS decided that they wanted to hire programmers to handle investing, instead of hiring programmers to handle nobler tasks. At least when Google develops banner ads, they are providing value to the millions of people who need to advertise. When GS develops a better trading algorithm, you can count the number of people on one hand who benefit.
    - muninn_ 10y ago
      Google (or Facebook) developing those ads aren't providing value in a vacuum. Now my Internet experience sucks, my privacy is exploited, I'm psychologically manipulated to buy more shit I don't need (to increase the stock value of companies that GS is evaluating), and I become addicted to getting updates, and receiving the latest fake news. It's easy to come out with a trendy anti-investment banking stance and claim that it's not noble. Meanwhile we also have genius developers working on CandyCrush and finding ways to get grandma to make in-app purchases for their own little business vacuum. I actually find GS (or anybody really) developing a better trading algorithm to be much more of a benefit to humanity than annoying banner ads that I have to download software to block. Capital speculation, valuing companies, buying companies, mergers and acquisitions, etc... are all things that benefit the entire country and allow us to have free enterprise and for billionaires to fund crazy fun endeavors on the hope of receiving more money.
      - kkhire 10y ago
        agree with everything you said. there's this demonization of wall street and financial institutions as if it's a brain drain to make money. what does that make the millions of ad tech and food delivery startups then? its the backbone of the economy. no companies can be formed and no biz's can do transactions without the banks working well. the more efficient and sophisticated they can be, the better off everyone else is. ultimately, much of the money on sand hill road is coming from LPs who made it in finance
- adwhit 10y ago
  I'll be the unfashionable person that agrees with you, then. Most developers (workers in general) at worst are merely pointless. I think you could easily make the argument that working in banking (/oil/marketing/think tanks/...) is actively harmful and that the smarter you are, the more damage you can do. There is no iron law that says that just because you turn up on time, work hard and internalize your organization's goals, that the world wouldn't be a better place if you had just stayed in bed.
  - SegFaultx64 10y ago
    I agree with a lot of this. Especially work around credit algorithms and alike is fraught with immoral (or at best amoral) choices. The question is if it is more immoral than working on something like a self-driving car, that is going to yank jobs out from under a huge chunk of the population. I really don't know what the answer is.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    The world is a lot more complex than this. I know you know this.
- accountable 10y ago
  The beauty of capitalism, we get what people are willing to pay for (or what the government forces them to pay for).
- shubhamjain 10y ago
  Let's, for an argument sake, believe that what Goldman Sachs does is hideous, counter-productive horseshit. Following that, let's outlaw the giant, and move all its employees into a more productive force. What do we have? Do we have more minds working on real problems like cure of cancer? I guess not; the probable result is thousands of unemployed programmers. It's a misguided belief that we can solve more problems with more people working towards them, which reeks of the same ideology that Fred Brooks tried to acknowledge in Mythical Man-month, that it's possible to build Software faster by adding more people to the project. If there is a prevalent sentiment that too many companies are starting up in the valley with nonsensical business models, how can we say with the straight eye that more programmers are needed to be shifted to create even more companies.
  - optionalparens 10y ago
    I agree with this and your point brings up some other implications. I especially agree that there are a lot of companies with very questionable business models. Ironically, Goldman is helping many of these companies make money and be perceived in the market as "valuable" regardless of common sense, evidence, or more thorough financial models. Most financial and economic theory seems to indicate that even moving all the Goldman employees to some other company will just result in other companies taking its place. If we put in place rules to prevent another Goldman forming, another company will find a loophole at some point or even be far worse. I'm certainly not justifying their existence, actions, or anything else. Rather, I am pointing out that the market will just swallow brain power and redistribute it some other way that isn't ostensibly any different or "better." If there is a problem that needs to be solved, it is not redistributing tech people from Goldman somewhere else, but rather fixing whatever societal, financial, economic, legal, and political conditions among other factors created the perceived evil entity swallowing the universe. If we chastise the tech people for working there or the situation itself, we should also instruct all the other people there to stop wasting their brains and apply them somewhere else.
- optionalparens 10y ago
  I agree it's disgusting to think of people working for a company like Goldman, but not sure I agree with the rest. Also some people are just trying to put food on the table, and they could compromise, but they don't and it's not proper for me to judge them even though I am. Firstly, Goldman can't correctly value a company - no one so far can. The best Goldman can do is use their position of power to effectively tell the market what the value is, but they can do that practically by creating magic numbers from the sky. Indeed, go and do an old school valuation on many companies and you'll get vastly different results. I have a degree in Finance along with various computer and math degrees. One of the big takeaways is that financial valuations are entirely subjective just like stats studies are, so it is the justification, evidence, techniques, and so on that matter. Your job is to convince someone, and Goldman exploits its position as a large player by doing just that. If Goldman could actually set prices or guess them exactly to the millisecond, they would never have any losing bets and they could manipulate the market 100% to their will. One could say that in this sense, you are right as they do indeed manipulate things to some degree. They are so large that their actions influence the rest of the market and their failures and successes change the market, ironically screwing themselves up quite often. Many principles though say that valuing a company is hard to impossible (just ask Black and Scholes). Random Walk and some of the associated studies like throwing darts at the financial pages (darts beat top Wall Street investors more than 50% of the time usually) demonstrates that there are elements we do not understand in terms of valuations and predictions, and that moreover people don't act rationally depending on your point of view. Given this reality, trying to build better models is a very interesting and wide open computing topic. Another important factor is that valuations and other financial market indicators change over time. That means your models both need to account for time and be extremely fast at reacting to changes. In computing, this touches a lot of interesting topics from performance to network architecture to low-level protocols to CPU caching to distributed computing to machine learning and on and on. Outside academia, there are few companies that are focused and yet touch so many different computing topics and actually apply them to their business in production. Personally, I would never work for a company like Goldman. My moralistic view point has cost me at times financially but I am OK with that given my internal priorities. For some people, it's all about money. Goldman might be evil to many like me, but many popular tech companies aren't much better if you take off the geek glasses. It is not a popular sentiment around here, but I wouldn't necessarily put people at a lot of popular SV companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Uber, and so on above the Goldman people or on some higher pedestal/plane of existence. Surely some are doing interesting or altruistic things even, but most are just grinding out the day trying to keep the business afloat or make it rich. Many of these companies on some level are still tightly tied to people like Goldman, have similar motivations, and arguably a lot of the work they are doing is intellectually less stimulating, valuable, academic, and challenging. Moreover, a lot of the "work" and "tech" that these SV companies think they are inventing has already been around the financial sector (or even tech sector itself, not to mention academia) a long time and exists in better, faster, more powerful forms with the caveats usually of being expensive or exclusive to a single company. Not many people realize what tech people at a company like Goldman are doing, and the people that work there often are bound by legal agreements not to share. That makes companies like Goldman very adversarial, anti-open source, and anti-employee. To that end, I think they are pretty disgusting, but I've experienced nearly as bad working at game companies and tech giants. Very few companies are doing anything worthwhile with brainpower. Even academia where brainpower should be tantamount has often become more about stats like amount of papers published, grant money, or other financial results rather the brainpower. As a whole, computer science is a field that constantly reinvents wheels poorly, wastes tremendous amounts of brainpower, and is far from altruistic or progressive at times. We could say that about almost any field, so take it for what it is and remember that most of us (a select few make a smaller scale difference) aren't saving the world, even when that literally might be the company "mission." Most of us are wasting our brainpower most of the time and it's up to us to do better; working for a company is almost never the answer for maximizing your brain.
- deleted 10y ago
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akhilcacharya 10y ago
During my onsite they said they had an even bigger percentage.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  The algorithmic crew is in a separate building over in Jersey City even. Essentially all tech and management.
  - akhilcacharya 10y ago
    Yup, that's where my offer was too.
- htrp 10y ago
  GS is one of the few firms that understands how to use tech to out-execute their peers. They probably have better proprietary systems developed 10 years ago than most companies have today.
ForHackernews 10y ago
And they likely get paid peanuts compared to the front office.
- helsinki 10y ago
  Nope. Glassdoor is highly inaccurate.

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jbob2000 10y ago

It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to stock trading. All that programming and the only thing we get for it is that we can correctly value a company.

NikolaeVarius 10y ago
Its insane that you think this is the case. The markets are an incredibly important part of the economy and this technology does not only simply value a company.
- zzleeper 10y ago
  I thought it was satire. Although you might make an argument for why reducing time-to-trade from 50ms to 100ms would not be the end of the world
  - witty_username 10y ago
    That would make markets less efficient and thus allocate capital in a worse manner.
    - aleeds 10y ago
      Less efficient for literally 50 ms. Then it all balances out.
      - zeveb 10y ago
        The world GDP is about $76 trillion; that means that the global economy produces about $120,000/ in 50 ms. Reducing the time to work on a trade from 100 to 50 ms gives a trading algorithm that much of an edge, which ultimately helps increase the size of that $76 trillion pie.
  - eej71 10y ago
    I didn't think it was satire as I believe it to be a popular viewpoint both in the larger world as well as among many folks here on HN.
- jbob2000 10y ago
  GS is an investment firm, their job is to find things that are under valued and cash in on the value left on the table. What else would they do with this technology? They aren't an agri-business, looking for a drought resistant strain of wheat. They're not a biotech company, folding proteins to cure cancer. They aren't an engineering firm, looking for a device to clean and desalinate water. They program computers to eek out another 0.1% on their portfolios.
  - minipci1321 10y ago
    > What else would they do with this technology? Why, the same as all other hi-tech companies -- remove the human from the chain, replace them by the computers, automate processes. Will we still be able to speak about "greedy bankers" once it is all computers everywhere trading?
- simonh 10y ago
  Though even if all it did was value companies, a 1% improvement in accuracy on the NYSE would correctly allocate $200 Billion dollars of miss-allocated capital to do more work for the economy. And that's just in the US. Globally it could route half a trillion dollars into more deserving companies, creating new jobs, services and products and pushing down unnecessarily high prices. This is why a well functioning finance industry is so vitally important.
  - Bartweiss 10y ago
    > a well functioning finance industry I'm fully prepared to argue we don't have that, though. Traders are throwing many millions of dollars at projects without even a pretense of improving market accuracy, or adding meaningful liquidity. Algorithmic trading hasn't been especially good for accuracy - we suddenly have flash crashes with markets dropping 30% and recovering, based on no change in fundamentals. High speed trading hasn't been much good for it - paying to move your trading servers slightly closer to a T1 backbone doesn't improve liquidity meaningfully, or accuracy at all. And we already have serious, systematic fraud: was the money Goldman Sachs spent buying insider leaks from the Fed really good for the industry? I take your point, and I don't begrudge finance its enormous economic role. But suggesting that the industry's growth in the last ~decade is about improving accuracy seems pretty questionable.
    - simonh 10y ago
      > But suggesting that the industry's growth in the last ~decade is about improving accuracy seems pretty questionable. Finance companies overwhelmingly make money by more accurately allocating capital whether that's channeling investment, arbitrage, executing a trade before the other guy, whatever. In every case that's money that went to a better place to do more economic work faster. It's what finance companies are for. Yes there's the occasional dodgy deal or rip off, but to read your post you'd think that is the only thing financial companies ever do. In reality trillions of dollars spent on research, technology, infrastructure, business growth and jobs got there via financing. Better financing means more and better quality of all of those things.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
  Honestly, there's still a point there. Having a well-priced, liquid stock market is obviously important. Mises even set it as his threshold for socialism - a country that has an independent stock market is not socialist. But that's not the same as appreciating the current state of stock trading. Sinking millions into millisecond improvements does not improve pricing. Identifying large trades and running pump-and-dump just before they clear doesn't improve liquidity. Running years-long fraud to get early leaks of Fed decisions helps no one. A lot of what happens in high speed trading today is actually harmful to the market as a pricing and liquidity tool. Insider leaks from the Fed weaken market confidence for everyone. Flash crashes are a new horror born entirely of algorithmic trading. The list goes on. I think it's entirely reasonable to appreciate free markets, even libertarian economic policies, and still consider the start of trading today alarming and detrimental to the economy.
- zhte415 10y ago
  Indeed it is, and indeed getting it all wrong because on is chasing 5 basis points on a quote from LIBOR, and creating synthetic upon synthetic based on this quote. The quote being a single analyst calling up a trading desk for a market rate, sometimes getting a reply, sometimes not, if getting a rate often from not the stated markets contact, and if not getting any response just inputting the rate from the day before. Organisation setting LIBOR was doing no wrong, those playing it were, but those depending on it diverting any accountability to a black box of interest rates which was clearly not a black box. Absconding selves of responsibility. Markets are indeed allocations of capital. But only when markets dont' get wound up in local optimals. As LIBOR. And bring havoc to everyone.
SegFaultx64 10y ago
Not going to comment specifically on the judgement (I agree in general terms). However that is a vast mis-understanding of what a lot of the brain power at an investment bank goes towards. It isn't just equities it is fixed-income and economics as well. But beyond that it isn't just about valuation. It is everything from working on how to actually clear transactions, building dark pools and similar platforms, research and building very real tech on blockchain, building security and infrastructure tooling. Goldman literally invented a programming language (although it is showing it's age at this point). They make very robust Open Source contributions: https://github.com/goldmansachs/gs-collections https://github.com/goldmansachs/gs-collections (just an example). Regardless of if what they do is immoral or silly or both, they are building interesting stuff and solving hard problems. A better organization to direct a dig like that at would someone like Bridgewater, they really are just trying to value equites, and fixed-income.
- jbob2000 10y ago
  Right, but all of what they are doing is self-serving. They develop these things to give their client portfolios an edge over other investment firms. They aren't developing these technologies to apply them to healthcare or general science, it's just to give them an edge in the investment business. For a company of their size and wealth, their open source contributions are paltry. A handy way to deal with arrays in Java? Wow, that's game changing...
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - scrollaway 10y ago
    What you are saying applies to a lot of companies. Most companies in fact are essentially only self-serving, and if we're talking about open source contributions I can make an argument that outside of the big 3, nearly every valley company's FOSS contributions are paltry "for their size and wealth".
  - andrevvo 10y ago
    These firms inject capital into the economy efficiently and effectively, which then allows firms access to the financial resources to develop technologies to apply to "healthcare or general science". Can you think of a better way to accomplish this? Have the state choose? I think we all know how that turns out.
melling 10y ago
Why do people always say this? It's such an thoughtless thing to say. You know what's a real waste of brainpower? 3.5 million truck drivers. People driving cabs. Fast food workers. We can, and should, train more software developers. It's the one job that might be useful in 30 years. At the very least, people will hopefully have enough education to move to another field.
- branchless 10y ago
  Innovation occurs at the edges. Far be it from me to suggest all truckers are dumb, I'm sure many are not, but the fact is that finance is sucking in many of our brightest and best who might carry the west forward. Instead they are not even doing something pointless, it's appropriating wealth away from other productive endeavor.
  - melling 10y ago
    GS employes 9000 programmers and engineers. I'm sure they only hire the best, just like everyone else. You are exaggerating the opportunity cost of people working at other firms, like Facebook, Google, or Apple, for example.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Based on my experiences over the past year, the real shortage seems to be in competent contractors, plumbers, and electricians--at least in areas with growth.
  - optionalparens 10y ago
    Only anecdotal, but I have observed as much over the past few decades. It's hard to be certain why as there are so many factors at play, but I suspect that a part of it may be due to how we perceive certain jobs. There's a certain stigma with most traditionally "trade" jobs like electricians and plumbers. Many of these type jobs actually make more, especially if you own your own business or have a fee structure that is tied to your actual work. I've known journalists, biologists, programmers, middle managers, government employees, and many white collar jobs to scoff at or look down on other jobs. In some conversations I have reminded these same people that the filthy guy in line they are making fun of might be pulling more than twice their salary, and often may still be university educated or have needed to go through some rigorous training. I am not sure what makes some people think they are above certain jobs or better than other people. The Obama administration sentiment that everyone needs to go to college has done no favors helping certain classes of jobs. White collar jobs or being a celebrity, athlete, or famous in some other way is seen as success, while anything else regardless of quality of life, salary, long-term prospects, independence, and so on is seen as failure, second-class, or even undesirable. I respect anyone who works hard, and especially those that do things that I can't do. I need these people to survive or at least have a better quality first-world life, therefore I always make sure to treat them well. It helps when you come from a culture that considers it rude to not at least offer to feed your plumber or make a coffee.
wtvanhest 10y ago
The same could be said for 95% of active companies, especially the large ones. FB - It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to sharing photos. Twitter - It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to sharing single comments. etc. etc. etc. The reality is that we live in an world with inefficiencies. If there are large enough inefficiencies in the value of assets that people can get computers to find them and eliminate them, that is likely a good thing. Just like we live in a world where sharing information used to be really hard, but many 'pointless' companies have made communication incredibly easy. It is better to not judge what you don't fully understand.
minipci1321 10y ago
Then you might get a food for thought from reading the recent thread of comments of Google employees (about what they dislike about Google). This is not to cast a shade on Google, but more to get some insight about how the brainpower may actually be spent.
- pc86 10y ago
  Link?
  - minipci1321 10y ago
    https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-negatives-in-working-in-a-too-good-to-be-true-offices-like-Google https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-negatives-in-working-in-a...
exstudent2 10y ago
There's nothing "disgusting" about people exercising their free will to take a job they enjoy and/or pays the bills. Is programming to serve ads better? Is being a dishwasher or delivery person? It's become quite popular to whine about the career choices others make ("we need to _make_ more X become programmers). I think our industry as a whole would benefit from a heaping helping of "mind your own business".
dexterdog 10y ago
I know. They could be using all of that intelligence to get people to click on ads instead.
ranman 10y ago
FWIW I don't think most of it goes towards trading. They do a lot of other analysis and tool building... as well as operational stuff. I imagine there are a very large number of poorly payed staff classified as "IT"... and a very small number of highly compensated staff classified as "engineering". I'm not privy to the internals though so I'm just guessing. Would be interested if anyone has actual data.
rayiner 10y ago
> It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to stock trading. s/stock trading/advertising.
- branchless 10y ago
  Isn't this capitalism though? Companies are competing on products and it's cheaper to advertise than to innovate, leading companies inexorably down this route.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
justin66 10y ago
> It's disgusting to me that that much brainpower was/is dedicated to stock trading. Is it more or less disgusting to you to spend brainpower on banner ads, or social media exchange of cat memes, or something? I'm honestly curious.
- jbob2000 10y ago
  For one individual to make their own decision to do those things, no issue. But when a group of wealthy elite make it their mission goal to vacuum up money from everyone below, that's disgusting. The executive team at GS decided that they wanted to hire programmers to handle investing, instead of hiring programmers to handle nobler tasks. At least when Google develops banner ads, they are providing value to the millions of people who need to advertise. When GS develops a better trading algorithm, you can count the number of people on one hand who benefit.
  - muninn_ 10y ago
    Google (or Facebook) developing those ads aren't providing value in a vacuum. Now my Internet experience sucks, my privacy is exploited, I'm psychologically manipulated to buy more shit I don't need (to increase the stock value of companies that GS is evaluating), and I become addicted to getting updates, and receiving the latest fake news. It's easy to come out with a trendy anti-investment banking stance and claim that it's not noble. Meanwhile we also have genius developers working on CandyCrush and finding ways to get grandma to make in-app purchases for their own little business vacuum. I actually find GS (or anybody really) developing a better trading algorithm to be much more of a benefit to humanity than annoying banner ads that I have to download software to block. Capital speculation, valuing companies, buying companies, mergers and acquisitions, etc... are all things that benefit the entire country and allow us to have free enterprise and for billionaires to fund crazy fun endeavors on the hope of receiving more money.
    - kkhire 10y ago
      agree with everything you said. there's this demonization of wall street and financial institutions as if it's a brain drain to make money. what does that make the millions of ad tech and food delivery startups then? its the backbone of the economy. no companies can be formed and no biz's can do transactions without the banks working well. the more efficient and sophisticated they can be, the better off everyone else is. ultimately, much of the money on sand hill road is coming from LPs who made it in finance
adwhit 10y ago
I'll be the unfashionable person that agrees with you, then. Most developers (workers in general) at worst are merely pointless. I think you could easily make the argument that working in banking (/oil/marketing/think tanks/...) is actively harmful and that the smarter you are, the more damage you can do. There is no iron law that says that just because you turn up on time, work hard and internalize your organization's goals, that the world wouldn't be a better place if you had just stayed in bed.
- SegFaultx64 10y ago
  I agree with a lot of this. Especially work around credit algorithms and alike is fraught with immoral (or at best amoral) choices. The question is if it is more immoral than working on something like a self-driving car, that is going to yank jobs out from under a huge chunk of the population. I really don't know what the answer is.
- muninn_ 10y ago
  The world is a lot more complex than this. I know you know this.
accountable 10y ago
The beauty of capitalism, we get what people are willing to pay for (or what the government forces them to pay for).
shubhamjain 10y ago
Let's, for an argument sake, believe that what Goldman Sachs does is hideous, counter-productive horseshit. Following that, let's outlaw the giant, and move all its employees into a more productive force. What do we have? Do we have more minds working on real problems like cure of cancer? I guess not; the probable result is thousands of unemployed programmers. It's a misguided belief that we can solve more problems with more people working towards them, which reeks of the same ideology that Fred Brooks tried to acknowledge in Mythical Man-month, that it's possible to build Software faster by adding more people to the project. If there is a prevalent sentiment that too many companies are starting up in the valley with nonsensical business models, how can we say with the straight eye that more programmers are needed to be shifted to create even more companies.
- optionalparens 10y ago
  I agree with this and your point brings up some other implications. I especially agree that there are a lot of companies with very questionable business models. Ironically, Goldman is helping many of these companies make money and be perceived in the market as "valuable" regardless of common sense, evidence, or more thorough financial models. Most financial and economic theory seems to indicate that even moving all the Goldman employees to some other company will just result in other companies taking its place. If we put in place rules to prevent another Goldman forming, another company will find a loophole at some point or even be far worse. I'm certainly not justifying their existence, actions, or anything else. Rather, I am pointing out that the market will just swallow brain power and redistribute it some other way that isn't ostensibly any different or "better." If there is a problem that needs to be solved, it is not redistributing tech people from Goldman somewhere else, but rather fixing whatever societal, financial, economic, legal, and political conditions among other factors created the perceived evil entity swallowing the universe. If we chastise the tech people for working there or the situation itself, we should also instruct all the other people there to stop wasting their brains and apply them somewhere else.
optionalparens 10y ago
I agree it's disgusting to think of people working for a company like Goldman, but not sure I agree with the rest. Also some people are just trying to put food on the table, and they could compromise, but they don't and it's not proper for me to judge them even though I am. Firstly, Goldman can't correctly value a company - no one so far can. The best Goldman can do is use their position of power to effectively tell the market what the value is, but they can do that practically by creating magic numbers from the sky. Indeed, go and do an old school valuation on many companies and you'll get vastly different results. I have a degree in Finance along with various computer and math degrees. One of the big takeaways is that financial valuations are entirely subjective just like stats studies are, so it is the justification, evidence, techniques, and so on that matter. Your job is to convince someone, and Goldman exploits its position as a large player by doing just that. If Goldman could actually set prices or guess them exactly to the millisecond, they would never have any losing bets and they could manipulate the market 100% to their will. One could say that in this sense, you are right as they do indeed manipulate things to some degree. They are so large that their actions influence the rest of the market and their failures and successes change the market, ironically screwing themselves up quite often. Many principles though say that valuing a company is hard to impossible (just ask Black and Scholes). Random Walk and some of the associated studies like throwing darts at the financial pages (darts beat top Wall Street investors more than 50% of the time usually) demonstrates that there are elements we do not understand in terms of valuations and predictions, and that moreover people don't act rationally depending on your point of view. Given this reality, trying to build better models is a very interesting and wide open computing topic. Another important factor is that valuations and other financial market indicators change over time. That means your models both need to account for time and be extremely fast at reacting to changes. In computing, this touches a lot of interesting topics from performance to network architecture to low-level protocols to CPU caching to distributed computing to machine learning and on and on. Outside academia, there are few companies that are focused and yet touch so many different computing topics and actually apply them to their business in production. Personally, I would never work for a company like Goldman. My moralistic view point has cost me at times financially but I am OK with that given my internal priorities. For some people, it's all about money. Goldman might be evil to many like me, but many popular tech companies aren't much better if you take off the geek glasses. It is not a popular sentiment around here, but I wouldn't necessarily put people at a lot of popular SV companies like Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Uber, and so on above the Goldman people or on some higher pedestal/plane of existence. Surely some are doing interesting or altruistic things even, but most are just grinding out the day trying to keep the business afloat or make it rich. Many of these companies on some level are still tightly tied to people like Goldman, have similar motivations, and arguably a lot of the work they are doing is intellectually less stimulating, valuable, academic, and challenging. Moreover, a lot of the "work" and "tech" that these SV companies think they are inventing has already been around the financial sector (or even tech sector itself, not to mention academia) a long time and exists in better, faster, more powerful forms with the caveats usually of being expensive or exclusive to a single company. Not many people realize what tech people at a company like Goldman are doing, and the people that work there often are bound by legal agreements not to share. That makes companies like Goldman very adversarial, anti-open source, and anti-employee. To that end, I think they are pretty disgusting, but I've experienced nearly as bad working at game companies and tech giants. Very few companies are doing anything worthwhile with brainpower. Even academia where brainpower should be tantamount has often become more about stats like amount of papers published, grant money, or other financial results rather the brainpower. As a whole, computer science is a field that constantly reinvents wheels poorly, wastes tremendous amounts of brainpower, and is far from altruistic or progressive at times. We could say that about almost any field, so take it for what it is and remember that most of us (a select few make a smaller scale difference) aren't saving the world, even when that literally might be the company "mission." Most of us are wasting our brainpower most of the time and it's up to us to do better; working for a company is almost never the answer for maximizing your brain.
deleted 10y ago
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akhilcacharya 10y ago

During my onsite they said they had an even bigger percentage.

Bartweiss 10y ago
The algorithmic crew is in a separate building over in Jersey City even. Essentially all tech and management.
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  Yup, that's where my offer was too.
htrp 10y ago
GS is one of the few firms that understands how to use tech to out-execute their peers. They probably have better proprietary systems developed 10 years ago than most companies have today.

ForHackernews 10y ago

And they likely get paid peanuts compared to the front office.

helsinki 10y ago
Nope. Glassdoor is highly inaccurate.