3 ms·

>He says one group was generating $100,000 a day from his high-frequency trading software and paying him $150,000 a year. I'm not saying I don't want the guy t

by endtime 16y ago

>He says one group was generating $100,000 a day from his high-frequency trading software and paying him $150,000 a year. I'm not saying I don't want the guy to have a higher salary, but there's an implied fallacy here. It seems he should be paid relative not to how much value his code generates, but to how hard it would be to replace him.

patio11 16y ago
When you say "should", are you making a positive observation or a normative claim? My positive observation is that people get paid whatever amount they can successfully negotiate, and a programmer at the very top of a field with ungodly amounts of cash money flowing around is in a good position to negotiate lots, because their BATNA is "I walk one block out of this office, have coffee with someone, and a week from now I'm making seven figures and you're competing against my algorithms."
- roel_v 16y ago
  It's a positive observation in the sense that one's actual market value is equal to the cost of replacement. The price discovery method (negotiation) is imperfect, causing the discrepancy between the market value and the actual paid price, but the point of the grandparent would still hold.
lol 16y ago
It's non-trivial to create a tradeable strat. If he actually created it (rather than simply implementing it for somebody), he should almost certainly be paid more than that, and would be at many firms.
SkyMarshal 16y ago
And making 100k/day using the tens or hundreds of millions of principal an investment bank can provide is a far cry from making 100k/day trading one's own savings.
- gaius 16y ago
  From the article: He found a partner, and together they began trading on their own. The programmer now pockets more than half of any profits his software generates. The programmer says he's making about the same money he did at the job he left. But at his old job he'd topped out in pay while now he says the sky's the limit

by endtime 16y ago

patio11 16y ago

When you say "should", are you making a positive observation or a normative claim? My positive observation is that people get paid whatever amount they can successfully negotiate, and a programmer at the very top of a field with ungodly amounts of cash money flowing around is in a good position to negotiate lots, because their BATNA is "I walk one block out of this office, have coffee with someone, and a week from now I'm making seven figures and you're competing against my algorithms."

roel_v 16y ago
It's a positive observation in the sense that one's actual market value is equal to the cost of replacement. The price discovery method (negotiation) is imperfect, causing the discrepancy between the market value and the actual paid price, but the point of the grandparent would still hold.

lol 16y ago

It's non-trivial to create a tradeable strat. If he actually created it (rather than simply implementing it for somebody), he should almost certainly be paid more than that, and would be at many firms.

SkyMarshal 16y ago

And making 100k/day using the tens or hundreds of millions of principal an investment bank can provide is a far cry from making 100k/day trading one's own savings.

gaius 16y ago
From the article: He found a partner, and together they began trading on their own. The programmer now pockets more than half of any profits his software generates. The programmer says he's making about the same money he did at the job he left. But at his old job he'd topped out in pay while now he says the sky's the limit