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"Financial engineers" aren't interested in building a sustainable business; they want to play a game cleverly, make a cash-grab, jump ship, and leave thousands
by _bxg1 8y ago
"Financial engineers" aren't interested in building a sustainable business; they want to play a game cleverly, make a cash-grab, jump ship, and leave thousands dealing with the fallout. It's a similar short-term strategy to that taken by many SV founders who build a company only to sell it, though obviously the latter don't cause nearly the same degree of harm to society. But they still pass on opportunities to create actual value and jobs, in favor of making a quick buck and moving on to the next exploit. It's the mindset of locusts.
- iscrewyou 8y agoI love the term financial engineers. In my head, it defines the person, the procedure, and the purpose.
- _bxg1 8y agoThe problem with engineers (speaking as one myself) is that we're prone to focusing only on the mechanism itself, abstracting away the details and ignoring the parts of the system we can ignore. In software we can often get away with this because the rest of the system is just further machinery; there are benefits to taking it into consideration, sure, but nobody gets hurt when you don't. But business and finance are not software. Their systems are made of people. When you waste a CPU's time by ignoring its nuances, you simply get less out of it. When you shuffle money around, writing off the nuances of industry and economics as blips in a monetary machine, you destroy lives. I understand the appeal of the engineering mindset, but you have to be a psychopath to continue in it while leaving such destruction in your wake.
- iscrewyou 8y agoI know and I agree. And a software engineer is much different than a mechanical engineer or a civil engineer. I guess I should’ve mentioned that the term financial engineer gives me context or a reference point where I can see that they are behaving like engineers. My comment was more focused on their behavioral mechanisms.
- _bxg1 8y agoI figured that was possibly what you meant; I was just elaborating.
- asdf21 8y agoEngineering typically builds something useful and long-standing, these financial engineers just tear things apart..
- tempodox 8y agoI'd prefer the term “capitalism hackers”.
- leesalminen 8y agoAlternatively, someone started a business that they wanted to create and build. At the same time, this founder didn’t want to spend their entire career on this one company. So they build it up and sell it off to PE. After a while they have a new idea and start again.