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> Not many people who work on financial infrastructure speak publicly about their work... This was a bit of a throw away line, but I found it insightful. As so

> Not many people who work on financial infrastructure speak publicly about their work... This was a bit of a throw away line, but I found it insightful. As someone who isn't in this space, my question is: why is this? Is it contractual, or is that just not part of the space's ethos? Feels like we need to overcome this some how to achieve progress?

sokamyung 7y ago
I am not sure you would consider me directly in that space, even though the vast and distributed nature of that "space" seems unlikely to produce someone that can be considered equal part high level broadly knowledgeable enough, technical enough to make a statement about the work, in addition to muck around here to provide an answer. I think your answer is lost in the crevices of the nebula of dissimilar characteristics. That being said though, take or leave by following boiled down opinion on the matter that it is essentially just a form of greed that drives this ethos you highlight. It's both negative greed of people not wanting to discuss their secret sauce that does or could make them rich and wealthy, especially if and when it comes as the expense of others (regardless of whether it is only their sub-conscience that acknowledges it), not wanting to expose things like the spaghetti code that makes up the core of a multi-trillion dollar enterprise of maybe even the literal fraud being perpetrated to achieve riches, some self-delusion that obfuscation quals security that hopefully will prevent nefarious actors gaining insights. The very nature of the financial industry, a store of value, worth, and a huge closet of misdeeds and fraud that is chocked full and bursting at the seams to reveal the putrid innards; makes it a massively sensitive matter and domain. The behaviors and actions or ethos of the financial industry is not at all dissimilar to when you interact with other dishonest and nefarious and secretive types who have dirty secrets to hide and ill gotten gains to obscure and squirrel away. But there is also a layer of honesty that must be maintained. The notion of "disrupting" the financial sector with the trademark wonton recklessness of the Silicon Valley mentality gives me shivers, because when, e.g., the WeWork fraud One may as well have asked why African government officials don't publicly speak about how their government work or ask the CCP how China really works. But one could also even ask that question closer to home like how massively lossy Silicone Valley unicorns can exist or one may also ask for an audit of the DoD (which, interestingly, the recent attempt to audit the Marines led to the Auditor refusing to sign the audit) or the Federal Reserve (a set of private bankers that control the money supply without any accountability, oversight, let alone limits or balance of powers). Those are ALL equally sketchy and nefarious deceptive and manipulative smoke and mirrors slight of hand operations that one could ask the same question of why does not one speak publicly about their work. You may be one of those that realizes that there is a thread that runs between all of the above.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Nursie 7y ago
> Not many people who work on financial infrastructure speak publicly about their work... What pieces of financial infrastructure do you want to know about? Mastercard and Visa (for example) publish a lot of information about their technology and standards, and certainly people aren't prohibited from talking about implementing them or interfacing with them.
Erlich_Bachman 7y ago
Why would you give away any details, when each one of them might end up being a secret that is causing your firm to make millions of dollars? The financial sector is many things, it's a lubricant of the economy, it is a prediction machine, it's a fascilitator of markets, but not least important it is setup as a game, where every player tries to outsmart the others. Why would you talk about how you are playing and give your opponents a chance to outplay you?
- Jeff_Brown 7y ago
  I wish superior innovation were more responsible for the bulk of profits. Weighted by volume, in more cases it is simple market power. (Fun fact: Statistics was invented many times throughout history. Minus the last time, it was always hidden to make someone money.) Even when you've got awesome secrets, you've still got other parts of the business. Open research moves faster. Libraries of books have been written about investment, or running a business, or writing software, or other profitable things. Granted, some of that comes from people teaching without acting -- but a lot of it too comes from actors with serious skin in the game.
CrunchyJams 7y ago
This is simply not accurate. I build financial market infrastructure and in the last twelve months I've seen companies in my industry presenting at AWS and Splunk conferences, and a Cassandra meetup. There are lots of great technologists in the space that are just like the rest of us and love sharing ideas. There are definitely NDAs in place, but "financial infrastructure" generally refers to processing systems, not trading systems. The former is increasingly utilized, while the latter generates alpha (i.e. where you actually make money). People like sharing ideas about processing infrastructure because everyone benefits when the rest of the market gets better at it also. Your efficiency is only as good as your counterparties' efficiency. If their system breaks, you still have a broken trade that costs you operational time and money no matter how good your infrastructure is. There is a lot more wrong with what this author wrote, but in the interest of time I'll keep my answer to the question asked.
PeterisP 7y ago
It's hard to speak about the infrastructure because: 1) it's complex and relies on a bunch of concepts that are niche/uncommon in tech field, so it's really hard to make a short answer that makes your point understandable without adding an essay-length explanation about why some assertion of fact is actually true, or how some aspect of the financial system works slightly differently than the common understanding and has serious implications that usually doesn't matter only because the system is carefully engineered to ensure that this never happens, but for a different system it would matter. 2) you can't have a purely technical discussion because pretty much every factor of infrastructure is part technical, part legal, part financial, and you can't really separate these aspects because they put serious constraints on each other. 3) it's a bit emotionally unpleasant because multiple important, relevant aspects have political connotations and invite passionate debate about things that I'd like to assume as axiomatic and offtopic to the main point. For example if we want to debate why technical payment systems are the way they are and what other technical payment systems are plausible in the short-term, aspects like the need for reversibility are pretty much an undisputable unavoidable constraint from the legal/economic side to the technical part; IMHO any productive technical debate is possible only about how to best design systems within these non-technical constraints (and what exactly are the actual constraints), but a lot of the discussion here is centered whether these constraints "should" be there - which is interesting but a completely different topic, to note the "is-vs-ought" distinction, debating whether reversibility (or, say, KYC/AML) ought to be a requirement has absolutely no relevance to the debate whether and when it is a requirement. But it's hard to make a technical description of how/why something works without getting sidetracked into a political discussion of whether some must-have requirement should have a right to exist. There's not really an ethos of secrecy (at least for the main infrastructure side), all the technical and legal (but not financial) details are generally available to whoever is interested but they are large and details matter, and key details differ between countries. Seriously, when getting started in the industry when I had spent months reading on various details of e.g. card issuing/acquiring process, I thought I had a reasonable understanding.... and now I know how a bunch of that understanding was slightly but dangerously wrong.

sokamyung 7y ago

I am not sure you would consider me directly in that space, even though the vast and distributed nature of that "space" seems unlikely to produce someone that can be considered equal part high level broadly knowledgeable enough, technical enough to make a statement about the work, in addition to muck around here to provide an answer. I think your answer is lost in the crevices of the nebula of dissimilar characteristics. That being said though, take or leave by following boiled down opinion on the matter that it is essentially just a form of greed that drives this ethos you highlight. It's both negative greed of people not wanting to discuss their secret sauce that does or could make them rich and wealthy, especially if and when it comes as the expense of others (regardless of whether it is only their sub-conscience that acknowledges it), not wanting to expose things like the spaghetti code that makes up the core of a multi-trillion dollar enterprise of maybe even the literal fraud being perpetrated to achieve riches, some self-delusion that obfuscation quals security that hopefully will prevent nefarious actors gaining insights. The very nature of the financial industry, a store of value, worth, and a huge closet of misdeeds and fraud that is chocked full and bursting at the seams to reveal the putrid innards; makes it a massively sensitive matter and domain. The behaviors and actions or ethos of the financial industry is not at all dissimilar to when you interact with other dishonest and nefarious and secretive types who have dirty secrets to hide and ill gotten gains to obscure and squirrel away. But there is also a layer of honesty that must be maintained. The notion of "disrupting" the financial sector with the trademark wonton recklessness of the Silicon Valley mentality gives me shivers, because when, e.g., the WeWork fraud One may as well have asked why African government officials don't publicly speak about how their government work or ask the CCP how China really works. But one could also even ask that question closer to home like how massively lossy Silicone Valley unicorns can exist or one may also ask for an audit of the DoD (which, interestingly, the recent attempt to audit the Marines led to the Auditor refusing to sign the audit) or the Federal Reserve (a set of private bankers that control the money supply without any accountability, oversight, let alone limits or balance of powers). Those are ALL equally sketchy and nefarious deceptive and manipulative smoke and mirrors slight of hand operations that one could ask the same question of why does not one speak publicly about their work. You may be one of those that realizes that there is a thread that runs between all of the above.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Nursie 7y ago

> Not many people who work on financial infrastructure speak publicly about their work... What pieces of financial infrastructure do you want to know about? Mastercard and Visa (for example) publish a lot of information about their technology and standards, and certainly people aren't prohibited from talking about implementing them or interfacing with them.

Erlich_Bachman 7y ago

Why would you give away any details, when each one of them might end up being a secret that is causing your firm to make millions of dollars? The financial sector is many things, it's a lubricant of the economy, it is a prediction machine, it's a fascilitator of markets, but not least important it is setup as a game, where every player tries to outsmart the others. Why would you talk about how you are playing and give your opponents a chance to outplay you?

Jeff_Brown 7y ago
I wish superior innovation were more responsible for the bulk of profits. Weighted by volume, in more cases it is simple market power. (Fun fact: Statistics was invented many times throughout history. Minus the last time, it was always hidden to make someone money.) Even when you've got awesome secrets, you've still got other parts of the business. Open research moves faster. Libraries of books have been written about investment, or running a business, or writing software, or other profitable things. Granted, some of that comes from people teaching without acting -- but a lot of it too comes from actors with serious skin in the game.

CrunchyJams 7y ago

This is simply not accurate. I build financial market infrastructure and in the last twelve months I've seen companies in my industry presenting at AWS and Splunk conferences, and a Cassandra meetup. There are lots of great technologists in the space that are just like the rest of us and love sharing ideas. There are definitely NDAs in place, but "financial infrastructure" generally refers to processing systems, not trading systems. The former is increasingly utilized, while the latter generates alpha (i.e. where you actually make money). People like sharing ideas about processing infrastructure because everyone benefits when the rest of the market gets better at it also. Your efficiency is only as good as your counterparties' efficiency. If their system breaks, you still have a broken trade that costs you operational time and money no matter how good your infrastructure is. There is a lot more wrong with what this author wrote, but in the interest of time I'll keep my answer to the question asked.

PeterisP 7y ago

It's hard to speak about the infrastructure because: 1) it's complex and relies on a bunch of concepts that are niche/uncommon in tech field, so it's really hard to make a short answer that makes your point understandable without adding an essay-length explanation about why some assertion of fact is actually true, or how some aspect of the financial system works slightly differently than the common understanding and has serious implications that usually doesn't matter only because the system is carefully engineered to ensure that this never happens, but for a different system it would matter. 2) you can't have a purely technical discussion because pretty much every factor of infrastructure is part technical, part legal, part financial, and you can't really separate these aspects because they put serious constraints on each other. 3) it's a bit emotionally unpleasant because multiple important, relevant aspects have political connotations and invite passionate debate about things that I'd like to assume as axiomatic and offtopic to the main point. For example if we want to debate why technical payment systems are the way they are and what other technical payment systems are plausible in the short-term, aspects like the need for reversibility are pretty much an undisputable unavoidable constraint from the legal/economic side to the technical part; IMHO any productive technical debate is possible only about how to best design systems within these non-technical constraints (and what exactly are the actual constraints), but a lot of the discussion here is centered whether these constraints "should" be there - which is interesting but a completely different topic, to note the "is-vs-ought" distinction, debating whether reversibility (or, say, KYC/AML) ought to be a requirement has absolutely no relevance to the debate whether and when it is a requirement. But it's hard to make a technical description of how/why something works without getting sidetracked into a political discussion of whether some must-have requirement should have a right to exist. There's not really an ethos of secrecy (at least for the main infrastructure side), all the technical and legal (but not financial) details are generally available to whoever is interested but they are large and details matter, and key details differ between countries. Seriously, when getting started in the industry when I had spent months reading on various details of e.g. card issuing/acquiring process, I thought I had a reasonable understanding.... and now I know how a bunch of that understanding was slightly but dangerously wrong.