5 ms·

> For most software, functionality, signing up for a subscription, platform availability etc are usually prioritized higher than response times and keyboard sho

> For most software, functionality, signing up for a subscription, platform availability etc are usually prioritized higher than response times and keyboard shortcuts. This is why I love working in fintech. The engineering is paramount. Customers will not accept slow or buggy software. I get to solve hard problems, and really build systems from the ground up. My managers understand that it is better to push back a deadline than to ship something that isn't up to standard.

culi 4y ago
This has pretty much been the exact opposite of my experience in fintech. But it's a startup so maybe that's the difference
quadcore 4y ago
Sounds like places Id love. May I ask what company youre working for?
leidenfrost 4y ago
Now I want to work in a fintech
ncmncm 4y ago
Yes, but all in service of what amounts to automated stealing (cough) supplying liquidity. Better than adtech, anyway. Or nukes. Lots of things, really. (I would have said weapons, last year.) The only really defensible tech activity these days is things to help get off carbon-emitting processes. Making factories to make electrolysers. Making wind turbines better. Adapting airliners to carry liquid hydrogen in underwing nacelles. Making robots to put up solar fences on farms and pastures. Banking energy for nighttime without lithium. Making ammonia on tropical solar farms for export to high latitudes. It's even money whether we can get it done before civilization collapses. I guess we will need plenty of liquidity...
- kragen 4y ago
  Those are worthwhile problems to solve, but they seem well on their way to getting solved, though it's not guaranteed. Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change. Fighting each other is also why it's not guaranteed. Other problems are also worthwhile to solve. I agree that zero-sum HFT and negative-sum adtech and arms races are not the most prominent ones.
  - culi 4y ago
    > Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change 10% of all deaths each year are due to air pollution. There's pretty much no place on earth where unfiltered rainwater is still safe to drink. Ocean acidification is accelerating and killing off the organisms that are both the biggest producers of oxygen and the biggest sequesterers of carbon.
    - kragen 4y ago
      Air pollution is not due to climate change, unless you count CO₂ as air pollution, but that's eargrayish misreasoning — that's not the kind of air pollution that causes 10% of all deaths. The sort of local air pollution we're talking about amounts to factories strip-mining local children's lungs for profit; it's a form of fighting each other. Rainwater harvesting risks seem to be primarily due to birds pooping on your roof and other fecal contamination, and they can be adequately mitigated by boiling or chemical sterilization: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5. Climate change very likely would collapse your civilization, given enough time, but that isn't what is happening now.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    If we spent on those what we spend instead on adtech etc., it really would be guaranteed. Even with fighting invaders. Albeit probably not invaders using nukes.
    - kragen 4y ago
      I think 228 GWp of solar power generation capacity is being installed in 02022, which is about US$50 billion for the solar modules and another US$50 billion for balance of plant, not counting things like battery storage, pumped storage, transmission, and Fischer-Tropsch. Wind energy generation capacity is getting installed at a similar pace, in terms of peak gigawatts per year, but I have the impression that it is significantly cheaper. Tesla's revenues are US$53.8 billion per year, of which about US$0.07 billion is solar panels and therefore getting double counted. I don't know how to measure other automakers' EV production, housing switching to heat pumps, housing adding insulation, and R&D, so I'm just not counting them. Alphabet's yearly revenue is US$258 billion, some of which is earned from things like Google Play, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace, and some of which has been spent on things like Makani, Verily Life Sciences, DeepMind, and Google Fiber. Meta's revenue is US$118 billion. https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-technology-media-and-telecom/googles-revenue/ https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-t... says, "Google earned nearly 81% of its total revenues in 2021 from advertisements," and it's talking about that US$258B number, not some smaller number that excludes other Alphabet companies. We can maybe estimate the whole adtech spend, generously, at US$400 billion per year [edited: was US$300 billion]: most of Alphabet, all of Meta, plus a handful of smaller fish. (I say this is "generous" because it's counting all the effort that goes into running Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, and Android development as "adtech", because it's monetized through ads, even though most of the people working on those projects are not directly concerned with ads; if you omit that, you might size adtech at only US$50 billion.) And maybe US$200 billion per year goes into the renewables transition. I'm not convinced that doubling that to US$400 billion per year would guarantee a win, particularly when the humans are going around bombing each other's power plants, snarling up power plant construction and energy-efficient housing in red tape, and publishing disinformation that "debunks" global warming. These are of course very rough estimates, but how would you estimate these numbers? As far as I know, there aren't any invaders the humans are fighting; they're only fighting other humans, plus the occasional rogue elephant.
- kajaktum 4y ago
  I think we have more than just environmental issues in this world...but sure.
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    Not for long, unless...
- eru 4y ago
  Who would they be stealing from?
  - ncmncm 4y ago
    The body politic. People program computers to exchange messages furiously, to no external effect besides power consumed. Then they go buy yachts. It's all perfectly legal, of course.
    - eru 4y ago
      I'm not sure how this 'stealing' is supposed to work.
      - ncmncm 4y ago
        The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely. As a society, we like to reward people who do things that are useful: feed, house, clothe, warm, transport, educate, protect, medicate, lately amuse people, and get money that may be exchanged for those services, or yachts. HFT traders provide none of those, nor anything comparable, but get yachts anyway.
        Kranar 4y ago
        >The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely. Ah, so you lack a basic understanding of how the stock market works, but think you're qualified to make very strong statements about it.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Trades batched by second would provide as much liquidity as anybody could use, without the yachts.
        4y ago
- sanitycheck 4y ago
  Well, there's education - that's net good. And I think entertainment is pretty neutral (even slightly positive) if it doesn't involve gambling or rely on player addiction. Fintech and adtech are where people bright enough to contribute positively to society go to make money instead, kind like the oil industry. All IMHO, YMMV, etc.
tatoalo 4y ago
> The engineering is paramount. You must be lucky, not everywhere in the sector that’d be remotely close to true unfortunately…
- jiggawatts 4y ago
  He's probably referring to the trading desk or similar teams. Stock traders forced a lot of advances onto software. Random examples of high-perf stuff from that space include the new garbage collector in the JVM with a minimal pause time and LMAX Disruptor. Multi-threaded GUIs are relatively common in that space as well, to ensure that one hung control or window won't stop anything else.
  - scruple 4y ago
    I've known a handful of software engineers who have stopped through The Trade Desk for a year or less. It doesn't sound like a great place to work to me, despite the high throughput their software demands.
avgcorrection 4y ago
> This is why I love working in fintech. The prototypical nerd would happily work on building a nuke capable of destroying a continent if that entailed letting him work on “hard problems”.
- labster 4y ago
  I wouldn’t work on a continent-destroying nuke unless the project used Rust. Wouldn’t want it to be unsafe.
  - DrBazza 4y ago
    Obligatory - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98125 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98... Missiles don't really need GC or RAII. They have their own special resource clean up.
- mr_mitm 4y ago
  Oh you mean the Manhattan project?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
GuB-42 4y ago
I don't know what you mean by "fintech" but from my experience, bank and other finance apps are usually not that great, neither are the websites. So maybe some parts of fintech are nice and clean, but the part that the end user faces, not so much.
- drdec 4y ago
  If I am not mistaken, fintech refers to the software/hardware surrounding trade execution on the various exchanges (stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.) where speed is of primary importance.
- xmcqdpt2 4y ago
  Yeah I work in finance too and it's a mixed bag. The stuff I work on right now has a very high focus on correctness and stability which is nice. But I've also seen productionized jupyter notebooks written by just out of school data scientists and 1000 lines long SQL queries that encoded important business logic and weren't version controlled.
- dahfizz 4y ago
  I mean the actual tech than enables financial markets (fintech) - high frequency trading, matching engines, market data, order execution, etc.

culi 4y ago

This has pretty much been the exact opposite of my experience in fintech. But it's a startup so maybe that's the difference

quadcore 4y ago

Sounds like places Id love. May I ask what company youre working for?

leidenfrost 4y ago

Now I want to work in a fintech

ncmncm 4y ago

Yes, but all in service of what amounts to automated stealing (cough) supplying liquidity. Better than adtech, anyway. Or nukes. Lots of things, really. (I would have said weapons, last year.) The only really defensible tech activity these days is things to help get off carbon-emitting processes. Making factories to make electrolysers. Making wind turbines better. Adapting airliners to carry liquid hydrogen in underwing nacelles. Making robots to put up solar fences on farms and pastures. Banking energy for nighttime without lithium. Making ammonia on tropical solar farms for export to high latitudes. It's even money whether we can get it done before civilization collapses. I guess we will need plenty of liquidity...

kragen 4y ago
Those are worthwhile problems to solve, but they seem well on their way to getting solved, though it's not guaranteed. Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change. Fighting each other is also why it's not guaranteed. Other problems are also worthwhile to solve. I agree that zero-sum HFT and negative-sum adtech and arms races are not the most prominent ones.
- culi 4y ago
  > Your civilization is collapsing because you're fighting each other, not because of climate change 10% of all deaths each year are due to air pollution. There's pretty much no place on earth where unfiltered rainwater is still safe to drink. Ocean acidification is accelerating and killing off the organisms that are both the biggest producers of oxygen and the biggest sequesterers of carbon.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Air pollution is not due to climate change, unless you count CO₂ as air pollution, but that's eargrayish misreasoning — that's not the kind of air pollution that causes 10% of all deaths. The sort of local air pollution we're talking about amounts to factories strip-mining local children's lungs for profit; it's a form of fighting each other. Rainwater harvesting risks seem to be primarily due to birds pooping on your roof and other fecal contamination, and they can be adequately mitigated by boiling or chemical sterilization: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41545-019-0030-5. Climate change very likely would collapse your civilization, given enough time, but that isn't what is happening now.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  If we spent on those what we spend instead on adtech etc., it really would be guaranteed. Even with fighting invaders. Albeit probably not invaders using nukes.
  - kragen 4y ago
    I think 228 GWp of solar power generation capacity is being installed in 02022, which is about US$50 billion for the solar modules and another US$50 billion for balance of plant, not counting things like battery storage, pumped storage, transmission, and Fischer-Tropsch. Wind energy generation capacity is getting installed at a similar pace, in terms of peak gigawatts per year, but I have the impression that it is significantly cheaper. Tesla's revenues are US$53.8 billion per year, of which about US$0.07 billion is solar panels and therefore getting double counted. I don't know how to measure other automakers' EV production, housing switching to heat pumps, housing adding insulation, and R&D, so I'm just not counting them. Alphabet's yearly revenue is US$258 billion, some of which is earned from things like Google Play, Google Cloud, and Google Workspace, and some of which has been spent on things like Makani, Verily Life Sciences, DeepMind, and Google Fiber. Meta's revenue is US$118 billion. https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-technology-media-and-telecom/googles-revenue/ https://www.globaldata.com/data-insights/internet-services-t... says, "Google earned nearly 81% of its total revenues in 2021 from advertisements," and it's talking about that US$258B number, not some smaller number that excludes other Alphabet companies. We can maybe estimate the whole adtech spend, generously, at US$400 billion per year [edited: was US$300 billion]: most of Alphabet, all of Meta, plus a handful of smaller fish. (I say this is "generous" because it's counting all the effort that goes into running Google Search, YouTube, Instagram, and Android development as "adtech", because it's monetized through ads, even though most of the people working on those projects are not directly concerned with ads; if you omit that, you might size adtech at only US$50 billion.) And maybe US$200 billion per year goes into the renewables transition. I'm not convinced that doubling that to US$400 billion per year would guarantee a win, particularly when the humans are going around bombing each other's power plants, snarling up power plant construction and energy-efficient housing in red tape, and publishing disinformation that "debunks" global warming. These are of course very rough estimates, but how would you estimate these numbers? As far as I know, there aren't any invaders the humans are fighting; they're only fighting other humans, plus the occasional rogue elephant.
kajaktum 4y ago
I think we have more than just environmental issues in this world...but sure.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  Not for long, unless...
eru 4y ago
Who would they be stealing from?
- ncmncm 4y ago
  The body politic. People program computers to exchange messages furiously, to no external effect besides power consumed. Then they go buy yachts. It's all perfectly legal, of course.
  - eru 4y ago
    I'm not sure how this 'stealing' is supposed to work.
    - ncmncm 4y ago
      The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely. As a society, we like to reward people who do things that are useful: feed, house, clothe, warm, transport, educate, protect, medicate, lately amuse people, and get money that may be exchanged for those services, or yachts. HFT traders provide none of those, nor anything comparable, but get yachts anyway.
      - Kranar 4y ago
        >The stock market is a zero-sum game. Every single penny taken out was a penny put in. Money going in is people's pensions, largely. Ah, so you lack a basic understanding of how the stock market works, but think you're qualified to make very strong statements about it.
        ncmncm 4y ago
        Trades batched by second would provide as much liquidity as anybody could use, without the yachts.
        4y ago
sanitycheck 4y ago
Well, there's education - that's net good. And I think entertainment is pretty neutral (even slightly positive) if it doesn't involve gambling or rely on player addiction. Fintech and adtech are where people bright enough to contribute positively to society go to make money instead, kind like the oil industry. All IMHO, YMMV, etc.

tatoalo 4y ago

> The engineering is paramount. You must be lucky, not everywhere in the sector that’d be remotely close to true unfortunately…

jiggawatts 4y ago
He's probably referring to the trading desk or similar teams. Stock traders forced a lot of advances onto software. Random examples of high-perf stuff from that space include the new garbage collector in the JVM with a minimal pause time and LMAX Disruptor. Multi-threaded GUIs are relatively common in that space as well, to ensure that one hung control or window won't stop anything else.
- scruple 4y ago
  I've known a handful of software engineers who have stopped through The Trade Desk for a year or less. It doesn't sound like a great place to work to me, despite the high throughput their software demands.

avgcorrection 4y ago

> This is why I love working in fintech. The prototypical nerd would happily work on building a nuke capable of destroying a continent if that entailed letting him work on “hard problems”.

labster 4y ago
I wouldn’t work on a continent-destroying nuke unless the project used Rust. Wouldn’t want it to be unsafe.
- DrBazza 4y ago
  Obligatory - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98125 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98... Missiles don't really need GC or RAII. They have their own special resource clean up.
mr_mitm 4y ago
Oh you mean the Manhattan project?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

GuB-42 4y ago

I don't know what you mean by "fintech" but from my experience, bank and other finance apps are usually not that great, neither are the websites. So maybe some parts of fintech are nice and clean, but the part that the end user faces, not so much.

drdec 4y ago
If I am not mistaken, fintech refers to the software/hardware surrounding trade execution on the various exchanges (stocks, bonds, commodities, etc.) where speed is of primary importance.
xmcqdpt2 4y ago
Yeah I work in finance too and it's a mixed bag. The stuff I work on right now has a very high focus on correctness and stability which is nice. But I've also seen productionized jupyter notebooks written by just out of school data scientists and 1000 lines long SQL queries that encoded important business logic and weren't version controlled.
dahfizz 4y ago
I mean the actual tech than enables financial markets (fintech) - high frequency trading, matching engines, market data, order execution, etc.