5 ms·

The financial industry has long been populated with far too many lazy, incompetent people with Ivy-league degrees and egos. I work with a bunch of older guys wh

by numair 18y ago

The financial industry has long been populated with far too many lazy, incompetent people with Ivy-league degrees and egos. I work with a bunch of older guys who are from the non-Ivy-dominated era of Wall Street, and it really appears this was a far more enjoyable time to have been a part of the industry. Perhaps it will be good for the mindless status-seekers to head elsewhere; just don't be surprised when their output doesn't exactly look like an answer to Sputnik. That being said, 90% of the "quantitative finance" world was and still is utter nonsense that legitimately drains other fields of technically savvy people, so it will be good to see them in other places. These guys are just a tiny percentage of the financial industry, however; most of the young guys in finance today are arrogant paper-pushers, no different from the sort of annoying people you'd encounter at a Hollywood talent agency.

TriinT 18y ago
"The financial industry has long been populated with far too many lazy, incompetent people with Ivy-league degrees and egos." Lazy!?! Investment bankers tend to be douchebags, but they put 90-100 hours per week, 50 weeks a year. Sure, there's a lot of face time to be put, too... but "lazy" is not the word. I get the impression you don't even know what you're talking about. There are many areas in the financial industry: investment banking, trading, risk management, insurance, private equity. These areas attract all sorts of people, with all sorts of academic backgrounds and personalities. Traders are completely different beasts than, say, investment bankers. "That being said, 90% of the "quantitative finance" world was and still is utter nonsense that legitimately drains other fields of technically savvy people, so it will be good to see them in other places." Nonsense. There are simply not enough positions in academia and industrial research labs for all the Math, Physics PhD's out there.

by numair 18y ago

TriinT 18y ago

"The financial industry has long been populated with far too many lazy, incompetent people with Ivy-league degrees and egos." Lazy!?! Investment bankers tend to be douchebags, but they put 90-100 hours per week, 50 weeks a year. Sure, there's a lot of face time to be put, too... but "lazy" is not the word. I get the impression you don't even know what you're talking about. There are many areas in the financial industry: investment banking, trading, risk management, insurance, private equity. These areas attract all sorts of people, with all sorts of academic backgrounds and personalities. Traders are completely different beasts than, say, investment bankers. "That being said, 90% of the "quantitative finance" world was and still is utter nonsense that legitimately drains other fields of technically savvy people, so it will be good to see them in other places." Nonsense. There are simply not enough positions in academia and industrial research labs for all the Math, Physics PhD's out there.