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"Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testified before the House Committee on Science and Technology and said salaries are not the problem when his company tries to re

by pmorici 17y ago

"Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates testified before the House Committee on Science and Technology and said salaries are not the problem when his company tries to recruit top scientists and engineers. "It's not an issue of raising wages. These jobs are very, very, very high-paying jobs," he said." It maybe true that they are very high paying jobs but I doubt they are as high paying as say a job on Wall Street.

scotty79 17y ago
The trouble is that as engineer or researcher you have to actually do some hard, useful things. As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that they can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at all. I guess people claiming they can predict future always earn disproportional amounts of wealth without doing anything useful. That is as long as everything goes well. Squeeze this free-riding and casino mixture that is called financial market a bit and you will have plenty of smart people available for hacking physics as they loose incentives for hacking money game instead.
- yummyfajitas 17y ago
  As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that they can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at all. Fail. I've been through the interview process at a couple of such places, and you don't get in without having some skill. In fact, I'd say the typical financial job is more technical than the typical engineering job. A large number of engineering jobs consist of little more than the electrical/mechanical/chemical equivalent of CRUD programming, but not very many finance jobs fall into that category [1]. [1] The financial industry requires many CRUD-type jobs to be done just like any other industry, but those are usually outsourced.
  - scotty79 17y ago
    I overshot myself a bit with "without having any skill at all". I meant "without skill that they must had to get comparable salary from engineering type of job". Also I didn't mean CRUD jobs because they are probably same as everywhere else. Smart person with a bit of social aptitude can pass them fairly fast. I don't think that during work you would be using skills that you were tested for during interviews. Any highly profitable branch that does not require skill has to have high barrier on entry. Because if not, soon all people would d it, and that would make it less profitable. If job actually requires skill then barrier of entry need not to be so high because lack of skill will quickly become apparent anyway. For example barrier of entry to my college was fairly low (it was technical and not many people actually wanted to get in because math is hard so the college set their barriers fairly low to not put people off, this also probably had to do with the way the school was financed). Semester later one third of the students were gone. After first semester only half remained.
    - yummyfajitas 17y ago
      According to the people I've spoken to working in finance, they routinely use moderately advanced math. By advanced math, I mean PDEs, numerical problems requiring cleverness and more probability than most engineers learn [1]. They also do it at a speed and level of distraction that many good techies can't handle. By this I mean a trader has the absolute right to yell at you at any time and make you drop everything debug the program he is using. As for "barriers of entry need not be so high", college is different than a job. Your college still collected tuition from the students up until they dropped out. Goldman Sachs has to pay the bad techies they recruit until they fire them (and this may also be legally problematic [2]). [1] It's usually not as deep as, e.g., a PhD in math or theoretical physics. [2] If they did as you suggest, and women or minorities disproportionately couldn't handle the job, they are inviting a disparate impact lawsuit.
      - geebee 17y ago
        I wouldn't dispute this - I'm sure that many finance people are pretty brilliant and have very strong math backgrounds. That said, I met a lot of folks who work in finance who make a lot of money and absolutely do not have a strong math background. Of all the folks who make substantial salaries (let's say above $250K/year) on wall street, what percentage do you think could, on the spot (or within a few minutes of consulting a book or web site), solve a simple differential equation, the kind that you encounter in an upper division undergraduate math class?
        anamax 17y ago
        If you really think that math is both necessary and sufficient for success in finance, get into commodities trading and show us.
        yummyfajitas 17y ago
        To clarify, my claim isn't that everyone in finance (or even above a certain pay scale) has a strong math background. My claim is that many of the engineer cum quants are doing technical work (not simply paper pushing) in a difficult environment.
timwiseman 17y ago
Beautiful point. "very, very, very high-paying jobs" is a relative term. If you want someone with skills and options to go into that specific field then the overall compensation for that field has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options. Of course, part of that "overall compensation" does include things which are hard to directly measure such as enjoyment of the job, flexible scheduling, and prestige in addition to traditional ideas of money and benefits.
- eru 17y ago
  > has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options. It has to be better than the next best alternative. (Opportunity costs.)

by pmorici 17y ago

scotty79 17y ago

The trouble is that as engineer or researcher you have to actually do some hard, useful things. As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that they can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at all. I guess people claiming they can predict future always earn disproportional amounts of wealth without doing anything useful. That is as long as everything goes well. Squeeze this free-riding and casino mixture that is called financial market a bit and you will have plenty of smart people available for hacking physics as they loose incentives for hacking money game instead.

yummyfajitas 17y ago
As for financial sector, so much money is floating around these guys that they can earn exorbitant wages almost effortlessly without having any skill at all. Fail. I've been through the interview process at a couple of such places, and you don't get in without having some skill. In fact, I'd say the typical financial job is more technical than the typical engineering job. A large number of engineering jobs consist of little more than the electrical/mechanical/chemical equivalent of CRUD programming, but not very many finance jobs fall into that category [1]. [1] The financial industry requires many CRUD-type jobs to be done just like any other industry, but those are usually outsourced.
- scotty79 17y ago
  I overshot myself a bit with "without having any skill at all". I meant "without skill that they must had to get comparable salary from engineering type of job". Also I didn't mean CRUD jobs because they are probably same as everywhere else. Smart person with a bit of social aptitude can pass them fairly fast. I don't think that during work you would be using skills that you were tested for during interviews. Any highly profitable branch that does not require skill has to have high barrier on entry. Because if not, soon all people would d it, and that would make it less profitable. If job actually requires skill then barrier of entry need not to be so high because lack of skill will quickly become apparent anyway. For example barrier of entry to my college was fairly low (it was technical and not many people actually wanted to get in because math is hard so the college set their barriers fairly low to not put people off, this also probably had to do with the way the school was financed). Semester later one third of the students were gone. After first semester only half remained.
  - yummyfajitas 17y ago
    According to the people I've spoken to working in finance, they routinely use moderately advanced math. By advanced math, I mean PDEs, numerical problems requiring cleverness and more probability than most engineers learn [1]. They also do it at a speed and level of distraction that many good techies can't handle. By this I mean a trader has the absolute right to yell at you at any time and make you drop everything debug the program he is using. As for "barriers of entry need not be so high", college is different than a job. Your college still collected tuition from the students up until they dropped out. Goldman Sachs has to pay the bad techies they recruit until they fire them (and this may also be legally problematic [2]). [1] It's usually not as deep as, e.g., a PhD in math or theoretical physics. [2] If they did as you suggest, and women or minorities disproportionately couldn't handle the job, they are inviting a disparate impact lawsuit.
    - geebee 17y ago
      I wouldn't dispute this - I'm sure that many finance people are pretty brilliant and have very strong math backgrounds. That said, I met a lot of folks who work in finance who make a lot of money and absolutely do not have a strong math background. Of all the folks who make substantial salaries (let's say above $250K/year) on wall street, what percentage do you think could, on the spot (or within a few minutes of consulting a book or web site), solve a simple differential equation, the kind that you encounter in an upper division undergraduate math class?
      - anamax 17y ago
        If you really think that math is both necessary and sufficient for success in finance, get into commodities trading and show us.
      - yummyfajitas 17y ago
        To clarify, my claim isn't that everyone in finance (or even above a certain pay scale) has a strong math background. My claim is that many of the engineer cum quants are doing technical work (not simply paper pushing) in a difficult environment.

timwiseman 17y ago

Beautiful point. "very, very, very high-paying jobs" is a relative term. If you want someone with skills and options to go into that specific field then the overall compensation for that field has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options. Of course, part of that "overall compensation" does include things which are hard to directly measure such as enjoyment of the job, flexible scheduling, and prestige in addition to traditional ideas of money and benefits.

eru 17y ago
> has to be higher than the overall compensation of all other options. It has to be better than the next best alternative. (Opportunity costs.)