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Comment by TheLarch | Hacker News Reader

Besides introducing systematic risk, the sale of this software by Goldman smells fishy. Despite the Blankfein quote about maybe selling for $5 billion back in the day, if the software is what they purport it to be, wouldn't selling it be akin to Amazon licensing their product distribution to Walmart?

I've wondered what these million dollar per month programmers do on Wall Street. This really puts it in perspective.

On that note, it's completely depressing to see many of the best minds of our time working on shit software that adds nothing to society. Another swath of them are working on getting people to click on ads for Facebook and Google.

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> Another swath of them are working on getting people to click on ads for Facebook and Google.

Which finances Google's driverless car efforts and an untold other amount of businesses (like gmail). Plus the salaries of thousands of developers and the myriad of other people who work for Google, and the subindustries it supports (bus drivers, chefs, real estate, etc). Just because their specific job isn't world-changing doesn't mean it has no positive effect on the world.

Silicon Valley has benefited greatly from the ad industry which is why the popularity of this type of complaint bothers me.

Same with Goldman. They do contribute to the world by facilitating commerce. Although they likely contribute far less to the world than SV developers since they siphon so much off the top for ultimately marginal longterm ROI. They also ultimately wouldn't make so much money unless they did provide some value to the economy beyond exploitation of byzantine financial systems.

I grant that Google is more of a social good than Facebook.

Your claim that Goldman has contributed is a debated topic. Paul Krugman favorably mentioned a study that purports to demonstrate that Wall Street's endeavors are largely unproductive. I can't find it now unfortunately.

Wall street programmers are solving humanity's resource allocation problem ;)

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index...

Please see my last comment, this is a debated topic.

However, I've read Mike Milken and, despite his warts, I believe he did radically improve capital allocation. So it certainly has happened over the years. -- edit: I meant about Mike Milken

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