Comment by tingley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tingley | Hacker News Reader

I'm breaking my own personal rule of the internet by saying this, but I went to Harvard in the late 90s, and I was friends with a bunch of math/physics types while I was there. A good number of them went to Wall Street.

I think a lot of what this says is accurate, but I think it downplays something important. It's not just that there's a lot of money in Wall Street, it's that it's not a great time to be (for example) a physicist in this country, or at least it wasn't when I graduated. I remember a friend of mine telling me how you were typically looking at two postdocs after your PhD, and then your options were either to be an academic or to build weapons. (That guy, ironically, is the one who stuck with physics.)

So apparently a lot of people took the money. Those kids could grind, and it all must have just seemed too easy. I find it hard to judge too harshly. A part of me feels like we failed them as a society, in the way we collectively assign value to human activities. Because their minds are capable of things I can only imagine, but we couldn't think of anything better for them to do than this.

I was also at Harvard in the 90s and was a physics major. I ended up in strategy consulting. The article is pretty much spot on, but I would add one more factor - it's a lot of fun to work with really talented people; thats one of the reasons people go to consulting/banking/law school. I interviewed with research labs and aerospace companies (areas I was interested in) and interviewed somewhat on a whim with strategy consulting firms (as the article points out, it's hard to miss them on campus). The people I met at the consulting firms were all really sharp people. The folks at some of the other places were uninspiring. So, I went to the consulting firm, and for the year and a half that I did it (before coming to my senses), it was easy to overlook _what_ we were doing, because it was great to work with people that challenged me creatively and intellectually and to solve hard problems ("hard" and "useful to the world" not being necessarily correlated).

This dynamic creates a nice positive feedback loop. Once you have a high enough concentration of sharp people, it's easy to get more. Good startups leverage the same phenomenon.

I completely agree. I frequently think about leaving the tech sector and going into consulting for just this reason. No work environment (except for a small non-profit I ran for awhile) has been nearly as stimulating as the ivy-league environment I was once in.

I don't think one should judge at all. People take a very broad brush painting Wall Street these days, which is understandable but still wrong. I prefer to judge people, individuals, not categories of people, however defined.

Also, why should "we [...] as a society" think of something "better" (who defines that?) for these bright minds? Surely, they know best how to make their own choices (where I'd emphasize _make_)?

But they're only going act out of their own self-interest. If society is structured as such that solving practical physics problems that could improve society through solving engineering problems and raising our standard of living is less valued than only using one's intelligence to game the system to take money from the less intelligent, then this is society's failing, not theirs.

Disclaimer: I'm of the opinion that it's better for society's best and brightest to use their skills to improve society for themselves and everyone else in the most universally helpful manner.

Moral relativism is not the answer. By judging people you make certain careers less attractive. People from top colleges are often status-conscious, so the media can influence their decisions by painting Wall Street in a positive or negative light. This can be a good thing when if talent is indeed "wasted" at Wall Street.

> Surely, they know best how to make their own choices

People don't generally make their own choices. People tend to gather 2 or 3 options (4 or 5 if they're from top schools) and then they "decide" by picking one of those options. It's completely baffling, but people are guided by the choices in front of them, not by where they want to go.

I also went to college in the late 90's. Where I went to school was not in the northeast, but had a significant overlap with Harvard applicants (or so I'm told). Interestingly, I never heard of anyone talking about going into investment banking/finance. A ton of people did go into "consulting" at McKinsey and (at the time) Anderson, etc, but most of the people I hung out out with in physics/engineering went on to actual engineering jobs or grad school.

When I later heard about this supposed pipeline of Ivy League people going into finance, I always wondered what the deal was. I assume it's primarily a geographical thing. Firms like McKinsey are all over the place, whereas finance is centered on Wall St., so they go for more local recruiting.

Of course some of my college friends did eventually end up going into Wall St. stuff. One after being a physics prof at MIT, another after doing a physics post doc and not finding any other physics jobs, and another left McKinsey and got a PhD in finance. Stochastic calculus FTW!

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