The jobs that really smart people avoid | Hacker News Reader

The jobs that really smart people avoid

washingtonpost.com

58 pointsarcanus45 comments

More clickbait bullshit from the Washington Post.

Took a study about MIT graduates: some stayed doing research after graduation and others went into finance. So yes not all MIT graduates go into finance. Misleading and inaccurate study of MIT students and what finance is and whatever "really smart" might mean.

Article says zero about job(s) that smart people avoid.

Whatever smart people are doing they are not at the Washington Post. But their boss Jeffy Bezos is a Wall St guy, and smart. His strategy of turning the WashPo into the HuffPo Insider but with a better rolodex and even less ethics seems to be going solid from a biz standpoint.

>His strategy of turning the WashPo into the HuffPo Insider but with a better rolodex and even less ethics seems to be going solid from a biz standpoint.

Had to highlight that. Excellent summary of their current state.

"His strategy of turning the WashPo into the HuffPo Insider but with a better rolodex and even less ethics seems to be going solid from a biz standpoint."

As if that isn't bad enough to avoid them, consider that they're also calling for prosecution of their own source: https://theintercept.com/2016/09/18/washpost-makes-history-f...

I've pretty much started ignoring anything published by them.

Confirmation (bias) of my creeping suspicion that the WashingtonPost has been picking up speed in the race to the bottom.

>His strategy of turning the WashPo into the HuffPo Insider but with a better rolodex and even less ethics seems to be going solid from a biz standpoint.

Sadly this is spot on. If it weren't for the Gawker suit, I think we would have seen many more former news agencies devolve into BuzzFeed-caliber sources of misinformation.

Five possible headlines that could all fit the data presented in this article, all of which would make excellent clickbait:

"The billion-dollar mistake top MIT grads make: staying in research."

"Finance makes top students lazy."

"Success in life not determined by how smart you are, study shows."

"Finance industry's 'best and the brightest' aren't actually the best and the brightest."

"The jobs that really smart people avoid."

All of these have a different slant, but all of them could be supported by the facts presented in the article. Which interpretation do you prefer?

Want to start a "news" site :)?

Economics are terrible, though I'm wondering if there could be a market for a markov-chain or recursive-neural-network based site that just generates clickbait from the millions of training examples on the web.

https://signalvnoise.com/posts/985-custom-cnn-t-shirts

I have another hypothesis the article didn't mention: students who want to do research focus more on their studies while the ones planning to go to Wall Street do the bare minimum to get an acceptable grade (whatever "acceptable" is for the Wall Street institutions) and spend the rest of their time networking, preparing for job interviews in banks, or just enjoying life.

EDIT: spelling

From the article:

"Shu noticed that since the Great Recession, after Wall Street careers had lost of some of their luster, newer classes of MIT students became more likely to major in science and engineering subjects — and their grades were better, too. This effect was most pronounced among the weaker students. Shu has a hunch that some students had been slacking off in their classes because they anticipated working in finance, not science, after graduating."

"slacking off" implies non-productivity, whereas S4M posits high productivity applied toward different goals.

(Using a throwaway, because I don't like putting this kind of stuff on my main account.)

I'm an undergrad CS senior signed for a quant/programming job at a Wall Street trading firm after I graduate in a few months.

I have several friends from previous internships going to work at the same company after they graduate. None of them (nor me) matches the description you gave. Many of us are involved in research at the undergrad level, and no one is coasting by on the bare minimum. Some of these people are also not the sort of people who make any effort to network. The common thread seems to me to be a very strong theoretical and professional background.

Of course, this is with a sample size of 5 undergrads and 1 company, so what I'm talking about could be highly atypical.

Also, if you like doing the bare minimum, you're going to have a bad time in Wall Street, because they often have a bad culture of working 50-100 hour weeks (depending on the company). That's the cost of the more attractive compensation.

I absolutely hate these new "N articles a month" paywalls. Using the "web" link is now ineffective because Google AMP also functions as a paywall.

What if click on an article to skim it and don't really want to read it? Sometimes I just want to gather some context for the HN discussion. Or perhaps I'll immediately decide it's not something I'm actually interested in. That counts against whatever number of reads they're tracking.

You might argue that I should pay for the website and the journalism it supports. Sure, if half of what I was clicking wasn't click bait. Maybe it's just me, but I have yet to find a website that I'd want to pay. (I'd pay for HN.)

To be clear, I do find some journalism to be great, but it isn't uniform in quality or relevance to my interests at any given news outlet. Not to the point where I'd pay for a monthly subscription to every news site for a chance to read the handful of things I want to. I might support microtrasactions if that were a thing. I wouldn't mind five or fifteen cents here or there. But that's never taken off.

These websites are taking valuable space on the HN front page, and they're hosting content I (and presumably others) can't even read! They're like viruses. I don't want them to show up. I wish we would ban them.

Edit: I usually don't make voting appeals, but I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. This is an earnest call for discussion about an issue I feel is a pain point for many HN readers. You might disagree with me, but that shouldn't necessitate a downvote. I haven't been disrespectful, and I welcome different opinions on the matter. I'd prefer a comment expressing why I'm wrong.

I view links to WaPo and the like as an inequitable and unsolicited tax on HN readers. Students especially are impacted by these paywalls.

They're trivial to walk around. Just clear cookies or use a private browsing mode.

It is annoying, I've been using https://www.eff.org/privacybadger from the EFF to help with this and other online tracking. I just disable cookies or block the parts that track your article counts on various news sites. Agree with the general point though, I'd be happy to subscribe if less of the content was clickbait nonsense.

It sounds simple enough. The more driven someone is, the more passionate about their area of study, the better they perform. Better grades, etc. And since they're so passionate about the field, they don't have much interest in moving over to finance.

The real issue here is that there is no economic incentive for many types of research. The more low level the research, the harder it is the reap the commercial benefits from your discoveries. Technological progress is one of the factors that drives long term economic growth, but we didn't find a good way yet to encourage it. (To clarify, this only applies to low level/basic research.)

(I've never had this thought before) What if it is currently encouraged at the proper level, given its present value -- that is, exponentially discounting the future revenue.

Throw in uncertainty, and inability to judge quality work so far from the future, and maybe that justifies the low pay of many basic research jobs? Would be interesting to see an analysis of this across fields, countries, year, etc.

> didn't find a good way yet to encourage it

This is why we have public funding of basic research. Allows resources to be allocated to things that don't have obvious enough commercial benefits to get funding or are too risky for private investment alone to accomplish. Microelectronics are a prime example: http://wvvw.thebhc.org/sites/default/files/beh/BEHprint/v024....

The other issue is just how much incentive there is in finance, which doesn't actually create anything of value. I get that allocating capital to where it's needed is a thing that needs to happen and there needs to be incentives to make it happen...I'm not for medieval prohibitions on usury, but if the 20% number quoted in the article is accurate, that seems dysfunctional. Given how often capital isn't being allocated effectively in the US, your example being just one of many, it seems like we're paying an awfully high premium for that function in today's society.

The article neglects to mention that 15-40% [1][2] of graduating classes at elite schools go into finance. That's a staggering number.

Sure the top students are going into research careers/PhDs, but the banking/consulting/tech recruiting engine is very strong for the rest. I think there are many people who could have productive roles in science/engineering/teaching/etc without getting PhDs who end up in tech/finance instead due to the strong recruiting pressure and great job perks/prestige.

[1] https://www.marketplace.org/2014/03/20/education/top-student.... [2] https://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/out-of-harvard...

I think it's quite common for CS grads to choose finance as a second choice after the big tech companies. Few people see it as an exciting as these banks try to portray themselves. I know several people who took an offer from a big four company to leave from a bank the first chance they got.

Are patents really a great indicator of success? I have a handful, and honestly its a much stronger indicator of networking/coworker relationships/legal force of a company. There a number of key people missing on many of the patents I am co-inventor purely based on these relationships. These patents also would never exist, if not for the legal team at the purchasing company. If the organization went for an IPO or alternate exit, the odds of patents are probably close to zero.

Firms like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch spend lavishly on Ivy League headhunting, tempting students with fancy dinners, promises of prestige — and, most importantly, the idea that there exists a safe template for their post-grad lives.

I didn't realize thy were pushing so hard.

> People going into finance were less likely to say they gained an “in-depth knowledge of a field” or that they better understood “the process of science and experimentation” after their four years at MIT.

Maybe that's because most jobs on Wall Street aren't that technical? A huge part of the job of an investment banker is learning how to socialize with rich folks and sell investment products to them. The president of Morgan Stanley gave a talk at my college and made it very explicit: "At Morgan Stanley, you are a salesman first". That's what the job is.

Who are those mythical "smart people"? I keep hearing about their habits all the time. Are they related to "successful people" in any way? Discovery doesn't have any documentaries on them yet.

"Students destined for Wall Street tended to arrive at MIT with weaker high school records, and later graduated with lower college GPAs."

This is also true at Wharton! The really high GPA kids go to consulting instead.

My experience has been the opposite, and more in line with the article. High IQs go to research, high EQs go to banking and the others consult.

I meant this mostly as a joke, Wharton kids don't get PhD's. Though here, the really smart kids do go to quant finance, so maybe we're just playing at a lower part of the curve than MIT.

I was a quant trader and hired quants out of MIT, et cetera. I never found them as brilliant as MIT's proper engineers nor as creative (or savvy) as other schools' proper financiers. (Part of the effect may arise from pure finance aspirants focussing less on their studies than research aspirants.)

There's actually a fourth group, they become President.

I don't even consider the finance and consulting industries to be distinctly different industries. It is basically the same industry.

Traders are trusted with balance sheet. Bankers and consultants aren't.

It's true that low-level banking and consulting are both grunt work; at their higher echelons it's relationship driven.

Consulting vs Finance: well, many McKinsey kids go to HBS/Stanford GSB for MBA, only to go back to PE/HF (finance). The only people who go back to consulting from Stanford GSB/HSB are those who did not come from consulting/finance.

Anecdote: a (very able) friend of mine was at a technical conference and attended a talk given by an HFT firm. His take was "The tech's pretty interesting, but all it seems to do is make money."

But what do I know, I'm a second tier guy working in the finance sector. :)

Writer doesn't seem to understand the difference between smart and intelligent and hardworking.

I've come across many intelligent and hardworking guys who lacked basic smartness

Sneaking suspicion that it's the legacy students (see got in on daddy's money) students who go into finance.

The article neglects to compare how many academic jobs there are with how many people get degrees that are supposed to qualify them for them, and instead skips to blaming Wall Street first, then imply that people that go to work on Wall Street are stupid.

This would be poor journalism if it were journalism in the first place.

If you can get into a PhD program at a top school like MIT or Harvard or Stanford then you should absolutely go. Otherwise the evidence is less clear. I think med school is actually the best place to go if you are smart, educated in the US...

I avoid Washington Post. Am I smart?

I generally do not read articles that provide data or uncover an insight if they are written by journalists.

Experts usually dont become journalists in their field. For example a writer for thr WashingPost are not usually experts in the implications of nuclear war, or psychological tendencies of humans.

Affirmative.

The article doesn't even try to answer the question in the title.

They forgot one: Politics.

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