Dissastisfied, Some Wall Street Technologists Flee for Start-Up Life | Hacker News Reader

Dissastisfied, Some Wall Street Technologists Flee for Start-Up Life

observer.com

16 pointssak846 comments

  But even quants are not immune to the feeling that what      they're doing for a living is not adding up to anything.

Not sure about this, but isn't the quants who are responsible for developing new pricing models for some esoteric options, new algos to capture the fleeting abnormalities in the market , improving (say) the existing Gauss Copula method that so that 2007 subprime crisis could be predicted or being avoided altogether (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant) and so on.

How can you say that kind of work is unsatisfying and lacking of creativity?

It's not that it isn't interesting or creative (at times). It's that there isn't much social redeeming value. You might as well be a professional poker player, except your are hated instead of admired. Now that the status is gone, it really hits you that you are pretty much a leech on society. I say that as someone who works in this industry and has thought often about an exit strategy, but the money is still too good be to justify a the risk of a startup.

I see. But I wouldn't be bothered about whether my work has "social redeeming value".

For me, it's much more important to firstly earn good money, secondly do something creative, not just typical CRUD applications.

And whether or not a work has "social redeeming value" is highly subjective. I, for one, don't think that Twitter has any bit of "social redeeming value". I can't see how a 140-char limit sentence can add much to our society.

I share office space with Andrew - didn't actually know he'd been at a bank, but I can verify that he seems pretty happy to be doing what he's doing.

I never worked full time at a bank, but I did a summer internship in Goldman's tech division and the work was extremely boring. I didn't really get the impression that anyone on my team was having fun, with the possible exception of my manager. I'm sure there are some tech jobs at the big banks which are fun, but I think they're the minority.

wonder if this influx of NYC bankers will be better or worse for the consumer internet world - don't know if the ethics and values of banking translate to those of web startups.

I don't see web startups as inherently being more ethical than that of the average investment bank, but in any case the IT people are not usually dealing with the same ethics decisions as those doing the investing at an investment bank.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com