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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> And why are tellers not bankers? They perform one of the main public facing banking tasks/services.

This question/claim only makes any sense if you're willing to consider that the cleaning staff might deserve to be called "bankers" too.

Tellers don't provide any banking services. They can't agree to hold your money or loan you money. They don't provide any advice. They're an implementation detail of the banking agreement you set up with an actual banker, a piece of plumbing that happens to be how you move money into or out of your account. Hence the popularity of automatic teller machines.

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I don't know what the definition of a banker is in the first place other than an employee of the bank.

That is where my confusion lies. What is the definition of a banker? And what is their job title?

There are a large number of job titles. But I would say someone qualifies as a "banker" if they are responsible for a flow of money, or if their work consists of helping other people implement flows of money.

I would be comfortable calling e.g. a corporate treasurer a "banker" in this sense, though I wouldn't expect corporate treasurers to be included in the category "bankers" in the context of this piece.

For this piece, something like the intersection of (1) the definition I provide with (2) the class of people employed by "banks".

A teller occupies a position of responsibility in that they can cause a lot of mischief by misbehaving. But I don't think the responsibility to refrain from stealing from the company is the relevant kind of responsibility. A teller at work isn't supposed to be making any decisions of any kind.

A teller is responsible for flows of money from the bank to its customers and vice versa, no?

No. The teller isn't responsible for those flows by transporting the money any more than the security guard is responsible for them by letting the customer go through the door.

You're right, the security guard is also a banker by your definition.

I suggest you show my definition to a few people, ask them whether it includes security guards, and see what they say.

On the negligible chance that you made this comment in earnest, the results may surprise you.

It was in earnest. What seems to be going on here is that we have a very different understanding of what "responsible for a flow of money" means.

In my mental model, someone who handles, protects, counts, transfers, etc. money to and from customers is fairly literally "responsible for a flow of money".

I suspect you believe your definition requires a higher threshold and/or type of responsibility that these roles do not entail, but I don't see where that is in your definition.

I think maybe you what you mean is that our hypothetical banker is independently making some decisions around how / where / etc this money flows with some degree of autonomy ?

My point here was primarily just to say that it is maybe a bit thornier of a thing to define than you realize given that your definition in my honest opinion and in what I consider a reasonable reading did not clearly leave out one of the primary categories of employee that you intended it to exclude.

Sidenote - stating that "you will find most people will agree with me" is an, um, interesting method of argument.

> Sidenote - stating that "you will find most people will agree with me" is an, um, interesting method of argument.

Not at all. That is the standard for determining what something means.

What you're saying here is that I expressed an idea, you agree with me as to both what I meant by it and what other people would understand by it, but, for unstated reasons, you think my expression was metaphysically incorrect. Why?

The project of communication is for the listener to understand the same thing the speaker intended. If that happens, the communication was correct. As applied here, if I think "responsible for a flow of money", elucidated by a negative example, means something, and everyone else agrees with me that it means that thing... then that is in fact what it means. Words hold their meaning by common agreement, and solely by common agreement.

In Italy we have two different words: 'banchiere' the one who owns the bank, 'bancario' the one who works at the bank.

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