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Comment by swyx | Hacker News Reader

Ex finance guy here - Liar's Poker for 1980s Wall Street, When Genius Failed for 1990s, More Money Than God for 2000s, Flash Boys for 2010s

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liar%27s_Poker

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Genius_Failed

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/More_Money_Than_God

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Boys

obviously these do not represent all of finance but its a nice decade-by-decade recap of talking points, i figured i'd try to do it and was surprised how nicely it broke out

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Patio11 specifically calls out flash boys as bad and inaccurate.

He recommends: https://www.amazon.com/Flash-Boys-Insiders-Perspective-High-...

Which I’ve had on my shelf for a while, but haven’t yet read.

i love a good patio11 takedown. got a source for his call out?

He mentions it in the footnote of this article:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2019/6/26/how-brokerages-make-mone...

Flash Boys: Not So Fast is the argument in much more depth, and should be dispositive.

“When Genius Failed” is really good. Lot of parallels to tech where folks are visionaries right up until the day that they’re not and how things that we don’t truly understand can go haywire

If you like books on finance and history, “Reminiscences of a Stock Operator” by Edwin Lefèvre is also an excellent book, and an interesting view into early Wall Street.

Those are all good recommendations, but if anything tech/SV is resembling every day more and more to 1980s WS.

I think it's different in that you do have some subset of people who think they're doing things for the common good, and some actually are, but...

"Greed is good" Gordon Gecko

Lots of finance people, rightly or wrongly justify their work as giving a valuable service to humanity: From "providing liquidity" to "absorbing risk" and "helping your pension grow" the list of supposed goods provided by finance is very long.

And they're not entirely wrong. Although there are benefits provided by other industries on net (probably including tech) that are greater.

and this isn't much different from "we're making the world a better place by ____" https://youtu.be/B8C5sjjhsso

yep. i'm merely one of many finance bros that escaped to tech. if you work in martech, then you absolutely outpaced wallstreet haha.

May I ask why you left finance for tech? I'm considering going into trading instead of SWE because the environment may be more social. I also spend a lot time analyzing current events, so why not get paid for it, too?

I made a career change into sales and trading for a while, then went back into full-time medicine - finance is a really interesting subject, but the proportion of assholes in sales and trading is much higher than in software, medicine, or most corporate jobs (all of which of course have some proportion of assholes).

That's not to say that people in that industry can't be charming - they totally can be, but they will also do whatever it takes to boost up their reputation (and therefore their annual bonus) at your expense. "Liar's poker" is a pretty accurate description of the culture, but it's much worse when you have to deal with it every day.

My experience was on the sell-side, things may be different on the buy-side. Feel free to message me if you want to chat.

I work as a dev at a financial company. I can say that I agree with you. The people (both business side and dev side) in the trading portion of the company were much more likely to be assholes than in the non-trading areas, such as client facing areas. It seemed like the closer people got to being a trader or portfolio manager, the more likely they were to have a mindset of "I'm better than you. I know more than you, so do what I say.", even when they don't know what they're doing.

i should prob write my "why i left finance" up in a more permanent place but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847266

Would "Bonfire of the Vanities" make a good introduction to 80s Wall Street as well?

It's a good insight into the mind of a banker/master of the universe but it doesn't go into too much detail about the actual job IIRC, though tbh I haven't read it in a few years

Monkey Business was a pretty funny read too--for certain definitions of funny.

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