Serious question: If someone is smart and capable enough to work on tangible things like AI systems or self-driving cars, why should they choose the NYSE outside of pure monetary reasons or affinity for a “modern” tech stack?
If I can take that same skill set and apply it to something with a much better culture surrounding it that affects people in a positive way, then I would definitely choose that over finance any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
At the end of the day, if the NYSE did not exist, the world would continue to turn. It's just not that big of a deal to a heck of a lot of people.
This is startlingly ignorant of the complex machine that is the modern economic system. If something like the NYSE was to shut down today it would be pandemonium.
There is a difference between 'I don't understand how something works' and 'I don't understand how something works, so it is worthless'. The former is healthy and the first step to understanding, the latter is ignorant, and the first step to getting more ignorant.
The current state of business within the current iteration of how people interact with one another isn’t some necessity.
Yes, the world may fall apart for a relatively brief moment in the grand scheme of things — but then life will go on.
The first step to understanding this is to drop the superiority complex.
Very little is actually needed to keep the world turnin.
The real answer here, in my opinion, is that yes there would be pandemonium, and then yes, the world would go on without it, but then something else just like it will pop up. And that is because a liquid market for financial assets (whether that is securities, options on securities, futures, etc) will always be a massive benefit to the ability of businesses to conduct business, and the ability of individuals to preserve and increase wealth.
The movie portrayals don’t match my experiences at all and I saw a lot more bad behavior in the tech companies I worked for.
Heck I saw more people working for the intellectual challenge of it in trading than I did in SV style tech firms where money drove nearly every decision.
It’s really hard for me to buy that SV style tech companies are a better place to work when for the last 2 decades the business models that have been front and center are panopticon style tracking to sell ads and legal arbitrage.
It's not an either or, I can hate both ;-) I'm a big boy and get to make up my own mind on the matter.
There are problems in Fintech that are absolutely worth solving for altruistic reasons. One that I think is very important and might even need to incorporate AI is this :
Larger financial institutions have access WAY more and WAY higher quality data surrounding stocks and options. For example, publicly available SEC filings contain extremely useful information about companies. Professional traders have access to services which provide this data accurately in programatic form (like an API). Us normal people have only the SEC filings themselves, which are enormous documents. It would be impossible to read them fast enough to ever catch up on all of them in the last say year. There are free APIs, but they are absolute dogshit and provide incomplete and inaccurate information.
If someone could democratize this and provide this info for free or cheap to the public, it would be an enormous benefit to the general public.
illinois.edu has one of the top rated CS programs, but once you graduate there are not a lot of options but to move to one of the coasts, or move back/to Chicago and try your luck there. Second City has a good deal of fintech.
Maybe they aren't as smart as they think they are? Or they find that there are interesting problems to solve in fintech? Problems they can tackle and see resolved in a realistic time frame vs 'tangible' (?) self-driving cars or chat bots.
I know AI encompasses a far larger range of things but right now, what problems is it solving? Artists, writers, and others can do that work. What do self-driving cars resolve beyond continuing the dominance of car culture in a world that could have better public transit and safer infrastructure?