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Comment by allenrb | Hacker News Reader

Essentially yes. When I worked in algo trading, it never bothered me that we were extracting profits from the markets, nor that we served little social good. It felt like a step up from where I’d been before (being told that we were making the world a better place, when every engineer knew otherwise.) At least we weren’t making things obviously worse.

What did bother me, and was acknowledged by my coworkers, was how much top talent was being pulled away from productive tasks to essentially wank around. Not just technologists either, but all sorts of mathematicians and scientists were drawn to the flame.

We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs. It’s enough to make one want to give up on capitalism, except that everything else appears to be worse.

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Ads are tremendously useful, just ask any business owner.

The problem with ads is not that they're useless, it's that it is an industry prone to scams and grift. (Because doing advertising right requires all sorts of actual science, and ain't nobody got time for that when there's money to be made.)

t. Worked for 20 years and adtech.

Disagree, most are actively harmful as it makes the product with best marketing win, not the objectively/subjectively best one.

Seems like every person I've ever met in M&A has ended up hating life because of their career choice. They seem to burn out in 5 years or so after salting away a million bucks or 3. Was that your feeling doing the HFT thing?

I work at an HFT firm. Most fun I've ever had.

But is that because of the excellent WLB and pay or because of the social impact?

The jobs in algo trading are very interesting for technically - mathéamtically inclined people. It’s really one of those fields where you have a direct impact on the results of your - measurable in additional dollars made.

There is 0 social impact. That’s the downside of course - but hey, how many jobs out there are really having any kind of positive social impact ? Not 0, but close to it.

I think there is some impact, for finding the correct price of things.

That impact is not made by HFT - finding the right risk premia for different investments is very valuable but that is a signal measured over days/weeks/months because actual capital investment decisions take that long.

Intraday financial games are zero-sum. What HFTs gain, they leech away from mutual funds and pension funds and retail investors and market makers who operate over a longer horizon.

I work on very interesting technical problems with very smart colleagues for excellent pay. All my career progression is in compensation, so I can remain an IC forever and no one thinks that's a negative. I'm subject to no politics whatsoever, and there's very little politics in the company as a whole. The work I do every day has a direct material impact on the company and I'm rewarded proportionally to my impact. My WLB is so-so, but it's better than it was in grad school so I'll take it.

Regarding social impact, the world does have some demand for liquidity and price discovery. Providing those services is both essential and extremely difficult. It's definitely not the most social good I could be doing with my talents, but I think it's weakly positive.

Great to know. Offhand it seems it could be quite interesting to me as well.

Agreed. Concerns about more nebulous effects on society didn't change the fact that it was great fun. I miss it.

Which HFT firm do you work at if you are okay sharing

> We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs.

Those things have driven a load of proprietary and open source tech that helps everyone else.

Rising levels of inequality would suggest this is false.

What would rising levels of being lifted out of poverty suggest? The equality gap doesn’t count for much if you starve or freeze to death, and poverty is declining world wide.

> poverty is declining world wide

That depends on how you measure it.

Yeah, keep changing the measure until Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos etc are below poverty line.

The worst way to measure it is inequality. How the top person is doing relative to the bottom person isn't important. How the bottom person is doing now compared to the bottom person 100 years ago is.

sorry, i don't believe inequality is rising, at least in ways that matter. in the last 50 years, a substantial number of people were pulled out of poverty.

Obviously this would mean that countries that previously relied on subsidised labour from those third world countries would have to start paying up. I'm not suggesting that it is a zero sum game however.

>We as a society have managed to allocate so many of the “best and brightest” to either fintech wankery or placing ads in front of eyeballs

It's nothing to do with "we as a society". I'm a quant trader and know many others, and the vast majority are in the industry because we care about making money not some leftist save the world crap. Even if socialists managed to completely destroy the financial market, we'd just find another way to make money without trying to save the world (e.g. like the mostly corrupt officials in Russia and China when they were communist). "Society" can't change human nature; even mass brainwashing on the scale attempted by Maoist China failed.

I.e. the best and brightest will always work where they want to work, not where leftists like you want to "allocate" them.

I think you just illustrated the problem. You have complete awareness of what you do, and you somehow manage to see it as a battle against "leftists" rather than selfish greed. I'm cool with that, but it precludes you from having valid opinions on anything related to improving the world for the majority of people. Please accept this and refrain from any social commentary. Your comment above demonstrates that you don't actually operate in society.

> Please accept this and refrain from any social commentary. Your comment above demonstrates that you don't actually operate in society.

Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially.

If you try to exclude greed from the design of your societal system, it will immediately fail. In large numbers, economics shows us that altruistic people wash out of the model and everyone operates in their own self-interest (greed).

Self interests have externalities. The pleasure you gain from improving someone's life is in no way comparable to the pleasure you gain from making other people suffer. It's a fallacy to say "everyone operates in their own self-interest". It's usually parroted by anti-social people in order to justify anti-social behaviour.

> Cut the fascist bullshit. Everyone can comment about how society should be run, even people that are very successful financially.

It's not financial success that precludes someone from commenting on how society is run, it's blatant, deliberate anti-social actions. This is the foundation of a social contract. It's the same reason you'll get locked up if you go around punching people in the face.

Also, I don't think you know what "fascist" means.

You’re suggesting that people can’t participate in societal planning because they disagree with your causes. You just dress it up in overly dramatic phrases like “anti-social” and “selfish greed” to make inhumanely oppressing them palatable. This was bog standard behavior of fascism in Italy.

It doesn’t seem like fascism to you because you’ve done some mental gymnastics to pretend you’re not just crushing intellectual opposition, but that’s all it is in the end. Op is not punching anyone in the face. He/she is just blatantly unsupportive of socialism.

Focusing solely on getting rich to the detriment of other people is the antithesis of "societal planning". I'm not sure why you're defending this behavior. Do you really believe that people who strive for profit over the well-being of other people are in any way being "social"? Do you see them as the necessary negative force for positive action to be possible? Do you really believe that humans require adversity to succeed, and that those who choose to be adverse agents are engaging in some self-sacrificial martyrdom so society can benefit from their negative influence?

Please, I want to know; what benefits do the actions of the op have for "societal planning"? The person he was replying to was at least honest in admitting that this behavior "served little social good".

Once again, I think you'd do well to actually read what fascism actually stood for. The propaganda of fascism had a lot more to say about nationalism, "shared history" and the good of corporations than it did to say about things being "anti-social" or even mentioning "selfish greed".

I’m a lot less leftist than you apparently assume. I’m a landlord, among other things. My problem with our system is that the things which “pay” are not things which have much benefit to society. I’ve got zero fault with you for choosing to make money. Didn’t I say I did the same thing and loved it? I just question the system that drives the behavior.

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