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Comment by hgomersall | Hacker News Reader

I'm so glad I'm not wasting my life working in finance.

I've worked in various small to medium IT companies, a FAANG and another fortune 500 tech company. 6 months ago I moved to a proprietary trading company/market maker and it's the most interesting and satisfying place I've worked so far.

I hope to continue to "waste my life" for many years to come.

May I ask which one, and what your process was that led you to them?

Actually it's one of the few truly intellectually-pure endeavors. Everything else is the same pursuit with extra steps:

Make a trading strategy to make money

Make a cutting edge machine learning classifier to back out latent meaning in search queries to produce better search results to drive more traffic to google to sell ads to make money

You're not wrong, but the problem is those steps are also the steps that produce food, or improve health, or solve climate change or solve any of the innumerable problems we face as a society. As you identify, there are plenty of pursuits other than finance that are not particularly socially useful - it's not a very exclusive club.

Out of curiosity - in what domain do you work ?

I find the work in finance / tech very interesting. Societally useful ? Almost certainly not. But probably still more than most good-paying tech jobs.

I work in finance/tech, but my code doesn't execute million-dollar trades automatically. Cash transactions are reviewed by a human, and its mostly data analysis type work.

It's one thing to make recommendations or calculations and give the report to a human. It's another to start trading high volume in real time automatically.

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