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Comment by roncesvalles | Hacker News Reader

The incentives in finance are remarkably well-tuned to rewarding employee effort. Make the company 300k? You get 30k. Make the company 300 million? You get 30 million.

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That seems so easy to game. Do some small change that brings short term gain, bag the profit and let the rebound be the failure of another team.

Doesn't that pretty much describe the 2007-2008 financial crisis?

And every such crisis before it, and the next one too.

The crisis was 07/08, but the buildup was almost a decade in the making, does that count as short term?

Maybe the profit share is earned out over time? Otherwise I would agree with you..

the law in the UK is that material risk takers bonus pay over a certain amount (couple of hundred thousand) is deferred over 3-5 years and can be clawed back

If you think it's easy to game 30M in short term revenue, please try to do that in a large firm.

The risk/compliance teams would be interested in your strategy.

I'm a socialist/anarchist, they would never give me that opportunity :)

You could try this overall strategy in the stock market and see how it works out ;)

how do swe get into finance?

I see quite a few SWE jobs here in Singapore in finance, mostly realtime C++ order management. If the advertised salaries are real, they're very well-paid (300-700k USD, plus bonus).

First step, understand what Finance means in the scope of technology work.

i dont have a clue

The path of least resistance is to become a well known C++ or systems guru.

This can be done by contributing substantially to the language standard, a compiler, etc etc.

Or you could learn COBOL!

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