And this is what some of the brightest minds in the country are being harvested to develop. One of the biggest ongoing travesties.
Jane street on the other hand is arbitraging against regular folks money, so they can distribute the gains to their select high value clients. There is no free office productivity suite and limitless "How to repair cell phones to start your own business" videos distributed to everyone for free.
In a way, they are doing opposite functions. Ad media takes from people who buy stuff and gives to people who don't (or cant't) buy anything. Jane street and their ilk take from regular people and give to those who have everything already.
the finance industry doesn't produce anything of value. it just turns $1 into $2 and liquidates productive industries.
But is it really? Is buying a lot of stock and selling it later really something that takes a genius?
And doing so without being caught for market manipulation might require genius that surpasses the human limit.
Define buying a house.
an "information technology" degree that teaches React and stuff is not engineering.
This is the last website I would imagine people complaining they can't buy a house.
Lol, is that really what you think I meant by real engineering? You have tunnel vision for computer tech.
Even Senior+ level SWEs at FAANG's in Silicon Valley have trouble buying homes there. The costs are absurd.
You can buy an f'ing house. In places like Ukraine people make $100/month and apartments are $50k(and I'm talking before the war). There, it's LITERALLY impossible.
What people here are describing is that things should be better, and I agree, but words matter.
In 2021, the median annual salary for software engineers in Ukraine ranged from $30,000 to $48,175, depending on location and experience. Some specific figures include $30,000 in Kyiv, $29,000 in Lviv, and $24,000 in Kharkiv. Remote software engineers in Ukraine had a median salary of $48,175.
It's quite below the EU median, but definitely not $100 a day.
BTW $100 a day is $12.50 a hour, which is more than the federal minimum wage in the US ($7.50 or so), and only $4 below California's minimum wage, $16.50.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1460-Latham-St-Mountain-V...
$1.6M 894 sqft 2b1ba
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/4609-E-Mountain-View-Dr-S...
$1.1M 930 sqft 3b3ba
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1763-Fordham-Way-Mountain...
$3.5M 1527 sqft 3b2ba
That last one would be considered a small starter home in my MCOL city and is literally 10x the cost for 300 less sqft of my current home. It's a total joke.
2 FTE Sr SWEs at Google would struggle to even get the downpayment for that last one. The mortgage is like 80% of their after tax salary.
Average mechanical engineer salary (mid-career) = £45k Max mortgage based on salary = ~£200k Average house price = ~£292k
-> Most people with an engineering degree cannot buy a house
Most people with an engineering degree are probably in a relationship, so they don't need to buy a house on a single salary.
There are plenty of houses for sale below the average price, just as there are plenty above.
Buying isn't necessarily the best option anyway. House price returns in the UK are somewhat below stock market returns, so as a pure investment it doesn't make sense. Unfortunately, we have the narrative in the UK that we should aspire to own houses, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily correct!
This doesn't feel like a valid assumption.
Unless the demographics of those with engineering degrees is significantly skewed towards singles, this feels like a very valid assumption. Of course, you might have access to better statistics by profession.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
Also, it's 164k a year, not ever. So whether or not it can buy a home in SF kind of depends on how long and how fast you save.
Those with the power will use it. So much for the "invisible hand" making everything "fair and efficient".
Aligning incentives so that what's good for the individual is also good for society is a politician's job.
A hardworking and smart person in tech really doesn’t need to try hard or sacrifice much to live a comfortable life in terms of finances. Hard part is the rest of the things in life really.
When the incentive instead rewards "how much money can you extract from others without improving their lives at all" we've headed in a very dangerous direction. You get the "we can make more money by making our product more aggravating" motivation that leads to dark patterns and all sorts of problems.
This sort of market manipulation stuff is just a very clear example of this pattern. Smart people not building useful products but instead fighting to crank a machine so that it spits more money in their direction.
worse, those are the active smart people doing that.. for each one of them there are a hundred others trying to do everything and anything to become one of those.. its a pyramid. The competition between individuals is a feature. You bet it is on the lips of every one of those individuals their "top" credentials that sit them in that trading seat. In other words, for every quant geek on that trading group, there are a thousand other "almost top" people using their time, talent and effort to try to be one of those inner circle ones.
Imagine becoming highly educated and then just using that ability to cream off the output of people who labour every day producing things that are actually useful. The tragedy is all the signals from society are saying this ok. Nobody questions the money. I got excited thinking we would 15 years ago, but nobody cares.
I guess if you're bright enough to come up with a solution you could be like Satoshi, or you could just work for Jane Street and suck as much as you can before you die.
the outcome is the same. you're sucking money out of people.
Huh. Interesting point. I guess I never thought about it when JS were the secretive OCAML hacking prop quant fund, but if they become just another use-size-to-win badguy I can see the angle.
people who get stuck in finance - especially trading - are not that bright IMHO compared to the hopelessly curious stubborn ones who go into philosophy or hard sciences or other areas of research.