Hacker News Reader

Comment by siavosh | Hacker News Reader

It seems like the topic of QF is appearing more frequently these days on HN. I guess it's a sign of the times after an absence after the implosion of 2008. There also seems to be general leveling off of posts on how awesome working for startups are compared to 2008/9 and the exodus of talent from wall street. Sign of the times I guess. Makes me think we're headed back to the 'good old days.'

This is all a bit depressing cause I feel like the conclusion a lot of society had reached in 2008 was that finance should be boring, simple, and shouldn't attract too much brain power from other fields.

View on HN

I've noticed it too. I think many of us believe that the size of the financial sector is extremely disproportionate to the value it adds. It drains talent by offering smart people salaries that other industries can't afford. It gambles with the economy recklessly, but the public pays the debt when their gambles turn sour. And on, and on.

But let's face facts. I'd love to think everybody's really here to "change the world" and "create value." But the biggest stories in tech entrepreneurship focus on silly, time-wasting apps that are sold for millions. Does that really make any more sense than giving a guy a million dollar bonus for designing a high frequency trading algorithm?

If we don't expect more from our community, we can't really criticize theirs.

"It drains talent by offering smart people salaries that other industries can't afford."

Bullshit. The difference is that in finance (trading, at least), good technology is seen as a competitive advantage that makes a meaningful impact on P&L. When financial companies do well they tend to share the love in the form of cash bonuses. This is a strategy other industries could adopt but choose not to.

Also one other nit, there are only a few companies (the megabanks) that are big enough to have a government backstop if they blow up. There is a whole world of smaller outfits doing business without any such guarantee.

The mean salary in New York City's finance industry rose from $80,000 in 1981 to $360,000 in 2011, while average New York City salaries rose from $40,000 to $70,000.

You may be right, but I just don't think there are a lot of tech companies that could offer a mean salary of $360,000 and remain profitable. Especially small to medium size companies. Compare that to hedge funds, which were basically printing money and could pay their small staffs extremely large salaries (and even larger bonuses).

Google and Microsoft are in the same ballpark of profitability per employee as say Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley. The difference is that financial firms take pride in how much they pay their employees, while tech firms do things like collude to depress employee wages.

This couldn't be more true. I got an offer at Intel after working there for the summer. A finance company asked what they were paying and decimated Intel's offer. Upon telling Intel the recruiter at Intel demanded to know where I was going. Luckily I wasn't going to Apple, Adobe (or one of the other companies they allegedly had illegal no competes with or I would have no job at all.

'decimated', as in, paying you ten times less?

If you are going to pull out a dictionary, make sure to read both definitions. :)

decimated:

past participle, past tense of dec·i·mate (Verb) Verb

1) Kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage of.

2) Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): "plant viruses that can decimate yields".

Even under definition 2, it still means 'reduce'. So if the salary was 'reduced', the second offer was less than the first one. It may have 'decimated the attractiveness' of the first salary, sure.

Please tell me you are trolling:

Drastically reduce the strength or effectiveness of (something): "plant viruses that can decimate yields".

decimated Intel's offer.

Drastically reduce the effectiveness of Intel's offer.

It fits exactly. Not only that, but you could also say:

Destroyed Intel's offer. (Def 1)

Decimate is the right word choice and it conveyed the intensity of how badly Finance Co. beat Intel's offer. Your definition of decimate may be used by heavy quants but it doesn't fit everyday usage.

Sure, just like December is the tenth month of the year.

Actually, it was: http://design.caltech.edu/Misc/month_names.html .

Nine tenths as much to be correct. From wiki: The word decimation is derived from Latin meaning "removal of a tenth". A cohort selected for punishment by decimation was divided into groups of ten; each group drew lots (Sortition), and the soldier on whom the lot fell was executed by his nine comrades.

Ah yes, my favorite pet peeve - descriptivism vs prescriptivism in linguistics. Lives have been wasted arguing about this exact interpretation of decimate, my position is that 'decimate' in a 2013, Western context means one of the definitions posted above - i.e., significantly reduce in number, not by 10%.

So what was the offer like? 2x Intel?

You are not wrong about the amount of money to be made in the finance industry, but when talking about those salaries you have to be very careful.

Hedge fund managers make orders of magnitude more money than their employees. Investment banks work much like law firms, if you are a partner or partner track you can make tons, but frequently that is built on the back of average paid employees.

What would tech company compensation look like if we included Brin/Cook/Zuckerberg?

There are lots and lots of small shops out there that have good but not idiotic compensation packages. The tech companies could (should?) match them if it weren't an ingrained part of the culture not to.

Well, total compensation, say at Google, can be around 200k for senior guys. A lot of people in finance are making less than that and so people do leave for software jobs.

As I have said before, really huge compensation levels in finance exist for VP-level people. Please keep in mind that "VP" in finance means something like "pretty senior", he might no be a manager at all. These guys have around 5 years experience and if all went well for them they can be making around 300k. These would be hard to match en masse while avoiding a situation when of two engineers doing the same job one is paid X and another 2X.

I don't think any of our tech guys ever earned $360k. That's for the traders.

It drains talent by offering smart people salaries that other industries can't afford

This is repeated a lot, but the skills of financial wizards are orthogonal to what most tech companies need.

It's also not the case that the tech industry can't afford to pay people high salaries.

I think most of the easy money in startups has been made (and from here on out the dumb ideas that raised millions of dollars won't see as much money), so people are jumping back to finance.

There was never a real exodus of talent. The really talented people weathered the storm, and it seemed as if a whole bunch of B-people switched over and are now considering switching back.

Yeah, it's been weeks since anybody's purchased a useless half-baked app for $30M. The bubble must be over.

It's been more than a year since anybody's purchased an app with zero revenue for $1B.

I should clarify that I don't think the bubble is over yet, but the euphoria stage has passed

Reply on news.ycombinator.com