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Comment by walshemj | Hacker News Reader

Lets be honest Amazon is an online shop the best and brightest are either going to be working at tier 1 RnD or on wall street or the city.

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Re Wall Street: It's unfortunate that some of our brightest are tempted into playing multi-million dollar poker, rather than focusing their energy on producing any significant long-term value.

I believe software engineering wages will continue to rise over time, and will eventually reflect the true value the industry produces.

I have no shame in admitting that I would rather use high-level mathematics and programming to play "multi-million dollar poker" on Wall Street than join half of the startups and big tech companies and have a boring job churning out insignificant apps at a desk.

In fact, the way you phrased it, being a quant sounds really fun :) you don't want to play multi-million dollar poker?

I mean, sure, meaning and existentialism and all that, but I bet it's at least somewhat exciting.

That's the fundamental problem. The function of the finance system in a healthy economy is to ensure efficient allocation of capital. Playing poker has a neutral to negative effect on the system.

Well you're the one who used the word poker, so I guess it depends on your definition here...but the financial system somewhat revolves around poker.

Valuations of companies are only important to investors because of the inherent gambling. If you purchase capital at a single valuation that never rises or falls, what's the point? Even an index fund pursues gradual increases over time.

...Or am I building a strawman here? Is this not where you were going?

Which is why I work for a large bank, in toxic assets resolution, where the stakes are still in the billions of dollars.

I think I'd rather use my tech skills to play multi-million dollar poker on Wall Street then create yet another beautiful, responsive, flexible, tweet-able, location-based, modular MVC library API component framework backbone architecture.js.

Also, who wouldn't want to play high-stakes poker with someone else's money!

"It's beautiful! It's disruptive! It's agile and lean!"

"What does it do?"

"It revolutionizes the way you share pictures of your cats!"

...Yeah. Playing multi-million dollar poker on Wall Street sounds a lot sexier than the shiny startup veneer put on another photo sharing app.

Experience from other branches of engineering compared to other equivalent professions over the last 100 years suggests otherwise.

Let's be honest, Amazon has a massive infrastructure supporting a very large number of very diverse customers, tonnes of products and projects, and lots of active development on them.

Have you heard of a little thing called Amazon Web Services?

down voted eh the truth hurts doesn't it there is a world of difference between working at JPL MIT etal and some me to start up using the latest shiny new thing copying some existing SM type solution of which there are dozens already.

I didn't downvote you, but calling Amazon a startup is pretty ridiculous -- and your spelling/grammar isn't lending your argument any favors. (Though, ironically, it does fit into PG's description of "a company optimized for growth.")

I think it should have been obvious from the context that I was talking about a substantial number of the HN commentators who are working at me to start ups (nothing wrong with that but its not world changing rocket science)

Soory if you have problems with reading as a literate dyslexic I had no problem with reading writing not so much :)