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Comment by matthewsinclair | Hacker News Reader

I've had a similar experience in financial services but from the other direction, and particularly as an architect.

I can't tell you how many times I have heard the phrase "I'm a banker, I don't need to understand the technology" from people in very senior positions with very high salaries.

The thing that they fail to understand - apart from routinely missing fundamental banking concepts like "on behalf of" or "product as sold" - is that banking is technology.

Banks don't store cash any more, they store bits.

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Matthew, I should have put my response to you. I'll be curious to see what happens with Bitcoin and when crytocurrencies become the norm, whether the business will start to respect tech. Show me a great business mind with great technical sense and s/he will be the master of the universe. Algo and HFT which now move the majority of capital markets are essentially just messages passed back and forth. So to your point - you nailed it! And this is coming from a sales guy who recognizes the EXTREME strategic advantage technology provides. If any of you are interested in a Beta invite to the Next Gen job search and career management platform send me an email to ben@projectsherpa.com with the subject BETA

You have to consider their goals, which define their needs. If they are in very senior positions and have very high salaries already, and don't understand the technology, then it's fairly obvious that they do not need to understand the technology. They got everything they wanted without that ever being a requirement.

Of course, it's better for everybody else if they do. We need them to understand the technology. They don't.

Until they are going to be bankers for a tech entrepreneur's M+A deal or IPO. Then we'll see how much they need to know tech ;) The meek shall inherit the earth in some ways was foretelling the rise of the technologists - disclaimer, I am not religious and mean it in it's literal sense.

Everything is based on stored bits. It's how those bits are interpreted that matters. No banker should care that they store bits instead of physical cash. It simply doesn't matter. I've only ever seen inept programmers think that everyone should know the underlying technology, which I guess you could say is hypocritical, as I doubt many of them truly understand what's happening in the lower levels of programming, physics, or math. Abstraction - it's important.

That is all going to change as the world becomes more data driven. As a sales person, relationships are important, but still without a deep understanding of my data, I would be incredibly inefficient. Talk like that also sounds like what the Equities traders were saying up until 2007 or 2008. I don't need to know tech, I don't need to know algos, until they were replaced by trading tech and those same guys who were making 1.5-2 MM/yr couldn't get 150K jobs. Automation and electronification are happening. Only people at Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein's level can truly afford to be luddites. As the old guard dies, the youth will start changing everything. Technocrats vs Plutocrats will rule.

If you could throw in some extra buzzwords and drop a few more names, it might be helpful in convincing me you're not an idiot.

Synergy.

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