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Comment by sirkneeland | Hacker News Reader

Good because fewer smart people will be going to Wall Street where they will be tempted to think they can outsmart the market with elaborate financial engineering that crashes the market.

Good because brilliant engineering types who would have been "Quants" on Wall Street will go and be actual brilliant engineers.

Possibly bad because these Harvard MBAs (and their ilk) haven't magically become passionate about technology. They are simply following the money. So, we'll have more of "that kind" of people in tech.

Not to say there are no talented, technically savvy elite MBAs who do care about tech. I know some of them. But plenty more may just be mercenary types, going where the money goes.

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If by "brilliant engineers" you mean, finding new ways to display ads and bill people for displaying ads, which is what counts for "brilliant engineering" in Silicon Valley these days.

Putting aside the fact that Silicon Valley is doing a lot more than whatever makes the front page of TechCrunch today, there's still the fact that in order to get an ad impression you have to provide something that an actual person somewhere ostensibly finds useful. At it's worst this is orders of magnitude more useful than Wall Street's endless arbitrage seeking to benefit the richest of the rich without actually providing anything that is useful to someone with less than 10M dollars.

AdTech is a broken industry with most participants providing zero to negative value to the world. They are basically just nodes in a messy, unregulated, scam-ridden chain of players moving an ad from technically illiterate buy side to an equally illiterate sell side, taking something like 70% of the money in the process. Zero value for humanity, no comparison to Wall Street...

But Silicon Valley !== AdTech.

Journalism is in a tailspin because the eyeballs they used to sell for a dollar are worth two cents now. There's a lot of good things that used to be free with ads support - if an engineer can work on a project that gets them the same money they used to, they've done a lot of good.

Yes, Harvard MBAs suddenly become "brilliant engineers" when they take the Google offer vs the Goldman one :)

I think the signal here is that Harvard MBAs are great monetizers and optimizers. They go to Wall Street to buy companies, optimize them (operational or financial improvements) and then sell them. They don't go to Google to program a better search, they go there to help Google capture the value of the search.

Wall Street includes the IPO and M&A bankers who make large exits possible and the advisors who patch together the modern marvel of multi-billion dollar VC funds. The other side of this reductionist lack of systems thinking are the traders I've heard spouting tripe about the "kids fooling around on glorified iterations of MS Paint to make cat pictures zoom around the world faster".

I agree that the equilibrium is for a smaller Wall Street and larger Silicon Valley. But shrinking finance does not come free - it shifts the same systemic power to fewer hands.

Not everyone sees a "large exit" as the end goal of their work.

Not sure I agree 100% about them just following the money. Isn't there just as much earning potential now as there ever was for "America's best and brightest" on Wall Street? Maybe more accurately stated as them following prestige and social capital, since Wall Street has become decidedly less popular in public opinion since the mortgage meltdown.

Or maybe they feel more fulfilled in working for companies that "make" something, rather than just finding ways to turn some rich guy's money into more money.

If you work for any company, or have any external investment in your own company, you are "just finding ways to turn some rich guy's money into more money".

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