In my experience, traders don't want cool new snazzy Google Wave. They want Excel. They don't want cool new Web 2.0 streaming quotes/risk calculations/portfolio calculations, they want VBA macros in Excel.
Even if you are working in actual trading/strategy area and write up your backtester with Python. They want your P/L in Excel. To implement the strategy though, they want it in C++.
Wall Street: Excel for life!
Also not sure about other places, but Excel usage is frowned upon here, at least on the trading desks that I support.
Is it a flashy OMS/EMS/reporting/risk/quotes front-end? What kind of technical problems do you guys encounter? In terms of concurrency, security, message processing, bandwidth/latency? What kind of business problems do you guys encounter? In terms of smart-routing, risk calculations and compliance. Just curious what programmers in GS are generally involved in.
Our department doesn't hire people like that.
(Also, pretty much nothing in the article applies to most banks these days. Sure, someone may have a burger-eating contest from time to time, but it's not like it's work-sanctioned. It's just a bunch of dudes with too much testosterone. There are bonuses, but it's silly to count on them for anything. Ask for the amount of money you want as your base pay -- they'll probably give it to you. Then enjoy the 20% or whatever as a fun extra.)
Among my friends, we represented every large investment bank in NYC and many of the smaller hedge funds, so I'm sure it's representative.
Not sure how compensation is in the IT depts. at those banks, though, if that's what you're talking about. IT is probably not representative of why people go to work on Wall St, though, since it's viewed as a cost center in most banks, and it's not what Antonio is talking about in the post.
If you ask me, its called life balance. It's just a job. It's just school. It's just money. That's just life.
I find it offensive, actually, but so it goes.
And the more they secretly suspect the other possibility might actually be better, the more they feel the need to poop on it. I don't feel the need to loudly proclaim how much it must suck to be a garbageman, but I do feel the need to loudly proclaim that I sure am glad I'm not earning six hundred thousand dollars a year at a big hedge fund.
You may try to justify what you do that way, but it's just cognitive dissonance. "Wall street people" tend to make money in rent seeking ways, destroying or merely transferring real value. At least at Google you could be creating value, growing the economy in sustainable ways, and increasing real GDP.
ERIC SCHMIDT: But in fairness to those people[finance people], had they come to Silicon Valley in 1999 they would have received a far greater payoff during our little bubble. So who are we to criticize the Wall Street folks for having their bubble? It was just a bigger bubble.
WALTER ISAACSON: Do you think though that Google creates something that’s more real than somebody on Wall Street creating a financial instrument?
ERIC SCHMIDT: To be honest, not really. When I walked into the company, I said, “People pay you for this thing, these little ads?”
http://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/events/live_2009_11_...
Meanwhile, a huge chunk of Goldman's activity as I understand it is simply taking the "dumb money" on Wall St. Nibbling the edges, taking pieces of trades by less sophisticated investors. That's not necessarily value creation, and much of the time it can be straight extraction from the rest of the economy.
Not that ads won't get there of course - they're well on their way already with various exchanges. But presently, they have to actually be creating other economic value via conversions in order to exist.
What about high frequency trading? Most of it is zero sum, first one to arb the difference wins. The economy doesn't derive any higher value from it if the difference would've been corrected within a couple seconds (or a few minutes) anyways. It's not the same as buying a burger.
Finance pundits worry about the implications of traders gaming each other. Let them game each other. The value investor sees a market price backed by millions of dollars of offers within pennies of each other. Should his trades move the market, much more liquidity will spring to life. The value investor feels fine.
If you sum the benefits of arbitrage over the high frequency traders, it's possible (close to) constant, too.
But the rest of the world can still benefit (or perhaps suffer in the case of a burger).
I was talking more from the perspective of someone who's generating cash. Burger King pays suppliers for meat and whatever (or raises cows in their own operation) and you pay them for a burger. You get a burger, they get cash, pay people, value creation all around.
In Wall St, on the other hand, theoretically we should see value creation through efficient routing of capital to the right places and the people who make that happen are rewarded for their effort. In practice, I feel, it's often a video game where they manage to nibble a billion little pieces away from the value-based investors who are actually performing an economic function. So in some scenarios, they're a net drain, rather than part of a robust economy. That's where my zero-sum analogy came in. YMMV.
[1] Mutual fund managers or hedge funds who take a lot of fees are probably quite a drain on your their clients returns.
I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Apple and Burger King would probably never be what they are today without MSFT or Mac. And perhaps vise versa also.
If GS got there first, but Citi cuts in line by offering a better price, the customer also wins.
Or are you saying that your meaningfulness bar is so high that no job can possibly clear it? What if you and your wife worked together?
For the most part, we get to choose our lives. I reject the idea that time spent working can't be meaningful.
If he loses the 20-factor-job he loses the 100-factor-wife.
I'm just saying that - to me - a job is just a means to some end. That end (for me) is providing for my family adequately. That I happen to enjoy what I do is an extra bonus. I'm just saying not to lose sight of why we do what we do. If you start placing too much importance on a job, you let your job define you. IMHO, it's much more empowering to remember that your job is just a tool like any other.
I purposefully got a job that really is "just" a job so I could not only put food on the table but be there to enjoy it as well.
Wall Street is like any other business. Don't over-glorify working for Google and not Goldman: tech companies are in it for money too; so are startups. At least on Wall Street people tell you they're doing it for the money. It's easier to detach that way and remember that what you're doing is just a job.