Re:Diverting talent out of Finance will revive Britain
by potatolicious on Sunday January 04, 2009 @11:20PM
(#419990)
I agree, but with a caveat:
The problem of "talent" migrating to lucrative fields is universal, but is not really a problem at all. I'm going to be graduating from college soon, and I've seen many of my peers look at Wall Street, law, and even medicine (I'm an engineer).
The people who do so, invariably, are hardly people I would consider top-talent. The people who take up code jobs at banks in the hope of one day becoming traders invariably can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. The people who are only after the money tend to also be the most incompetent. We're not losing that much when they all flock to the flavor-of-the-decade industry.
The hackers who really care about their work continue to work in their respective interests, rain or shine, and they're the ones who are advancing their fields in leaps and bounds. As long as we do not dis-incentivize these people (e.g. pay them a non-living wage) we're doing pretty ok.
I had a job offer from one of the major British banks for code, and I asked them how much real programming I could look forward to. My contact was honest and told me most of it would be front-end C# hackery, and I turned them down. I don't care if you pay me $200K a year, I'm going to hate my life if I hack C# GUI day in and day out.
The problem of "talent" migrating to lucrative fields is universal, but is not really a problem at all. I'm going to be graduating from college soon, and I've seen many of my peers look at Wall Street, law, and even medicine (I'm an engineer).
The people who do so, invariably, are hardly people I would consider top-talent. The people who take up code jobs at banks in the hope of one day becoming traders invariably can't code their way out of a wet paper bag. The people who are only after the money tend to also be the most incompetent. We're not losing that much when they all flock to the flavor-of-the-decade industry.
The hackers who really care about their work continue to work in their respective interests, rain or shine, and they're the ones who are advancing their fields in leaps and bounds. As long as we do not dis-incentivize these people (e.g. pay them a non-living wage) we're doing pretty ok.
I had a job offer from one of the major British banks for code, and I asked them how much real programming I could look forward to. My contact was honest and told me most of it would be front-end C# hackery, and I turned them down. I don't care if you pay me $200K a year, I'm going to hate my life if I hack C# GUI day in and day out.