
With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King?  - peter123
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/12/weekinreview/12lohr.html
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numair
The financial industry has long been populated with far too many lazy,
incompetent people with Ivy-league degrees and egos. I work with a bunch of
older guys who are from the non-Ivy-dominated era of Wall Street, and it
really appears this was a far more enjoyable time to have been a part of the
industry. Perhaps it will be good for the mindless status-seekers to head
elsewhere; just don't be surprised when their output doesn't exactly look like
an answer to Sputnik. That being said, 90% of the "quantitative finance" world
was and still is utter nonsense that legitimately drains other fields of
technically savvy people, so it will be good to see them in other places.
These guys are just a tiny percentage of the financial industry, however; most
of the young guys in finance today are arrogant paper-pushers, no different
from the sort of annoying people you'd encounter at a Hollywood talent agency.

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TriinT
_"The financial industry has long been populated with far too many lazy,
incompetent people with Ivy-league degrees and egos."_

Lazy!?! Investment bankers tend to be douchebags, but they put 90-100 hours
per week, 50 weeks a year. Sure, there's a lot of face time to be put, too...
but "lazy" is not the word.

I get the impression you don't even know what you're talking about. There are
many areas in the financial industry: investment banking, trading, risk
management, insurance, private equity. These areas attract all sorts of
people, with all sorts of academic backgrounds and personalities. Traders are
completely different beasts than, say, investment bankers.

 _"That being said, 90% of the "quantitative finance" world was and still is
utter nonsense that legitimately drains other fields of technically savvy
people, so it will be good to see them in other places."_

Nonsense. There are simply not enough positions in academia and industrial
research labs for all the Math, Physics PhD's out there.

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pg
Making something people want would be. Except I doubt it will actually stop
being possible to make lots of money by speculation.

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Dilpil
Possibly something taking advantage of the coming "Green Bubble".

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patrickg-zill
I bet farming makes a comeback.

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christofd
yeah, i know a brilliant young mathematician who wants to become a beef
farmer. for real.

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flashgordon
actually has finance really been disgraced? the bailouts are still on,
aspiring bankers still know that big bonuses are there (once the down turn
ends) when they create wealth, with no downside (to the bankers) when they
destroy it... bankers and banks have been disgraced yes, but finance as a
profession, has it really been tarnished?

compare this with careers in CS... dont know about the valley, but here in
Sydney, engineers rarely negotiate for salaries and benefits the same way
bankers do (ie directly arguming risk and rewards). Having to work crazy hours
for "prestige" is still the norm... and engineers are treated as "costs" in
most organisations...

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noss
Finance

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annoyed
politics

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vaksel
Medicine

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banned_man
It'd be best not to have any single industry be "king". The power careers tend
to suck in a lot of people with bad motivations and, when talent is difficult
to measure, such as corporate management, starkly insufficient ability.

Also, it's not the case that the most talented undergraduates pursue careers
in finance. It's more accurate to note that finance is a backup plan for the
most talented people, because it's available and pays well. Only the douches
specifically tailor their college experience to getting an investment banking
job. So to the extent that there are a lot of talented people in finance, it's
because a lot of smart people end up falling back on plan B, usually because
of the intractable systemic problems and corruption within academia and the
sciences.

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Alex3917
It's pretty hard to do something like getting a job setting up new quant
models for Soros unless you've specifically tailored your college experience
to learning how to do that. The interesting jobs in finance are pretty hard to
stumble across as a backup plan.

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banned_man
I disagree, having worked on Wall Street for a couple of years. Finance
prefers that you learn these sorts of things on the job. It's much better
received to have majored in math or computer science than business, at least
for an undergrad.

It's also very unlikely that Soros is going to have an undergraduate building
new quant models in his first year. If he's lucky, he might get to write the
code to test someone else's models. There really isn't an undergraduate course
that sets you up to be a quant, and most quant jobs are unattainable without a
PhD.

An MFE degree (Master's in Financial Engineering) can give you the basic
skills expected of a junior-level quant trader, but tends to underplay a
critical component: programming. (Most quant jobs are programming jobs;
unfortunately, the lingua franca is C++, and at most financial firms, the
quants are strong mathematicians but third-rate coders.)

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Alex3917
"most quant jobs are unattainable without a PhD."

Not really, you just need to do your summer internships at hedge funds and
make them lots of money.

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banned_man
What project is a summer intern going to be assigned that can has huge P&L
potential? A senior trader or quant would take it.

