
The Great Skills Mismatch: Wall Street Quants Thumb Their Nose at Tech Startups  - peter123
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/techbeat/archives/2009/05/the_great_skill.html
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gruseom
Anybody else notice the contradiction here?

 _The idea was to try to lure some of the talented software engineers who had
been laid off on Wall Street_

 _It turns out that the learning curve was too steep for many financial
engineers_

How talented can they be?

~~~
TriinT
Well... since when are financial engineers supposed to be good software
developers? Even if you're mega-smart, it's virtually impossible to be an
expert in pricing derivatives and, simultaneously, an expert in writing code.
Some quants were good at coding before they became quants, but as soon as you
has some minions hacking for you, your coding skills deteriorate amazingly
fast.

~~~
pierrealexandre
Most of the quants have to code themselves. Some of them have PhD/MS from the
best CS departments. Very few of them have an army of "minions hacking for
[them]".

That doesn't automatically mean they develop superior sofftware development
skills, but I think your comment misrepresents the reality.

~~~
TriinT
You are right. I know some quants who have a couple of younger coders to help
them with the implementation, but most of them have to code stuff on their
own. Sometimes it's "quantish" code like numerical PDEs and SDEs (which is
what quants should be doing), other times one has to create GUI's and such
stuff which an enthusiastic teenager is more qualified to do than a PhD...

------
TriinT
_"President Obama says that one healthy consequence of the financial crisis
will be that college grads with math skills won’t automatically want to become
derivatives traders. "We want some of them to go into engineering, and we want
some of them to be going into computer design", said Obama."_

I look at my friends who became computer & chip designers. In their early 30s,
after 10 years of hard, hard work in the unforgiving hi-tech industry, they
are mostly bitter and burnt-out. Technology moves so fast that their skills
will soon be quasi-obsolete. They're thinking of embarking on a new career.
It's so depressing that some are even considering selling out and getting a
stupid MBA...

I look at my friend who became traders. Their work is not the most
intellectually stimulating ever, but they can enjoy many weekends, they have
amassed enough loot that they can take a couple of years off and learn some
new skills. They seem happier than my engineer friends. They go to nicer
restaurants, "sleep" with hotter women. They surely won't make billions of
dollars in some mega-IPO, but they will (on average) live more comfortable
lives than my engineer friends.

OK, this is just an observation and I won't extrapolate any "universal laws"
from this small sample of individuals. Truth be told, the world is run by
jackasses. Stop trying to fight it. Unless the incentives change dramatically,
smart kids will keep going into finance over engineering. For each, his own...

~~~
gustavo_duarte
That's a great point about being _employed_ as an engineer, but the reality
you describe is more tied to their 'mode' of work (ie, an employee at a
certain type of company) than to the field itself.

There are horrible programming gigs out there, but there are also ways to
achieve a happy career working in technology. Startups, independent work,
searching hard for a good employer, and so on.

I have been happy as an indie developer for a few years. I bill hourly so
overtime is not a big deal, I have flexible hours, work from home, meet my
clients for beer, etc. I think it compares favorably to most finance jobs. The
income is a fair bit higher than most salaried positions, though I'm sure some
finance gigs pay much more.

Maybe one day I'll be in the soup line or in Dilbert hell, but so far it's
been a great ride.

~~~
TriinT
There are many ways of making a living as a techie. Working for certain kinds
of companies is a sure way of being miserable, that is for sure. Going the
other way and trying to become the next Gates / Bezos / Brin, etc is another
way of being miserable because the odds are ridiculously slim.

However, the area of chip design seems particularly unforgiving. I have seen
people burning out very rapidly. Reminds me of that book "The Soul of a New
Machine" -- you give your all when you're young, and then you find something
else to do with what's left of your life...

~~~
menloparkbum
I'm not sure why, but it seems like the jobs closer to the metal burn people
out quickly. I know maybe a dozen people who worked in chip design and
compiler design and by the time they were mid 30s, none of them were doing it
anymore. Most of them are now in occupations unrelated to any sort of
programming. Three of them did ok, financially, so they are pretty happy. The
rest are quite bitter.

~~~
gustavo_duarte
Other interesting books, in addition to the excellent "Soul", are "Show
Stopper!", which covers the development of Windows NT, "Microserfs" (fiction)
by Douglas Coupland, and "Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters". These are
centered on MS culture, but I think they are representative of the industry at
large. NT in particular took a heavy toll, with apparently many divorces and
strong burn out in the team.

I think it has to do with the culture in many of the firms doing this type of
development. Take bright motivated kids out of school, move them close to a
corporate campus where they don't know anyone outside of work, work them 70
hours a week, burn out, discard.

I'm not saying this is all by an evil design, it might just be the way things
work out, but I have seen the bitter results as well.

As to the nature of the work itself, I think close-to-the-metal work is a lot
of fun. Too bad the work conditions are often rocky. I doubt you'd see the
same burn out effect on those in sane work conditions.

