

Why do Harvard kids head to Wall Street? - thesyndicate
http://baselinescenario.com/2010/05/04/why-do-harvard-kids-head-to-wall-street/

======
tingley
I'm breaking my own personal rule of the internet by saying this, but I went
to Harvard in the late 90s, and I was friends with a bunch of math/physics
types while I was there. A good number of them went to Wall Street.

I think a lot of what this says is accurate, but I think it downplays
something important. It's not _just_ that there's a lot of money in Wall
Street, it's that it's not a great time to be (for example) a physicist in
this country, or at least it wasn't when I graduated. I remember a friend of
mine telling me how you were typically looking at two postdocs after your PhD,
and then your options were either to be an academic or to build weapons. (That
guy, ironically, is the one who stuck with physics.)

So apparently a lot of people took the money. Those kids could grind, and it
all must have just seemed too easy. I find it hard to judge too harshly. A
part of me feels like we failed them as a society, in the way we collectively
assign value to human activities. Because their minds are capable of things I
can only imagine, but we couldn't think of anything better for them to do than
this.

~~~
HSO
I don't think one should judge at all. People take a very broad brush painting
Wall Street these days, which is understandable but still wrong. I prefer to
judge people, individuals, not categories of people, however defined.

Also, why should "we [...] as a society" think of something "better" (who
defines that?) for these bright minds? Surely, they know best how to make
their own choices (where I'd emphasize _make_)?

~~~
gizmo
Moral relativism is not the answer. By judging people you make certain careers
less attractive. People from top colleges are often status-conscious, so the
media can influence their decisions by painting Wall Street in a positive or
negative light. This can be a good thing when if talent is indeed "wasted" at
Wall Street.

> Surely, they know best how to make their own choices

People don't generally make their own choices. People tend to gather 2 or 3
options (4 or 5 if they're from top schools) and then they "decide" by picking
one of those options. It's completely baffling, but people are guided by the
choices in front of them, not by where they want to go.

------
karzeem
The takeaway line: "The typical Harvard undergraduate is someone who … is
driven more by fear of not being a success than by a concrete desire to do
anything in particular."

To the extent that this is true, it applies equally well to most people who
excel in school, and I think there's a point there that the author leaves
untouched.

And that is that it's emotionally very hard to watch your friends — especially
people who appear less intelligent, diligent, or otherwise "worthy" (that's
subjective, obviously) — make significantly more money than you. In the long
term, that can strain friendships, and I think it's a major explanatory factor
in why smart kids go "waste" their talent in finance and consulting.

In other words, appearing to be less successful than one's peers is something
that few overachievers are emotionally capable of handling.

~~~
megablast
I think you miss the point that they make it very easy to go with Wall Street,
they tell you exactly what to do, coach you in interviews, and constantly call
you to convince you to come to them. They hound people, make them feel
special, wanted and even needed. Difficult to compare that to all the
companies I have interviewed at, even when they did want me to work there.

So you have the big bad world of the unknown, or this nice bunch of people,
who also went to your school, and really want you to come over to New York and
hang out with them.

~~~
npp
I recall Microsoft, Google, and other large engineering companies making very
similar efforts (and the tech companies certainly push lifestyle factors much
more directly). It's the same in lots of areas, not just finance and
consulting. The main difference seems to be that these finance and consulting
companies recruit across a huge variety of departments, so are relevant to
many more students.

------
pg
This seems pretty accurate, and if so it would explain why so few of this type
of student start startups after college. A startup is exactly the opposite
situation: you really have to commit to something, and you are immediately and
uncompromisingly judged by customers. It's the opposite of a decorous way to
keep your options open. But of course risk and reward are usually
proportionate.

~~~
gmichnikov
I have not seen any data, but I don't think that's totally fair. Students from
my class or those within one of mine at Harvard have started Facebook, Scribd,
Airbnb, Paperless Post, drop.io, Baking for Good, and probably others that I
am not aware of. Granted Facebook was not "after" college.

I am also not sure that in this regard risk and reward are proportionate.
Again I have no data, but I think a random sample of 100 people from Harvard
who went into finance 5-15 years ago may have made more money to date (and
taken far less risk) than a random sample of 100 college students who started
startups 5-15 years ago.

I think the fear of not knowing what else to do, not the money, is the primary
force that leads most to finance or consulting. Anecdotally, 0-10% of my
friends from college have any concrete thoughts at all about what they really
_want_ to do.

~~~
pg
Considering there are IIRC 1600 students in each undergrad class that probably
counts as few.

As for the risk/reward ratio, you may be right, or you may be wrong, but since
neither of us have any data we should probably default to the assumption that
they're proportionate.

------
starkfist
Something appealing about Silicon Valley was that losers like me could bust
ass and really make a big difference and get rich on the way. You just needed
to hack and hustle. Apple was the model. Two weirdos building and selling
really cool stuff. Relatively simple business model: make things, and sell
them. If you read the history of Apple, in the early days they hired straight
up nerds and dropouts and bizarre people. One of the early guys who ended up
designing hardware was self-taught and pulled in from the janitorial staff or
mailroom or something like that. Finally a "legitimate" way to make a career
for oddballs who would not be able to get an interview for a job cleaning
toilets at Goldman Sachs.

It's a very different world now where Ivy League overachievers are writing
blog posts about choosing between startups and investment banking. Google is
the new model. From a weirdo outsider's perspective the Google era startup
story sounds very similar to the investment banking path, with a few keywords
switched here and there. Elite educations, maybe going all the way back to
Montessori school. Please list your GPA and take this quiz for a chance at a
week long interview hazing session. Operate under the context of "changing the
world" but stay focused on maximizing return in the markets of eyeballs,
clicks, keywords and ads. Complicated business models; make something which
you don't sell and makes no money, but the data can be packaged into a new
form of financial instrument for the online ad market. Sell off the thing in a
couple years for a few mil, buy an Audi, try to do it again. Goal is to
ultimately hit it big enough so that you can avoid building stuff entirely.
Dream about ultimately becoming an investor yourself, coaching other type-A
wunderkinds through the difficult life process of choosing one high-paying
career over another one, and maybe complaining about taxes and poor service at
French Laundry on your blog.

It's a little oversimplified, but wanted to bring back the notion that the
startup scene also represents a path to success for creative and strange
people without otherwise great career options. It's not just a way for Harvard
kids to make as much money as they would in banking without having to wear a
suit.

~~~
quickpost
Agreed. The ability for an "outsider" to get in and be successful in the
startup world on hustle, smarts, and hard work rather than "pedigree" has
always been very appealing to me.

------
albertsun
This is incredibly accurate.

I'm speaking as a senior at a college to which a huge number of firms come to
recruit and a huge percentage of the senior class heads into banking or
consulting.

I'm doing neither, but the draw was definitely there. Especially the part
about lifestyle appeal over money appeal. When companies recruit, they never
explicitly talk about how much they pay, but their recruiting videos and the
demeanor of the recruiters and employees who come to visit say everything
needed.

~~~
Alex3917
"Especially the part about lifestyle appeal over money appeal."

I heard someone say that during the height of the dotcom boom, Yahoo made over
a billion dollars by putting a big purple chair in the lobby. Something about
social signaling to attract the right sort of people on the cheap.

------
hugh3
Another factor: the big finance and management consulting firms like to vastly
overvalue Ivy League degrees. A kid leaving an Ivy League school has been told
for years that he's special for going to that school, so he'll be much more
comfortable in an environment where that illusion is maintained.

------
jrp
In this thread, it has been said that people on Wall Street aren't creating
anything; they are just moving money around, making a profit on arbitrage,
etc.

I would like to disagree, and recall the second paragraph of this comment by
xxzz: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1242980>

~~~
aliston
When tied to fundamental underlying assets, investing creates liquidity and
capitalizes businesses over the long-term. In its current form, Wall Street
"investing" is more like high-stakes short-term gambling. Somehow we got to
the point where banks were so leveraged that a single incorrect "investment"
nearly resulted in the collapse of our financial system. Is that sort of
"investing" creating real value?

------
thefool
Speaking as a college freshman, what I see wrong with finance is that
fundamentally, these people, who have essentially spent their whole lives
learning to solve complicated technical problems, are being employed by
society to essentially produce nothing.

Thats the issue I see with it. I guess only time will show if my perspective
changes.

~~~
gaius
Resource allocation in a modern economy _is_ a complicated technical problem.
That's the problem investment banking was invented to solve. That it has been
corrupted doesn't alter this basic idea.

~~~
thefool
I could be totally wrong here, but I get the sense that despite that being the
intent of wall street, that basic concept has been very much abstracted away
into a complicated game of mutual insurance and risk management.

All I'm saying is that perhaps society would be better off if the resources
were allocated a little less efficiently, but those "best minds" were applied
to some other field.

------
jayruy
I currently work for an investment bank and have worked at a fortune 500 web
company. From a technologists standpoint, the cultural chasm between the two
is great.

This is largely because pure technology companies can succeed by culturally
incentivizing good engineering, which is timeless. Banks have much shorter
horizons in building systems of comparable complexity, and thus have a far
greater need to constantly mobilize and change architectural direction. This
is just a fact of the industry: technology advances, finance is cyclical. One
of the cultural side effects, which certainly can have sinister implications,
is that financial institutions lean heavily on monetary incentives to provide
such mobility.

There has obviously been a lot of bad press on structured credit, but the
basic concept is ultimately a great innovation in risk management.

Surely there was excess. But before ye great engineers start throwing stones,
consider how much your current occupation is aided by the massive corridors of
fiber optics constructed during the tech boom.

------
sendos
The way I see it is: I like to solve difficult problems, which is why I became
an Engineer. But now that I'm older I realize that the Wall Street guys are
also solving a difficult problem, namely how to maximize your returns.

Instead of taking a wireless signal and deciphering what bits were
transmitted, you take a stock market signal and decipher where the market will
move next.

So, instead of solving engineering problems and getting paid decently, one can
solve financial problems and get paid much much more.

If the intellectual stimulation is there in both cases I don't see why someone
would choose to be an engineer any more.

~~~
megablast
You miss the point were the Wall street guy gets huge bonuses when he
succeeds, and you get a nod.

Of course, this can't go on. The Wall Street guy doesn't actually create
anything, just uses arbitrage to make some cream off of all the dollars these
investment banks move around. Or exploit some foreign imbalance. They are the
ultimate middle men.

You still need actual people to solve the problems in this world. Or will this
all be moved off shore?

~~~
dkasper
There is a lot more to Wall St than skimming a few dollars office space style
off of the stock market. Ever heard of an IPO? It's what software startups
dream of!

We absolutely need smart minds to go into finance because some sort of
economic system must exist and everyone will admit the current one needs
improvement. Still, there's not reason to resent people who invest in
companies that succeed and make a lot of money doing it. This is almost
certainly good for the economy, and I would bet that the majority of people
who read HN do the same thing Wall Streeters do on a smaller scale by
investing in the market.

~~~
megablast
An IPO is an initial public offering. Do you know what that means? Wall street
doesn't create anything, it just sells stock to its clients and others. Often
it sells stock to clients before the IPO, which it then sells for the clients
again when the stock price reaches a certain number.

This is one of the reasons Google went for a dutch-style auction process for
its IPO, and wall street was pissed, since they couldn't use their usual
methods to make money from that.

The other things Wall St does is mergers and acquisitions, where they make
huge amounts of money on consulting fees.

I mean, sure they do a lot more. They increase liquidity in the market, they
help companies get loans, but most of it is moving money around, and getting a
fee for it.

~~~
tome
If it wasn't useful no-one would pay them for it.

~~~
isleyaardvark
Just because someone thinks they're paying for something useful doesn't mean
they are paying for something useful.

------
waxman
I'm a senior at Yale. I'm pursuing a start-up after graduation rather than a
banking/consulting job.

I'm certainly afraid of what the future holds. I'd be lying if I said I
wasn't. And this fear almost had me applying to McKinsey and Goldman (along
with 30% of my class). But in the end I realized that doing something I'm
deeply passionate about (hacking) far outweighs any of the apparent benefits
of a cushy Wall Street gig. I think it's time for me to stop worrying about
leaving doors open, and start sprinting through one. Maybe I'll end up
choosing the wrong door, but I'm confident that I'll learn more at that pace
and with that passion than I ever would have in the monotony of a chic midtown
office. I've never been so scared in my life. But I've never been so hungry.
We'll see how it goes.

(Btw, incidentally, my brother (one year younger) is interning on Wall Street
this year. I'm interested to compare notes...)

~~~
megablast
See, now why not take that wall street job for a few years? You would have
extra capital to spend time working on your startup, maybe make some good
contacts, and maybe seek an insight into a world that could really benefit
from a startup-wannabes insights.

All the time, you could be looking at someway to make their job easier ->
there is your startup.

~~~
ericd
I would say that this is a good strategy, except that sales to banks is likely
to be very high touch, and they are strongly infected with Not Invented Here
syndrome. They have extreme security needs and large IT/programming
departments, so I think it would be hard to find a niche that they would be
willing to buy.

I strongly agree with the building up capital thing, though. If you can save
up 50k, and you can handle everything yourself, your runway becomes extremely
long. Just have to be careful not to get addicted to the salary.

~~~
jrockway
Speaking from anecdotal experience, this is not true. As an example, I heard
some employees from the company I worked at left to start a company to make
messaging software. They ended up with a half-broken IRC client with a
terrible UI and no features. They then sold it to the bank for millions of
dollars.

If it's expensive, banks like it. Quality is a plus, but not required.

~~~
ericd
It was my impression when I was interning at Citi (quant/strategy/trading)
that they weren't very experimental buyers, and frequently liked to reinvent
the wheel. They certainly didn't redo EVERYTHING. Besides that, there aren't
that many big banks to sell to. I'd say it's trickier than average to get a
market fit. But maybe you're right that they'll buy any old crap.

------
dkasper
Can someone please explain to me why HN readers dislike Wall St so much? There
are honestly a lot of interesting things to be "hacked" and a hell of a lot of
money to be made if you're good at finance. The personality traits that make
people a success at startups (perseverance, critical thinking, people skills,
creativity, analytical skills, etc) are the same ones that make people a
success on Wall Street. A Wall Street job is not a wrong choice, and neither
is doing a startup, in fact there are a lot of similarities.

~~~
necubi
Primarily because most of these people aren't really creating things. They're
moving money around, but as we've clearly seen in the last few years, they're
doing a very poor job of optimizing capital placement in the economy.

There's no question that there's lots of money to be made on Wall St., but
such activities don't really seem to improve the world or anybody's life other
than the bankers. Compare that to people who form startups that can literally
change the world for the better.

Wall St, with its massively inflated salaries and bonuses creates a huge
brain-drain which attracts bright students away from more socially-useful
activities. I think anger about that is the primary source.

~~~
dkasper
_can literally change the world for the better_

There is plenty of software that does not really make the world a better
place. How much of the time do we engineers spend complaining about crappy
code that doesn't work? Or take video games, sure they provide entertainment,
but do they have a net positive impact on society? It's dubious at best (not
that I don't love SC2).

I don't want to sound too negative, but maybe a lot of finance people aren't
adding much value, but neither are most programmers. And there are clearly
counterexamples in both industries.

Furthermore, try to imagine our economy without the stock market. It would be
very different. That's a clear indication that there is _some_ value there.
Granted the market is surely not an optimal system, but that's a hard problem
that smart minds absolutely need to be working on.

~~~
codexon
Entertainment is essential to every civilization as the Romans discovered with
their bread and circuses.

Of course you may have a point when games like World of Warcraft ruin people's
lives, but from a monetary (and thus time) magnitude, wall st. has wiped out
people's savings that have taken decades to build.

~~~
dkasper
Why do people think Wall St took their savings? It's your own decision what
you do with your money, and if someone invests in something they don't
understand then it's their own fault if they get burned! The stock market has
rebounded astonishingly. The people who lost their life savings panicked and
that's their own decision. In 2008 I had about 2k which was invested in two
stocks (my entire portfolio, everything else was going to tuition). I sold out
at the bottom of the market for a 40% loss. If I held them today I would have
about a 45% _gain_, not bad for 2 years! Even if the market had not rebounded
that is the risk you take for investing in stocks instead of something else.
Remember, Wall St is a lot more than consumer investments anyway.

Also, I didn't say there wasn't value in entertainment, I said that it
probably doesn't provide more utility than Wall Street's activities although
really it's comparing apples to bowling balls.

~~~
codexon
Can you honestly say that to the people who were buying triple A investments
that turned out to be junk thanks to credit default swaps? Who's fault do you
think that is?

Do you blame sick people for not being smarter than a doctor in diagnosing
their own sickness?

Do you blame people for dying in a bridge that collapsed because they weren't
smart enough to see it was poorly designed?

I could go on and on. The point is that Wall Street has somehow become the
only place with no accountability, and everyone is supposed to be an expert.

~~~
dkasper
When I-35 collapsed in Minnesota was your initial reaction to hate all people
who build bridges?

~~~
codexon
No, because unlike people who work on Wall Street, they are held accountable
and are paid far less for the amount of utility they provide.

------
jhuckestein
Models and Bottles. I'm dead serious. A couple of friends of mine became
bankers because of that and I can't say that I haven't been jealous at times.

------
wooster
So, if I'm reading between the lines correctly:

* working in finance is bad

* working in corporate law is bad

* working in consulting is bad

* working at a startup is bad

* working as a college professor is bad

* working a "public interest" job is good

I don't see anything here that makes me want to take this person's point of
view seriously.

~~~
jrockway
I don't think he said that. He says that your goal may be to save the world by
being a public defender, but when you start working as a corporate lawyer with
a nice apartment, you stop caring about the goal.

What he's implying is that it's "bad" to throw away your life-long ambitions
for a bit of extra money. If your life-long ambition is to be a kick-ass
corporate lawyer or investment banker, then there's nothing bad about that at
all.

~~~
RK
My only friend who became a lawyer who didn't "sell out" is the one who never
planned to become a lawyer. He was an electrical engineer who was hired as a
technical expert at a big IP law firm. They eventually offered to pay for him
to go to law school. Everyone else I know wanted to save the world and now
works for The Man. What the blog author writes is very true in that regard.

------
ig1
Without those kids on Wall Street there would be far less kids on startup
street. Limited liquidity (no IPOs, no financing of takeovers), no high-risk
investment funds, high FX spreads killing international customer and supply
chains, etc.

~~~
tybris
The IT industry is not very representative. Most of the economy is in rather
quiet industries like construction, manufacturing, retail, refining, etc.,
where it usually takes about 100 years to get noticed.

~~~
ig1
It doesn't matter, most firms of any signicant size require financing sooner
or later, and generally that tends to come from wall street one way or the
other.

Go down to your local franchised fast-food shop. Chances are the kitchen
equipments been leased from the franchise and financed by a finance lease from
an investment bank. The impact of risk-tolerant financing on the economy is
huge, it's pretty much everywhere when you scratch under the surface.

The same applies for FX spreads. If you're importing or exporting any goods
(pretty much everyone these days) then you're benefiting from the tighter
spreads created by investment banks that are market making.

------
nlwhittemore
Fundamentally, what he nails is the recruitment question.

People make decisions based on their sense of what is possible. We hang out on
HN and join things like YC to be surrounded by people who reinforce the
possibility of our big crazy dreams.

College career offices are the single most antiquarian institution on college
campuses, and the institution most letting a generation of people into the
embrace of the only external groups who are willing to pay for the privilege
to be there.

Still, there is massive movement against this tide. Teach for America is
outrecruiting these firms at many of the best schools - which demonstrates the
opportunity for alternative organizations and just generally alternative
thinking.

But most schools are not Stanford, and most students don't think in terms of
startups yet. Finding ways to spread an entrepreneurial culture on campus and
connect it to the broader movement towards a new shape of the American
business landscape has huge potential to shift what is at the root of this
story.

------
tibbon
This article has a few weak points.

First of all, not everyone at Harvard is going to law school or pursuing law
in any manner (including graduate students there).

Of my friends who attended Harvard, surely some have moved into the finance
field but I think part of it is that it is one of the few fields that can (and
will) compensate and challenge them properly. Others have gone to work for
Google and Microsoft. Others have gone into consulting firms and others have
struck out on their own and ran their own consulting firms and companies. By
no means is it a clear pipeline that funnels everyone over.

From MIT I see a lot of people going into defense related areas, and not Wall
St (more so than Harvard).

And while some Harvard (or any) undergraduate students have little experience
at 'life' or getting things done, just look at last weekend's ROFLCon for an
example of what a handful of recent Harvard undergrads can do in their spare
time.

------
mhb
_Sutton is famously (and probably falsely) known for answering a reporter,
Mitch Ohnstad, who asked why he robbed banks by saying, "because that's where
the money is."_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Sutton>

------
rjett
Given the financial crisis of the past few years and the reasons behind it, I
think the magnetic draw of Wall Street has lessened to some extent. Smart
students still have the same fears of not being a success and the same draw to
something that promises the possibility of greatness, but they're looking into
other outlets. Anecdotally, I've seen a pretty big handful of my non-technical
friends applying to Google and similar places. Googlers seem to have a nice
lifestyle and the company has done a good job at fashioning their image such
that they're seen as an instrument of social change (google.org), innovation,
and ethical consistency.

------
hooande
My biggest question from this article is "What is the alternative to Wall
Street?" What else should our best and brightest students be doing?

I feel like the passion and creativity required to do a startup aren't any
more common in the ivy league population than they are in the general
population. Every intelligent person doesn't have the ability to _make_ things
happen. And job in the public sector or for a non-profit doesn't seem
appealing, especially not to competitive people. So if you're going to get a
regular job, Wall St seems like it's as good a place as any, especially if
they're actively recruiting you.

------
tszming
Did Jeff Bezos answered this question?

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwG_qR6XmDQ>

------
Jd
I think the basic motivation for why Harvard kids head to Wall St. are clear
enough (and decently explained in this article). What would be more
interesting though would be to explain why an ever increasing greater
proportion of Ivy League students go into finance/consulting today (as opposed
to 20 years ago).

------
gersh
All companies are about making money. Wall Street is more honest about it, and
does a better job of rewarding its employees. The ridiculous money culture
ends up centering around stealing money rather than fulfilling real societal
needs. Next, the money gets wasted in conspicious consumption..

------
philk
If you've always been a success it's really hard to do something that carries
the risk of failure.

------
countersignaler
This is exactly why, in hindsight, I am extremely thankful I did not go to an
ivy. I would almost certainly be stuck in a well-paying, soul-sucking finance
job.

Whew.

~~~
pheon
ive personally found finance is the complete opposite of a soul sucking cushy
corporatre gig and infact working in a sme or larger company in the valley the
real cubicle soul sucking el dilbert gig. yes your card says * famous web
company but in reality all companies primary function is to make money, its
just the branding is change the world vs lets make a ton of cash.

im going get downvoted like hell for this but saying all finance jobs are soul
sucking cushy jobs is like saying your startup, yes YOURS, is the next
google/facebook/twitter/blah

------
jacoblyles
If it makes the author feel any better, the kids that went off to "save the
world" are mostly doing much less good than they imagine.

------
zandorg
Because stockbrokers are salesmen, and posh Harvard kids sound posh and make
great salesmen.

------
known
Money + Motivation

------
aresant
Because of the money . . .

------
galactus
because it pays?

------
pw0ncakes
I can explain in under 200 words how to bring a lot more bright people into
technology startups.

The following program, sponsored by VCs: VC firm takes you on as a protege.
You don't know anything; you're not expected to. There's no guarantee of
funding, although the door is open, and you draw a meager stipend (if needed)
rather than a salary. You work for startups for the next 7+ years, possibly in
the VC firm's portfolio companies, possibly elsewhere. At the end of the
7-year period, you choose between (1) partnership in the firm as a
businessman, (2) the same but as EIR, or (3) to remain in startups as a serial
entrepreneur. You spend a day per month at the VC firm, shadowing senior
partners, but most of your time you spend with your head down coding.

I would have loved to have had such an opportunity coming out of school, and
would have easily been one of the few most qualified applicants in the
country... but this program didn't exist when I was 23 and, as far as I know,
still doesn't.

VC firms out there need to make this happen for the next generation of young
people.

~~~
albertsun
I don't think it's all together clear that startups should be trying to
recruit bright young people just out of college.

~~~
pw0ncakes
This is a good point, actually. The quality of person required by a startup is
much higher than what an investment bank needs, and most of the people going
into IB/MC wouldn't be qualified.

Also: analyst programs are designed to filter for the people with an
unconditional work ethic-- people who will cut corners and work 100-hour weeks
but simply will not miss a deadline, no matter how arbitrary, and people who
will take the most awful work with a smile on their empty faces. This is a bad
employee from a startup's perspective, because startups need people who write
quality code (hard to do if you're working till 3:00 am) reliably and are
willing to question others' decisions.

------
c00p3r
It was a good times 10 years ago, but now it is finished, and we (the ordinary
people) must somehow deal with all the results of their activity (mounts of
debt backed by junk or toxic assets, flawed financial instruments, like CDOs,
etc.)

So, 15 years ago smart people were making money on Wall Street, while smart
techies making money in Mobile and Communication sectors.

They were a good opportunities to those, who was smart enough to see them,
while the rest of us were coded PHP and HTML (or J2EE - the luckiest ones) for
food. =)

