

Dissastisfied, Some Wall Street Technologists Flee for Start-Up Life - sak84
http://www.observer.com/2010/media/programming-dummies-dissastisfied-some-wall-street-technologists-flee-start-life

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nsoonhui

      But even quants are not immune to the feeling that what      they're doing for a living is not adding up to anything.
    

Not sure about this, but isn't the quants who are responsible for developing
new pricing models for some esoteric options, new algos to capture the
fleeting abnormalities in the market , improving (say) the existing Gauss
Copula method that so that 2007 subprime crisis could be predicted or being
avoided altogether (<http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/17-03/wp_quant>)
and so on.

How can you say that kind of work is unsatisfying and lacking of creativity?

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frankc
It's not that it isn't interesting or creative (at times). It's that there
isn't much social redeeming value. You might as well be a professional poker
player, except your are hated instead of admired. Now that the status is gone,
it really hits you that you are pretty much a leech on society. I say that as
someone who works in this industry and has thought often about an exit
strategy, but the money is still too good be to justify a the risk of a
startup.

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nsoonhui
I see. But I wouldn't be bothered about whether my work has "social redeeming
value".

For me, it's much more important to firstly earn good money, secondly do
something creative, not just typical CRUD applications.

And whether or not a work has "social redeeming value" is highly subjective.
I, for one, don't think that Twitter has any bit of "social redeeming value".
I can't see how a 140-char limit sentence can add much to our society.

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endtime
I share office space with Andrew - didn't actually know he'd been at a bank,
but I can verify that he seems pretty happy to be doing what he's doing.

I never worked full time at a bank, but I did a summer internship in Goldman's
tech division and the work was extremely boring. I didn't really get the
impression that anyone on my team was having fun, with the possible exception
of my manager. I'm sure there are some tech jobs at the big banks which _are_
fun, but I think they're the minority.

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lifeoffbi
wonder if this influx of NYC bankers will be better or worse for the consumer
internet world - don't know if the ethics and values of banking translate to
those of web startups.

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gcheong
I don't see web startups as inherently being more ethical than that of the
average investment bank, but in any case the IT people are not usually dealing
with the same ethics decisions as those doing the investing at an investment
bank.

