Maybe, but could you live with the fact that you're providing absolutely no value to the world? It always makes me sad when the greatest minds get gobbled up by these companies because they're creaming off the top of an enormously complex system they created.
As someone that used to work in this world I find this opinion of “no value” pretty bizarre. There’s a lot of value in efficient markets with high liquidity and low fees, which companies like JS make possible.
Capitalism is the best system we humans have come up with at this point in civilisation, for all its flaws. It’s largely responsible for the technological, medical, and quality of life advances in the last 150 years.
Please tell me a better system that would cure cancer. I don’t think it’s Leninism or its derivatives. You need a macro system that is rich enough to allow for significant investment in medical research.
Having worked in both, there is a huge number of really smart people who turn down offers to work in quant shops. And people really underestimate how much tech will pay top researchers/overestimate how much the average quant makes.
I did work in the industry briefly and can confirm it is actually full of people who would post a comment like this. Just in case anyone needed another reason to avoid it!
Work on real problems. Try to make real people's lives better and happier. There are real problems in finance but my feeling was it's all very simple and solved decades ago, now it's just pointless complexity that isn't solving anyone's problems. I recommend John Kay's Other People's Money for a primer on what finance is actually good for and where it's gone wrong.
The real big problem in finance IMO is digital cash. Bitcoin started out trying to solve that problem, and there are still some people in the community interested in it, but it's mostly of interest to the finance guys now. Just another "instrument" in their "portfolios".
> Work on real problems. Try to make real people's lives better and happier. There are real problems in finance but my feeling was it's all very simple and solved decades ago, now it's just pointless complexity that isn't solving anyone's problems. I recommend John Kay's Other People's Money for a primer on what finance is actually good for and where it's gone wrong.
If the last few years have taught me anything it's that a large % of the population will actively aim to make their own lives worse long term because they are told lies. What benefit is there really in trying to undo their own self-inflicted damage.
