The reaction in all the other replies to your comment astounds me. I am reminded of a comment from PG earlier today, which he made in a thread on a totally different topic: "Your comment is a classic instance of people on a forum rushing to judgment based on incomplete information. It's isomorphic to the sort of thing one sees on reddit, except that it's about startups rather than the federal government or international bankers."
In this case, Antonio made an argument a year ago about why starting a startup was better than continuing to work for a Wall Street bank. He made no claim that continuing to run a year-old startup was better than working for a large tech company. That of course depends on many other factors about the startup, about the large tech company, and about whatever offers were made. Nobody on this thread knows any of those details, but that apparently doesn't stop anyone from rushing to judgement.
Well, he hated working for a company where engineers were second-class citizens, and all the staff were treated as fighting cocks.
I'd imagine that at Facebook, engineers are treated as first class citizens. I dislike Facebook as a product, and I'm not sure I trust Zuckerberg, but I really respect the company. Roughly 200 engineers running a tech product that millions of grandmas use is no mean feat. I bet they don't treat their engineers as mere cogs in a machine.
To extend upon that, bloggers get rich by getting your attention, which does not actually require they practice, subscribe to or even believe what they are telling you.
Hypocrisy is the norm with much of what passes through here.
At least GS employees don't have any pretensions to holiness.
I'd much rather work with people who are honest with themselves about their motivations than who try to push the suffering under the surface with bullshit rationalizations like that in the post.
It isn't hypocritical. Facebook is a giant startup, after all. Perhaps much of the loose, casual culture still remains there, and you don't have to worry about the corporate shell games and hierarchy that financial firms like GS would have in scads.
Downvoters who may not know better: it's generally expected that if you downvote someone, you will accompany that with an explanation of why you downvoted.
We're here to communicate, not bicker over popularity contests.
Yes. Isn't that curious, to say the least? First he complains about becoming a serf at GS - where I am assuming no one hides the fact that everyone is indeed a serf, and the pretense that it is not all about money, is kept at a minimum, if any at all.
If GS was the frying pan, then, in my view, he jumped into the fire at Facebook where he is now working for an adolescent-minded, untransformed individual, who traded his personal integrity for the fruits of lust - "success, sex, money, fame" - under the guise of "helping connect people"...
Goes to show you that the old Buckaroo Banzai saying holds true for Antonio as well... Whereever you go, Antonio, there you are. Still a wannabe human being... with much growing left over to do.
adolescent-minded, untransformed individual, who traded his personal integrity for the fruits of lust - "success, sex, money, fame" - under the guise of "helping connect people"...
If you believe working for yourself is better than having shelter, food and a life, the more power to you.
It's romantic to imagine hoofing it alone, but be realistic- living costs money. It always has, if you consider money to be a replacement for labor- even if you drop out of "the system", you still need to work to provide for yourself to see another day.
"This tendency reached the height of comedy inside the strategies division, where some of the quants published academic papers on the more theoretical aspects of their work. If an author quit Goldman though, his name would be removed from the official version of the publication. It got to the point that some papers had no authors, and had apparently written themselves. So it goes. No longer with the firm."
I suspect he plagiarized this whole anecdode from the autobiography "My Life as a Quant", in which Emanuel Derman is talking about his experience at Salomon Brothers, rather than GS:
"The level of fear that permeated Salomon was more evident, too. Friends of mine who wanted to leave the firm were semi paranoid that their bosses would discover that they were interviewing elsewhere and then fire them before they left. I never heard anyone at Goldman speak this way; despite the natural tension between employer and employee, most Goldman workers never imagined that exercising their right to look at other jobs would naturally lead to being fired.
There were other signs of Salomon's take-no-prisoners culture. In the 1980s, the Bond Portfolio Analysis (BPA) group had written a series of renowned reports for clients on valuing swaps and other recently invented derivatives contracts. Each report's distinctive light brown cover bore the names of its authors printed in a darker brown. Then, over the years, as one or more of the original authors left the firm for other banks or trading houses, BPA would reprint the report, having removed the departed authors' names. Eventually there were old but popular reports still being distributed that apparently had no author at all. This Orwellian rewriting of history struck me as particularly petty and ineffective, an affront to the notion of research."
From "My Life as a Quant"...
If so, what else did he make up? Did he directly experience any of this during his brief stay as a junior member of GS? Or is it all just a bunch of crap he's been reading in books like "Liar's Poker"?
It's obviously not copy-paste and why would it be so hard to believe that both Goldman and Salomon had the same practices of removing authors names from papers?
The similarity between the stories struck me: particularly that they both stressed the point about reports being circulated with no authors at all... OK it doesn't prove that he made it all up, but I would be willing to bet some money on it.
I respect the author's point of view, and I have to agree that Wall Street has .. well.. no moral compass (or maybe its compass points continually to $$$).
But I don't completely agree with his description of what a quant does. It all depends on where they work and what asset class they focus on.
Some quants determine the trading strategy of a desk. They are in charge of making strategic and technical decisions. Some tech driven trading desks actually are structured as a sort of "start up" within the main bank. The team would have a couple of quants and a bunch of programmers working together. The quants specify the strategy and the algorithm, the programmers code, test and deploy it. In these situations, the quant is not a subordinate to the trader, but a peer.
This post reflect's the author's own experience and it makes for interesting and entertaining reading. I doubt, however, that it is a true reflection of what a quant's job is.
IMHO, his view of the quant life was distorted by being on the 'sell-side', where the trader and salespeople reign supreme. On the buy-side, quants are much more of the revenue generators.
That'll become increasingly obvious now that (soon) banks won't be allowed to prop-trade : there'll be a migration of a lot of the 'value add' to the buy-side (true hedge funds, mainly).
Indeed. Though it really depends on the asset class. On liquid asset classes (equities, FX, etc.) there has been more and more focus on algorithmic market making and order execution. High frequency trading outfits and having extremely latency / price sensitive counter parties (i.e. the buy side hedge funds) has forced the sell side desks to evolve to a more tech driven trading model. In FX, banks like Deutsche and Barclays make loads of money off algorithmic market making and order execution. Way off topic .. apologies.
This is beautifully written and a genuinely entertaining read. I love it just for that, without the politics or without judging the validity of it's message. I just really enjoyed reading it.
I can understand Argyris Zymnis got his PhD in Electrical Engineering, probably did some research in signal processing, data fusion, etc. A Physics PhD ends up become a advertisement algorithm coder? How does that academic experience help though...no idea quantum mechanics applies in this area.
" the attention span of an ADHD kid hopped up on meth and Jolly Ranchers"
I think meth and sugar actually makes ADHD kids more calm because it allows for the easily triggered mental satisfaction obtained from normal everyday interactions, which ADHD kids crave and require constant attention and running around in circles to obtain, something we naturally get without drugs. But moving on with the article. :)
