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For the Love of Money

nytimes.com

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Re: For the Love of Money

#241

Post by vehementi »

mrbill wrote: post #226

My thought after reading this article: "Must be easy to feel good about walking away from making more money, and make a career of talking about it, when you've got that nice cushion of a few million in the bank already."

Same here, I was thinking of that anecdote about the catch 22 author being at some party. Some banker says "that 25 year old over there made more money last year than you have in your whole writing career"

and the author replies back "I have something he'll never have - enough"

Except when the banker wisens up and has the "epiphany" that his tens of millions are enough and lives a paradise of a life ever after.

Re: For the Love of Money

#242

Post by g8oz »

pimentel wrote: post #209

Whenever I see rich guys forfeiting on more money so they can help the poor, I remember this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others... TL;DR: If a high-powered lawyer who makes $1,000 an hour chooses to take an hour off to help clean up litter on the beach, he's wasted the opportunity to work overtime that day, make $1,000, donate to a charity that will hire a hundred poor people for $10/hour t…

Better yet he should be taxed at a 75% marginal rate.

Re: For the Love of Money

#243

Post by consz »

dredmorbius wrote: post #224
gd1 wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're still not getting it. You send your messages on a private link to the exchange. Then the exchange processes them (either puts an order in the order book) or matches a trade, and only then publishes that this has happened on the public market feed. At which point other participants can react. This: "So one way of jumping in on the order is being, say, a few thousand km closer to the exchange than some other tra…

So ... the exchange processing the trade -- where's it getting its liquidity from? If it can't satisfy the trade internally, it's getting buy/sell orders from elsewhere, correct? Or flip this around: instead of telling me how HFTs can't arbitrage their trades, tell me what's actually happening. Because HFT's like deepwater oil drilling: it's an awfully expensive hobby to be doing if there's no profit in it. Where's t…

An exchange doesn't have liquidity, it's merely providing a matching engine/order book for outside traders to post orders.

Re: For the Love of Money

#244

Post by bertil »

lmm wrote: post #191
harryh wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if Jack does't want to build the bridge and he holds enough of the company then he gets to say "stop building the bridge."

Is there evidence that's actually what's happening? I hear a lot of complaints on the internet about a quarterly results focus, but I've never heard of shareholders actually telling a company to change tack.

There are anecdotal evidence of this regularly happening, but usually those are fair decisions: both strategies discussed are generally sound, if radically opposed. One is generally a cash-out option and is favored by influential raiders who want the cash flow to invest elsewhere; the other is a growth option that might be more about serving management’s ambition that the stakeholders' interest. But those debate are public, rare and not entirely nefast.

What I have seen far more often is smart decisions delayed to please the investors, or costly decisions taken, at all stages: before or during Series A, B or further, before or during an IPO, etc. The most common ones are related to HR: contractors costing double and won't be here when what the set up breaks rather than employees to set-up a strategic asset because, otherwise, accounting practices would show increasing long-term duties to said employees. More generally, many companies suffer from a lack of investment because of the short-term focus — this I can describe in details in repeated cases, for the dozen of more companies that I’ve worked with. The single exception was when investors used the product themselves and behaved more like end-users.

Re: For the Love of Money

#245

Post by gfodor »

ItendToDisagree wrote: post #14
gfodor wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're seriously attempting to imply that there is no value provided by a highly liquid and efficient derivatives market? I'm not going to say these people are earning an amount commensurate to the value they provide to society, but pretending that they are just running a casino is equally naive.

I would say they provide little to no value to the average person no. Please clarify what they provide to society at large (meaning most people and not just large portfolios or predatory credit companies)? Greater security and insulation against bad investments? (which to be clear the vast majority of people do not have enough money to make in the first place.) Seems a lot like playing odds at a Casino, to use your e…

"large portfolios" include mutual funds and pension funds. Ie, where most peoples' retirement funds are. These funds benefit from derivatives to reduce volatility and risk.

Re: For the Love of Money

#246

Post by 31reasons »

patio11 wrote: post #181
31reasons wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it seems you are better off working in a profession with a very clear quantifiable performance metrics. Software development is not one of them unless you work for your own company. I am curious about making a list of professions that have quantifiable performance metrics. 1.Sales and Marketing 2.SEO 3.Bloggers 4 ..

You can use software development to achieve very quantifiable results for companies. If you do, there are a variety of ways to turn that into what you want out of life. One avenue of many is hanging out your shingle as a consultant and charging what your empirical results suggest you can get away with. (I've been beating this drum on HN for a few years. The PG essay on wealth, linked in a sibling comment, is probably…

Thanks Patrick!

>>You can use software development to achieve very quantifiable results for companies.

Can you direct me to books / resources to understand more in depth what you are talking about here. I have read what you are saying many times but never quite get it. I am struggling to understand why would someone want to pay me % of their profit when they can hire some programmer for $50/hour. Is it about how you present yourself to the client s or types of clients you go after ? I am working as a freelancer and all I am getting is very budget sensitive clients who doesn't want to pay more than their cleaning maid.

Re: For the Love of Money

#247

Post by codingdave »

pimentel wrote: post #209

Whenever I see rich guys forfeiting on more money so they can help the poor, I remember this: http://lesswrong.com/lw/3gj/efficient_charity_do_unto_others... TL;DR: If a high-powered lawyer who makes $1,000 an hour chooses to take an hour off to help clean up litter on the beach, he's wasted the opportunity to work overtime that day, make $1,000, donate to a charity that will hire a hundred poor people for $10/hour t…

That sounds completely logical, but misses the human element.

Your story only works if the people making all the money actually spend it on helping others. Most of the time, they do not. One of the things that will trigger people to charity and generosity is going out and doing some charitable work on their own. It lets them see the results, show them the personal satisfaction that can be gained by it, and sets them up to have the desire to contribute in other ways.

Re: For the Love of Money

#248

Post by jsh7 »

philwelch wrote: post #171
JDulin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As always, there's an old and insightful pg essay on these economics: http://www.paulgraham.com/wealth.html The trivial conclusion is that starting your own company is how to be accurately rewarded for your work. But that assumes there's no way to better measure employee performance. It seems like measuring it for engineers and programmers is an impossibly hard problem (At least, that's implied from all of the well-r…

We're talking about risk/reward tradeoffs a lot in this thread. Doing a startup vs. working as an employee is one of these tradeoffs. If you do a startup you'll get paid closer to what you're actually worth, but maybe you don't generate any real wealth and go bust and get paid zero. If you're an employee, you get to hedge that risk against taking a small fraction of the wealth you generate.

For a Wall Street trader on the other hand, this tradeoff seems to not exist.

Re: For the Love of Money

#249

Post by mikekij »

Great article.

TL;DR - I was a douche. Then I was visited by the ghost of christmas past, stopped being a douche, and started giving away groceries. I'm still rich though.

Re: For the Love of Money

#250

Post by jellicle »

mbillie1 wrote: post #50
logicallee wrote: post #9

I like how after all that, he ends with an ask for a quarter of his readers' bonuses to start a fund for his philanthropy old habits die hard :)

> an ask Can this new idiom be stricken from our collective lexicon? I've heard this a lot lately in the tech community (although mostly from manager types) and it's a linguistic abomination. "...he ends by asking ..."

It's a term of art in the marketing world. Legitimate jargon.

What's an equivalent... hmm, suppose I talk "a pull" in the context of a version control system. I'm talking about something with a specific meaning. It would be wrong to try to correct me and tell me I should talk about "a thing that is pulled".

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