Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

adgrok.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 147 posts

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#111

Post by ezl »

VolatileVoid wrote: post #106
noname123 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool. I'm surprised you say that finance always takes a backseat to writing amazing code, though. In my experience, traders don't want cool new snazzy Google Wave. They want Excel. They don't want cool new Web 2.0 streaming quotes/risk calculations/portfolio calculations, they want VBA macros in Excel. Even if you are working in actual trading/strategy area and write up your backtester with Python. They want y…

Don't confuse "amazing code" with "snazzy technology" (although we do some pretty snazzy stuff). Also not sure about other places, but Excel usage is frowned upon here, at least on the trading desks that I support.

Rare and refreshing. Too many hours of my life have been spent hacking broken Excel spreadsheets with recorded macros.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#112

Post by noname123 »

VolatileVoid wrote: post #106
noname123 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cool. I'm surprised you say that finance always takes a backseat to writing amazing code, though. In my experience, traders don't want cool new snazzy Google Wave. They want Excel. They don't want cool new Web 2.0 streaming quotes/risk calculations/portfolio calculations, they want VBA macros in Excel. Even if you are working in actual trading/strategy area and write up your backtester with Python. They want y…

Don't confuse "amazing code" with "snazzy technology" (although we do some pretty snazzy stuff). Also not sure about other places, but Excel usage is frowned upon here, at least on the trading desks that I support.

Want to get into details as to what kind of "snazzy technology" or "amazing code" you guys are involved in? You don't have to give me corporate espionage secrets, just vague general topic.

Is it a flashy OMS/EMS/reporting/risk/quotes front-end? What kind of technical problems do you guys encounter? In terms of concurrency, security, message processing, bandwidth/latency? What kind of business problems do you guys encounter? In terms of smart-routing, risk calculations and compliance. Just curious what programmers in GS are generally involved in.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#113

Post by jmatt »

blakeweb wrote: post #81
edanm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind enlightening me? I've only read a few of his works but don't recognize it.

Breakfast of Champions. Just open the first pages and you'll see it all over.

http://books.google.com/books?id=8Rvbn07LhvMC&lpg=PP1&#3...

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#114

Post by nearestneighbor »

In fact, we were basically the trader’s little bitches, and any quant who’s honest with himself realizes that.

I wonder what it is that traders do that they can't be replaced by software? How do they manage to generate more value than quants?

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#115

Post by joshu »

daychilde wrote: post #2

> with the attention span of an ADHD kid hopped up on meth and Jolly Ranchers Well, I'm very disappointed to find this. 1. One of the more common (and certainly well-known) medications for ADHD is Ritalin, which is methylphenidate. It's mildly related to meth. The long story short is that giving meth to someone with ADHD would not cause them to be able to focus less ; rather, to be able to focus more . 2. Studies hav…

On the other hand, giving meth to someone with OCD results in feedback like this.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#116

Post by neurotech1 »

I was staying with a lady who worked at Goldman Sacks in San Francisco.

She said the 12-14 hour days, writing market reports were normal for her. I'm guessing there was limited schedule flexibility for her. I'm not surprised people would rather found a start-up.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#117

Post by yummyfajitas »

noname123 wrote: post #100
yummyfajitas wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had a number of people tell me this system is why GS won the financial crisis. During the financial crisis, GS knew their positions and their risks. They could also calculate the side effects of proposed trades as quickly as their computers could calculate it. This meant the people at the top could actively plan what to do next during the day. In contrast, MS and JPM can only get information like this a few hour…

What about your HFT outfit, Mesh Capital? How do you guys do real-time P&L and risk calculations? Given the frequency and volume of the orders you guys pump to the market, I imagine that there must be a latency between when you receive ack/fills from market vs. real time market price of your positions. Given that HFT makes or breaks on pennies, cancel/modifying your orders in sync with real-time market info must be c…

We are a little far from facing citigroup-like scaling issues - they have 100,000x more employees than we do.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#119

Post by Psyonic »

VolatileVoid wrote: post #27

So. This is funny. I actually work at Goldman, work in the system he talks about, and have been doing so for 5 years. You can get numbed by the experience of working here, but you don't have to be. I've become friendly with some of the best hackers I know, and for us, finance always takes a backseat to writing amazing code. Sometimes we succeed. Sometimes we fail, but we try to never say, "Meh. Good enough." Wall Str…

You don't have to worry about them over-glorifying Google either. The general attitude on this site is that you're either working on your own startup (by far the best option), working for an early-stage startup (ok, but still second best, since its not your own thing), or you're basically wasting your time (working for "the man").

I find it offensive, actually, but so it goes.

Re: Founding a startup with zero revenue is better than working for Goldman Sachs

#120

Post by zmitri »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #8
d_c wrote: post #3

That's quite interesting: " At the risk of getting sued, let me throw you geeks a bone and part the Goldman veil a bit. The Goldman Sachs risk system is called SecDB (securities database), and everything at Goldman that matters is run out of it. The GUI itself looks like a settings screen from DOS 3.0, but no one cares about UI cosmetics on the Street. The language itself was called SLANG (securities language) and wa…

I've had a number of people tell me this system is why GS won the financial crisis. During the financial crisis, GS knew their positions and their risks. They could also calculate the side effects of proposed trades as quickly as their computers could calculate it. This meant the people at the top could actively plan what to do next during the day. In contrast, MS and JPM can only get information like this a few hour…

It did help. The reason was that GS was able to run the models and pricing on the CDOs (collateralized debt obligations) they held, unlike other firms. CDOs are made up of a collection of asset backed securities, and even running a cashflow model, prepayment model and interest rate model on each of those individually can take up to 10 seconds (Sorry for the financial terms). On top of that, there's thing called OAS (option adjusted spread) which is a type of Monte Carlo simulations and quite intensive. A lot of places were not able to properly price their CDOs due to the intensive nature of the calculations but Goldman could.

To be honest, Buffett's interest in Goldman and his friendship with Obama could have had some play in the government's interaction with them.

The real issue here, is that all the models and ratings on these securities did not correlate the failure of similar bonds with similar underlying collateral. When running the models, they had something like 10% cross correlation between different bonds with extremely similar collateral according to someone who used to work at Fitch. In reality it should have been something like 50 to 75%.

Post reply on HN