Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then maybe he shouldn't have pissed off a Senior VP? Sounds pretty simple to me.
You seem to be pretty angry in your responses in this thread.
Not really.
My Time at Lehman
111–120 of 198 posts
Re: My Time at Lehman
#112"... of my class of 1400 graduates from Yale, forty percent took jobs in finance."
This reminds me of an interview with the President of Iceland, where they let their megabanks fail.
Speaking of the downside of having a huge banking sector, he said "... since then you have seen a great growth period in the Icelandic IT sector, the high-tech sector, the manufacturing sector, because they could suddenly get the engineers, the mathematicians, the computer scientists."
Really interesting interview. http://www.businessinsider.com/olafur-ragnur-grimsson-icelan...
Re: My Time at Lehman
#113"When you’d rather have someone shit on your face than go to work, it’s probably time to leave." What's unfortunate is that money is capable of convincing people to stay around in situations where they may even come close to such a state of mind.
While I'd like to say that I'd leave well before, everybody has a price, and it sounds like Wall Street is willing to pay it.
Re: My Time at Lehman
#114"Which, it turns out, is a trader’s field day. What this meant, in its simplest form, is that these traders (or salespeople) could buy bonds at the "market" price from intelligent hedge fund managers in NYC and sell this same crap at much higher levels to unsophisticated (but legally considered "sophisticated") pension funds and insurance companies in middle America. What I discovered, quite starkly, is that the part…
Free-market believers assume there must be somebody in the system with the incentives to help those less sophisticated investors. Or that the market will eliminate con artists, because their investments must be weak. That's how you get Alan Greenspan, thought by some to be a sophisticated thinker, flabbergasted that the events of 2006-2008 were even possible.
investments must be weak.
" 'The investments are weak.' The fucking investments are weak? You're weak. I've been in this business fifteen years... "
Re: My Time at Lehman
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just because Oracle sells into companies that could just as well have used postgres that doesn't mean that Oracle aren't producing anything of value,.. Oracle doesn't sell software. They sell risk reduction. Someone to sue or blame. Once you understand that, you see how brilliantly they've achieved product/market fit in a way many people here can only dream of.
Sure some people buy Oracle for risk reduction after having done a sophisticated analysis, but plenty of people buy it because that's what the nice sales person tells them they need and the sales person obviously understand this techy stuff far more than they do. The dev team says they can just use this "postgres" but the sales person said he'd seen this situation a lot of times before and that dev team was too inexp…
Oracle also makes great Software and Hardware products work together perfectly. There is a reason why they have been #1 in their field.
Re: My Time at Lehman
#116Not exactly related, but nonetheless interesting:
A blog post by Doc Faustroll (@faustroll on Twitter) on the strain of being evil, including reference to Dick Fuld of Lehman
"Fuld at least had something of the physiognomy of the raptor, of the beast of prey, a kind of last remnant of aggressive character."
http://congruenz.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/the-strain-of-bein...
On my wall hangs a Japanese carving
The mask of an evil demon, smeared with opulent gold
In sympathy I see –
Bulging veins on the forehead, expressing
the strain it is to be evil.
-Bertolt Brecht
Re: My Time at Lehman
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about the lawsuits, but it is very much about risk reduction. This applies to all consultancies, not just Oracle. If you hand-roll your own solution for (almost) free using open source components, you're the one who gets fired when it goes down. If you buy an enterprise-level solution from Vendor XYZ, with a requisite expensive support contract, they fucked up when it goes down, and you are safe because good…
And this is just going to continue with cloud services, isn't it? SAAS, PAAS, IAAS, etc.
What will remain then, I wonder? If you reduce a business to its absolute core value? Maybe the IP? A few intelligent people?
Re: My Time at Lehman
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you need to ask why don't pension funds hire more talented people ? It's because those people are expensive and that means having to charge a higher management fee. And what do consumers tend to base investment choices on ? - management fees. High management fees mean that consumers won't pick that fund. Consumers can't tell how sophisticated their pension fund managers are so they'll just pick a cheap upfront c…
Even if you paid more, the incentives are wrong. Managers are told (often by state legislatures) to go out and hit unrealistic return targets, because to lower the targets would mean the states have to fund the pension more. If they hit the target, they keep their job. If they miss their target, they get fired. What would you do? This is also why state pensions like to jam money into alternative investments like hedg…
This sounds like a very difficult situation! I didn't realize it was this complicated; I always wondered why pension fund managers were so gullible.
Re: My Time at Lehman
#119I cringed when I read this headline on HN because I too worked for Lehman between 2006 and 2008. I felt the same way Nick did even around the same time (wanting to go back to making "real things"). However, lately I feel like I have come back somewhat full-circle. Many of the issues he complains about is rampant in almost of every industry. For example, Groupon was basically taking advantage of unsophisticated small…
I think you raise a very interesting point. When you read stories about trading, often people bring up the question, "What value does it provide to society?" Much of the commentary I read wants to apply that judgement to trading, but nowhere else. Are designer jeans a benefit to society? Is fast food? Are casinos? Does everyone's job need to be beneficial to society? And if so, who makes that call?
Re: My Time at Lehman
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is having superior information and data not consistent with a level playing field? What about hiring up a significant portion of all the top college graduates and having them work around the clock to give you every possible advantage? Is that consistent with a level playing field? My point is that there are a lot of things short of fraud that we consider "meritocracy" (and having superior information and superior ana…
Because for Wall Street to succeed, Main Street must fail? Why would Main Street transact with them at all if that were the case?
> Why would Main Street transact with them at all if that were the case?
Because we force them to, through 401k's and the like.