41–47 of 47 posts
The whole time I read this article, I could only think of PG's "The Submarine." http://paulgraham.com/submarine.html This article describes a process that's being going on for decades, but manages to do so while imbuing a "drama" that only a headhunting firm could truly muster (or the guy who wrote the book selling for $299). It's true, that the pressures have ramped up over time as private equity becomes a monster a…
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Around and past an IQ of about 135, work boredom is a chronic risk and sometimes a disability. (...) Past 135 (much less at 140, 150, or even 160) even 8 hours per day of grunt work is impossible, much less 17. Interesting. I went to a rather old-fashioned school with a strict IQ cutoff of 125-130+ (Stanford-Binet LM, I think, because some scored above 160), and my impression is the opposite: the higher they scored,…
That is not to say they do not have rich intellectual lives outside of work: but that, for them, corporate work is more like a generous sinecure that doesn't substantially impede their other pursuits. In fact, it was those of us with the "lowest" IQs who tended to be more freaked out about the prospects of mindless corporate work, and who were more likely to go for more "intellectually stimulating" careers like acade…
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It's not a matter of professional ethics, it's a matter of them making decisions in favor of their future employer to the detriment of their current one.
How is that different than just, you know, ethics?
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I'm not convinced that smart people gravitate to quant roles. The hours may be longer on the "soft" side but it is more prestigious and the work is less taxing and doesn't require continually learning new skills. I don't know how you can enter "soft" finance at the VP level. > Absolutely. This is completely true. Any idea what we should do about this in engineering? (Or just call it hopeless and exit for finance?) I…
When I give advice to smart kids entering college I tell them they should strongly consider targeting PE/HF: If they hate it they will know from experience and still have superlative exit ops, trivially able to land a management/executive-track job at a tech company or elsewhere. This is not a comment on what you're saying (I don't think you're far off) but it's pretty disturbing a reflection on tech that executive r…
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Plenty of high IQ people in PE and hedge funds, especially those who entered direct from college, skipping IB. They seem to be people who can tolerate grinding though. It may be true that the work gets boring but the alternatives aren't significantly better (how many people at Google are doing substantially more interesting work?) and pay and career advancement are much better.
I acknowledge that there are plenty of very smart people in finance (especially in quant roles). I said: There are plenty of 135+ in finance, but either they go for trading and quant or even IT roles, or they move to "the soft side" at a higher level: usually at least VP. Smart people tend to avoid competing on hours. Why? Because if you're putting out a 17-hour day (which is necessary at the entry level on "the soft…
PE, big banks, all of that money is based on information gathered from the companies before the rest of us peons get wind of any of it. John Q. Public is playing what he thinks is a fair lottery, while the wizards are pulling the levers behind the curtains. If we as engineers could figure out a legal way to "earn commissions" (read: steal from tens of thousands of people every year based on information asymmetry), then $500k is no problem. Until then, however, we are confined to, you know, actually trying to create value for people rather than extract it from the system.
Pardon the cynicism, I am pretty unnerved by our whole economic incentive structure.
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I'm not so sure. The high-energy physics community created an ethically (but not legally) binding agreement on the date of theorist postdoc offers to prevent a useless race for ever earlier commit dates. >In recent years, we have seen a growing number of early offers with short deadlines for high energy theory postdoctoral positions...We are worried that this practice is preventing young researchers from making a fre…
There was a similar agreement among federal judges for the hiring of term clerks. There was much gnashing of teeth when the plan broke down, and judges started hiring two years in advance. But I don't think there is any real prisoner's dilemma. What do the candidates lose? It's great to have a job lined up that far in advance. It lets you plan, especially if you have a family. Its obviously more burdensome for judges…
Contrary to your intuition, most people do not want the inflexibility of needing to decide on their next job 2 years ahead. For example, if you're a young law student, you're still learning what kind of law you actually want to work in, and it's very inconvenient to have to choose years ahead of time what court you work in, at which point your academic (or love) interests may have changed.