Sometimes it's hard to see in the moment that a product will be used for evil or will have a negative effect on people. Can you look back on any of your work now and wish you didn't do it?
Very much so. Worked on a system that coordinated vehicle registration for car fleets - it ended up being built into a system for repossession of cars from payday loan defaultors.
That triggered my move to education and medical software.
I work for one of the big video game publishers. If you believe the internet we slaughter puppies and are the cause of all unhappiness in the world.
The actual work is gruelling, frought with long hours and very challenging. So when you finally get your ducks in a row after countless hours of overtime and stress to see the public’s reaction is heartbreaking.
I regret working on games, but the technical challenges are stimulating enough that I continue to do it.
I don’t think anyone holds the developers responsible. At the end of the day most people are upset about the business model, not the content.
Look at Fallout 76. Content wise, it’s a decent game. The graphics are better than the previous game and they made attempts to rework some of the mechanics.
Where it failed was the utter lack of quality control due to timelines and the inclusion of micro transactions. The game obviously wasn’t ready. Plus the added shenanigans of the botched launcher rollout.
Add it all up and it’s easy to see why people are pissed, but they’re mad at Bethesda for pushing such as obvious cash grab as something innovative and new.
Obviously developers work hard and create awesome stuff. It’s just a shame these companies pile on the crap to suck every spare dollar out their customers instead of just releasing a great game that isn’t a bug filled mess due to botched release timelines.
Catch 22: people will not buy your game if your development and marketing budget aren't high (taking a long time to make a game is a huge increase in development budget). Yet sales of a game at the industry standard price-point barely cover the costs already. It would only take 2 failed AAA titles for my company to be on the verge of bankruptcy.
I guess it's dishonest to push so hard to have "high quality" games with a lot of content when you know that it's impossible to actually cover the cost with the list price, but it's what people demand. And it gets harder every year.
It should get harder every year to make money on games since there's so much already out there. There is less room for novelty and less reason to explore an ever-widening selection of games to kill time with. The big game publishers that are pumping out new editions of the same old game all the time are not providing that much value for all the work they're doing. Content isn't what makes games great, IMO, it's the novelty of the experience of interacting with it that draws me.
Who says there should be continued growth all the time in that sector? Why wouldn't we get so efficient at entertaining ourselves that the revenues top out or dry up? What if the next big thing is discovering there doesn't always need to be a next big thing?
I work as a game programmer. I'm one of those kids who grew up playing now "classic" games wanting to become a game developer themselves.
Every time I'm in a corporate game development gig I have regrets, because instead of working on a game I could personally appreciate I end up working on copycat mobile games; poorly designed games; games with no creativity behind them. Working on a game I would never consider playing myself, a game I would never recommend to a friend.
The best gamedev experience I had was working on an indie title with a very small and tight team. But that enterprise went bankrupt and the team disbanded.
Hope to bring that back someday, but lack the discipline at the moment.
This echoes many of my experiences in gamedev as well. It's really soul-crushing to be working on games that are poorly designed by people who has no business making games, or are designed to exploit some addictive impulse. It can really sap your enthusiasm for the medium as a whole.
It's really depressing that game development has become mainly a dark pit for developers. Most of the stories end up in 3 categories: work for a shitty mobile company that reskins every game with awful monetisation, work for big studios while being exploited or work indie without certainty of making a buck or stability. There is a reason why most developer advise to make games as a side project passion while having a job in other sector of software development.
Is there no way back, where upstart companies can make hit games and become mega stars, like iD in the 90s?
Is the resources required to make a hit PC game too high today for an upstart to succeed, or is it just big gaming houses controlling the distribution channels?
I think it is better you utilise your game programming experience to the more saner versions, mainly 3D graphics/3D scientific visualisation kind of roles.
They are almost on par with giving you the same satisfaction that your best gamed experience gave you with better pay and should I say most likely better working conditions as well!
If anyone has a strong background in 3D graphics and is interested in Counterstrike please do send me a message -- I'm building 3D analysis utilities for games[1] rather than games themselves which cuts out much of the complexity while maintaining many of the same technical problems. Email in profile.
You might want to look into board games a bit. That industry still tends to thrive on making a quality product they can sell (unless it's on Kickstarter, then sometimes it's just about having really cool looking minis, with gameplay an afterthought) and not so much about how they can microtransaction the game to death.
It pays much worse than game programming though, unless you make a major hit, so you'll need to keep a day job, especially now that there's way too many games released every year that it has the same visibility problem as like, Steam does.
But you get to work with all sorts of people, and do so in person (like I'm going to an event in a couple weeks where I will be playtesting other designers' board games, and even a couple games by publishers themselves, and get to talk to and be friendly with the people who work for the publisher), and I've found it generally more fulfilling than my time in video games, personally.
Although that being said, I do miss video games and I've started working on one in my spare time again recently.
It’s honest answers like this that make HN great.
Maybe start working on a game you would like to play as side project; if your personal situation allows for that kind of freedom.
I was an OS developer for the 3DO, and the first PlayStation, an then went on as a lead game developer for various publishers. The games industry is a cesspool, with the worse aspects ambition and creativity pressured together into the perfect storm for youthful slavery. Fuck that industry.
> I'm one of those kids who grew up playing now "classic" games wanting to become a game developer themselves.
This is why I got into development. I am so far away from that in the dev world nowadays. It is sad because it sounds like the video game industry does not promote healthy work environments.
Ditto. I started out on a Spectrum 48K+ as a 10 year old kid in the mid-80s trying to write games in Sinclair BASIC. My dream was to write my own version of Defender/Defender II/Stargate[1].
Professionally, I have never worked in game development and doubt I ever will, but I have a couple of web versions of Star Castle (https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/) and Asteroids (https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/) that I've built that I feel 10-year-old me would probably have enjoyed.
[1] Actually it still is, but now using WebGL. Watch this space.
Starcastle is still one of my favorite games. Simple enough but frustrating to master. I swear I spent more quarters on that damn game in my early teen years than I've spent on Steam games as an adult (when factoring in inflation). LOL
I also spent my childhood programming Trek games on the sinclair (kit).
I missed out on the kit computers of the early 80s, although it seems like that scene is undergoing something of a revival with lots of new machines - and not just Pi based - popping up. Confession: I spend way too much time watching content on channels like The 8-Bit Guy on YouTube.
>The best gamedev experience I had was working on an indie title with a very small and tight team. But that enterprise went bankrupt and the team disbanded.
That's the hallmark of having gamers as your audience. They reward the copycat garbage and publishers that mistreat them and exploit them, but they would never think of buying an indie game. They get what they pay for, and unfortunately so do the rest of us.
At the present I mostly dislike large companies, as their games nowadays tend to "monetize" more and choose "safe" options in game design thus making them less appealing. It's kind of like Marvel movies. Great production, but after you've seen a few of them you lose interest, unless you have some kind of special attachment to the universe or the characters.
I respect Blizzard's history and games, however I feel it is going downhill, especially after their Diablo Immortal fiasco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmkHAlhCvWg
To those who are unaware: Blizzard has historically been a company making awesome games mainly for PC. Blizzcon is an annual conference where hardcore Blizzard fans (mostly PC gamers) come to learn what's next for them. Diablo 3 was released 6 years ago, so naturally people have been expecting the next installment. And then Blizzard says to those people that the next Diablo is a mobile-only game (co-)developed by a Chinese company. Naturally, this isn't what most of the series' fans were expecting and are excited about.
The Diablo immortal fiasco is certainly a dramatic misstep in terms of who they're presenting to, I'd agree. It was also quite painful to watch. However, I was pretty excited to see the announcement of a future remaster of Warcraft 3 from the same event.
You certainly have a point, but I think it's also really easy to develop a characterization of a company based on relatively shallow information. I had a conversation with a friend recently who's not quite in the same situation, but is worth recounting anyway. We live in Vancouver, BC, home of one of EA's campuses. He went to school for game design, then proceeded to not do anything relevant for about 6 years. He has no professional game design experience to speak of, yet has a tendency to speak as though he does. It seemed to be a surprise when I broke this down for him. When I asked "We know multiple people at EA right now, who, despite EA's reputation, speak highly of the company. You have a certification of some sort, why haven't you applied?". He proceeded to describe what he thought of EA, based on some of the decisions they've made, some of the games he's disliked, and the internet's opinion of them. The conversation went well, but I had to feed him some harsh realities, I hope he does well.
My point is not so much that it's not valuable information, but it's not a lot of information to bet potentially very valuable experience on. If you can say "I worked for Blizzard and it really wasn't for me. But I gave it a shot." then that might give you a lot more information in terms of what you do want to do.
This relates to me a little as well. I'm at a crossroads as a developer. Having been a web developer for a few years, with no degree at the moment, I'm trying to figure out where I want to be. A few years ago the prospect of working for a large online auction corp. I had a very strong suspicion that I would not do well—culturally and otherwise—at this company, but it was double the money and I was at that time not doing anything constructive. So I set my ego aside for a while and proceeded to take the job and subsequently confirm my suspicion. It wasn't all bad, but near the end it got pretty bad. It was a mistake I don't regret. It cost me a lot emotionally, but now I know which kind of companies I won't work for. I have a lot more information to go on, and sometimes those risks are worth taking.
I worked on the back end system that allowed record labels block their content on YouTube. I thought I was going to be working on a system to help indie record labels distribute their content. I lasted 9 months.
It is very difficult to realize what you objectively work on sometimes. Every organization internally tries to justify the product they build as "good". People don't want to openly admit they work on a product that is bad for society but generates money, so they lie to themselves.
Yes. This is so true. This is something we need to teach young software engineers - to try and identify the true business model from the model that the company is claiming to incoming employees. To question what you've been told at face value, and to be brave enough to walk away or put your foot down when you find out you've been had.
I've been there. I often wonder how many others in the industry have.
The truth of this matter is that most people really don't care. On top of this, schools generally communicate with the business world to figure out what their curriculum is going to be (after all, that's where you're expected to go when you finish studying). To my mind, it is then not a huge leap to figure out that a strong foundation in ethics is not a desirable quality. After all, what big company these days doesn't want something that's at least a dark gray?
That's what I'm hoping we can change. When I think of Engineering, I think of trades that tend to have a firm grasp on ethics and take the consequences of what they build very seriously. I know that organizations like the ACM and IEEE espouse those same virtues, and I think they are not only worthy virtues but also important. Something worth being uncomfortable - or even discarded by less ethical companies - in order to defend.
Ethics not being a desirable quality to some (many? That seems too bold to assert) businesses is ironically part of the reason why ethics is so important to hold onto as an engineer. Some businesses would be elated to find software engineers that have discarded their sense of ethics entirely, to the profit of themselves and the harm of our society.
They had a platform for distributing music to all the online music stores like iTunes, Spotify, etc. I thought I'd be working on this platform to add support for new music services, which I was. Except the only purpose to distribute music to YouTube is so that it can be used by their Content ID system.
I worked on a concert/event ticket selling platform that sells tickets for far too much. It pretended it was selling tickets for sold-out events, but often it was nowhere near sold out.
It took me a while to realize the entire thing was just a scam and that the only reason we were getting traffic was due to advertising shenanigans.
At the time, it was one of the best sites out there on account of having the most correct (or rather, least incorrect) events. Lots of websites contained many errors, such as listing "London, UK" instead of "London, Canada". Mixing up "Ryan Adams" and "Bryan Adams" was also a common one. We corrected a lot of that. I did "big data" kind of stuff before it was cool (no machine learning though, just old-fashioned rule-based logic).
even if you're not working for ticketmaster, i hope everyone who does work at ticketmaster has trouble sleeping at night. you provide nothing to no one.
It wasn't TicketMaster, but it was similar. It many years ago but at the time there were a whole bunch of "TicketMaster-y" setups out there, and a whole host of resellers for them which combined data from all of them. We were one of the resellers. It looks like it still exists.
Some were even scummier than TicketMaster. For example there was one that would simply try to guess ticket/tour dates and venues and then sell massively overpriced "early bird" tickets for them. Sometimes their guesses were more-or-less reliable, other times it was wildly off.
And yeah, I agree. The entire endeavour is useless. It was my first real programming job, and since then I've been a lot more careful what kind of companies I work for.
I could be wrong, but I'm under the impression that ticketmaster's customers are the performers, who want to maximize their revenue without appearing greedy, so they give ticketmaster a cut for taking the blame.
Yes, but ticketmaster are also secretly co-operating with third-party resellers that want to tout their tickets, although they claim otherwise. So, even the listed price with fees is not the real price.
I read somewhere that people who invented ships also invented shipwrecks. You work (design, sell, market, manage & ship) on something hoping that a lot of people use your baby and sometimes when it takes off you end up knowing that its used for terrible stuff as well. If i created Whatsapp, i would presumably be having a hard time digesting the fact that its now being used in countries like India to spread fake news. I am not someone who has been in this position yet(fortunately), i would presume there would be a sense of guilt and anger whenever this happens. But the question/ thing to ponder on is does the medium(products you created) have the problem or the messenger(folks who use them) ?
Well if we berate Whatsapp where do we stop? Whatsapp is just an enabler. If there was only IRC to communicate I am sure fake news could use that channel as well.
* Would this product exist without the malicious use cases?
* Can the company sustain itself without the malicious use case?
* Are there ways to mitigate the malicious use cases, and could they be reasonably implemented?
* Is the true intent of the business - when you assess it honestly - for it to be used in the "good" scenario, or in the malicious scenario?
* Are the malicious scenarios being reinforced/rewarded?
* What portion of revenue is directly caused by the malicious use cases?
* Is the company marketing or appealing to the malicious use cases? Are they trying to actively warn against/discourage them?
* What are the worst case scenarios of the malicious use case? Are they theoretical or real?
* What are the best case scenarios of the "golden path" use case? Are they theoretical or real?
And we also need to pay attention as we answer the questions above, looking out for if/when we make shallow justifications rather than honestly assessing the answers to the questions above. Look out for situations where our response is hedged by an excuse that's irrelevant to your ethical duties as a software engineer, such as:
* "but we can't leave money on the table"
* "but people would lose their jobs if we didn't do this"
* "but this is what our competitors do"
* "but if we didn't do this, someone else would"
* "but it also causes [theoretical/unintended side effect that sounds good on paper]" (particularly important to watch out for when that unintended side effect is an oversimplified version of reality)
* "but it's not our choice how it is used" (particularly relevant in situations where the business model relies on the malicious use case, and/or there are opportunities to mitigate the harmful use case that are intentionally going unexplored... or situations where your product itself is using techniques such as behavioral conditioning to train a user's choices)
Yes, a few of my gigs were, probably not evil but certainly low in value for actual humans. But we all have to eat, and circumstances sometimes send you off looking for whatever job or client you can get right now.
About a year ago I worked on a system that helped a political party in my country to keep track of their "associates" in order to get some advantage in the election. They lost, but after I finally saw what the whole deal was I quitted at that company.
I’ve designed many e-commerce stores and helped improve conversions for a ton of companies most of which sell stuff. I regret being a cog in a system that propels consumerism but food has to be put on the table.
It wasn't really the consumerism of it that bugged me the most about working in e-commerce. We where pretty honest about what we sold, entertainment and general stuff you could live without. What I didn't like was implementing instant loans as a payment option.
If you admit that you're selling "luxury" goods, then you shouldn't be providing people, who don't have the money, with loan options. Least of all loans with 20%+ yearly interests.
As it happens very few customers actually choose the loan option. I think it took a week or so before the first customer even tried using that payment option.
That would bother me too. For me, just convincing people to buy stuff they don’t really need makes me feel guilty. I often wish I could work in an industry that helps the planet or even stay in e-commerce as long as it sells products aimed at improving environment, I just don’t know how to switch over or where.
I worked for financial traders for a few years before I wised up. It was at least refreshingly honest; during the hiring process, my boss explained that the company had a pile of money and our goal was to turn it into a bigger pile. But what I didn't understand was that mostly we made money when other people lost it. We turned a profit by being smarter or faster or luckier than the people we traded with.
I ended up leaving mainly because it was an unhealthy, high-pressure environment where a lot of the most celebrated people were giant dicks. But I stayed away because I realized that we weren't making anything better. We just situated ourselves near a river of (other people's) money and tried to siphon off a bit of the flow. It was depressing.
I'm glad I never went back. I honestly think the finance industry could be half the size it is with no real harm to the rest of the economy. And given what a mess the 2008 crisis was, trimming the industry way back might be overall beneficial.
Same reason(s) i stopped pursuing a career in finance. The percentage of the financial sector (mbe not including direct investors like vc’s) that is actually beneficial to markets and society can be counted on one hand.
As a counterpoint I work in finance and work with a group of smart people that all check their egos in at the door. It's a great place to work. We also try to turn money into more money, it's pretty much the game of life whether you play it or not. It pays really well so I can't complain.
Is the job fulfilling? Depends on your goals - for me I've gained a huge knowledge of low level programming, and front line experience on how far one can go with both software and hardware to 'win' against other competitors in the space. That's invaluable stuff for me.
Is the job moral? Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks, this isn't stealing from the poor. People who invest must understand risk, and risk is really the only way things move forward in the first place. But it also implies there can and will be people who lose out.
There should not be an additional layer of risk involved only because people bet on other people.
If I buy a share from company x, the success of that company should represent the share price. But that is partially true.
And NO enough people have no idea what they are doing. In Germany we increased the requirements for trading. You have to read stuff and sign off otherwise the bank will not allow you to buy certain products.
In Germany we increased the requirements for trading. You have to read stuff
and sign off otherwise the bank will not allow you to buy certain products.
We have that in the US too. While ordinary "retail" investors can buy stocks and
bonds (which they can do in Germany too, I presume), most of the "exotic"
products that people complain about are restricted to "accredited" investors. In
order to be an accredited investor in the US, you have to be one of the
following:
- a bank, insurance company, registered investment company, business
development company, or small business investment company
- an employee benefit plan, within the meaning of the Employee Retirement
Income Security Act, if a bank, insurance company or registered investment
adviser makes the investment decisions, or if the plan has total assets in
excess of 5,000,000 dollars
- a charitable organization, corporation, or partnership with assets
exceeding 5,000,000 dollars
- a director, general officer, or partner of the company selling the
securities
- a business in which all the equity owners are accredited investors
- a natural person who has individual net worth or joint net worth with the
person's spouse that exceeds 1,000,000 dollars at the time of purchase or
has assets under management of 1,000,000 dollars or above, excluding the
value of the individual's primary residence
- a natural person with income exceeding 200,000 dollars per year in each of
the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding 300,000
dollars per year in those years and a reasonable expectation of the same
income level for the current year
- a trust with assets in excess of 5,000,000 dollars not formed to acquire
the securities offered whose purchases a sophisticated person makes
So as you can see, there are already quite stringent requirements for trading
most "exotic" derivatives in the US. You either have to be a millionaire, have
the backing of an institution, have government certification or all of the above
in order to trade things like mortgage-backed securities and government bonds.
I have zero ethical qualms about winning when I know that the other people I'm
competing against are millionaires, have institutional backing, have government
approval or all of the above.
I think the point was that having smart people participate is wasting their time when they could be doing something more productive, not who is losing. Like for instance work on robotic arms so we can all have a household robot to do the house chores.
Medical research on non-life-threatening things is still creating value for people with less-than-fatal problems.
Physicists working on physics research might be a problem if those physicists could just divert money elsewhere in the economy into their own research programs. As it is, there's a complex system of controls so that public research money is generally used for some reasonably good purpose.
Cool, so my measly pension is invested in a pension fund (as it has to be, legally). The pension fund managers then buy some exotics, which gives me exposure to the same exotics. then something bad happens, such as 2008, and I lose my future.
Thanks guys, the stringent requirements really worked in my favour there!
One of my observations, to make a living you need an angle. This isn't necessarily 'bad'. A mechanic has years of experience and tools, and a lift. In return for parting with cash he'll do something for you (hopefully). Trading houses use their angle to do something to you, namely siphon off some of your money without providing you anything.
> Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks, this isn't stealing from the poor.
The problem here is that, for example, at least in the US, not everyone with a pension or who "contibutes" to a retirement plan is comfortable or even aware of the risks. That ignorance is not a defense, per-se, but if you've got blinders on that you're fleecing pennies off the already rich you are sorely mistaken.
I'd go so far as to argue that turning money into more money without providing a good or service in exchange is squarely immoral.
The service in this case is facilitating a trade. Liquidity is important, but I think it was oversold to pull some of the PR heat off of HFT. Especially since a lot of retail investing advice has turned to index funds, liquidity for individual stocks matters less for them -- it also means they don't have to understand as much financial info before investing (just read the index's prospectus every year vs. reading a whole bunch of company financial filings every quarter).
>There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest — what we call investment — is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or “usury” as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only dunking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said.
>That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.
I mean, I already believe in a lot of basic principles that would horrify a lot of people - free speech, freedom of religion, I don't care at all what someone's sexual orientation is, and so on.
So I don't see where this should stop us from trying to form principles as an alternative to arguing that something must be or must not be true because of what someone wrote down millennia ago.
>There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of an modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.
> I've gained a huge knowledge of low level programming
This is really interesting. I'm at least passingly aware about high speed/frequency trading, but don't know much about the topic in depth.
How low is low in this field? I'm picturing RTOSes running AVX512-heavy hand-optimized code, FPGA farms, custom network ASICs... how overly optimistic am I being here? Heh
Of course, such a vision is very lop-sided, since HFT depends heavily on high-level intelligence. So perhaps it's realtime(ish) Linux and lots of GPUs.
Not realtime, because that only enforces 'precision', not low latency per se.
When I was working in this field, 2008-2011, there were guys doing fpgas, custom tcp/ip stacks, custom network drivers, dedicated networks and network cards for exchange data coming in and for going out. Mostly linux.
Hardware and lowlevel fun.
Allthough the fastest trades were always done by this one catalonian guy using Windows and .NET. I kid you not.
How does realtime enforce precision and not latency? I was referring to hard realtime.
And wow, so I wasn't too far off the mark. FPGAs and exotic networking. Huh.
I remember reading a story about a trading floor running on SQL Server, which was doing continuous throughput of 6000 queries/second. I didn't know enough at the time to discern what percentage of that was writes, but I think the point may have been that it was all of it. This was quite a few years ago. So perhaps Windows isn't actually the slowe{st,r} system out there for certain tasks.
As I've always understood (but I'm no RTOS expert) is that
RTOS does not guarantee LOWER latency. It guarantees A latency.
But again: not an RTOS expert. We had a lab that would constantly test configurations of hardware and software. And I remember them finding RTOS not being helpful.
That's right, real-time does not mean real-fast. In a hard real-time system, there is a deterministic worst-case bound for response times. "Real fast" CPUs, like the latest and greatest Intel CPUs, are actually pretty difficult to get deterministic bounds on. There are factors like unpreventable SMI events, possibility of L1/L2/L3 cache misses, etc. Often systems that need to be really deterministic, like say an engine controller in a car, run on simple CPUs like the Cortex-R series from ARM.
> "Real fast" CPUs, like the latest and greatest Intel CPUs, are actually pretty difficult to get deterministic bounds on. There are factors like unpreventable SMI events, possibility of L1/L2/L3 cache misses, etc.
Oh yeah. I remember reading something along the same lines about x86 a while back. I guess it didn't really go in properly, heh. Thanks
I'd say AVX512 is maybe not so great, because it can cook your CPU to the point where it slows down the clock. AVX2 probably required. But above all test. Have a bunch of compilers, read about all the options, see what is fastest.
FPGA feed handlers are common, but now that can also be rented.
Whether you're using GPUs depends on what you're up to. A lot of the strategy testing requires a bunch of computing power but not speed. You then take your conclusions and implement something fast that doesn't necessarily use the GPU.
Realtime, but soft real time. It's not like a vehicle ABS system where you have to brake within x milliseconds or someone gets killed. I've seen places where they see the degradation over time and eventually decide it's time for the newest hardware, again.
TIL about FPGA feed handlers. (http://redd.it/56tw4n, one of the first hits for the term, was mildly interesting)
Hmm, good point about not needing speed. Yeah, 24 execution units each capable of 3 billion ops/sec is probably more performance than is needed :)
Interestingly, I would have imagine HFT as needing ABS-style hard realtime. But no, it neither needs that nor is simple enough to be encapsulated by that sort of embedded-style approach.
I've tried to grapple with this notion over the last 10+ years. When I entered finance (I work for a derivatives trading desk), it was just as Facebook etc were just starting and were becoming the 'cool' places to work.
However, nowadays the banking tech sector here in the UK seems to be more mature. Our traders are quite often from a STEM background which gives them an understanding of technology, and they don't adhere to the dicky stereotype you often hear about. But most of all, I've always found my tech colleagues to be extremely smart but also down to earth, pragmatic and meritocratic which is the reason why I've ended up remaining in banking.
For instance, when trading in commodities like grain, and deploying a strategy to push the price up over a long time period (whether or not it's a single entity doing so or all traders in unison), people somewhere in the world aren't able to buy that grain and go hungry.
Same with all the foodstuffs. But what about other stuff, metals? What happens if you drive those prices up? Well, again, somewhere in the world some poor chap now cannot afford the metal roof sheet that goes on top of his shed, and he'll sleep under the stars.
I think most if not all finance trading negatively impacts the people that are too poor to even dream about finance trading. When there's a buck to be made in finance, there's always a sucker paying for it. Somewhere along the line that sucker becomes someone who isn't even in the whole financial trading circus, and he'll in the end foot the bill. It must be this way, because the financial industry itself doesn't produce or increase the value of things, it just manipulates the price tags.
The big players used to corner small markets which then led to extreme blowouts. It doesn't happen as much now as there are tighter regulations on max position sizes and the volumes are higher.
Significantly influencing the price of a commodity with liquid markets, such as corn or soybeans is pretty much impossible unless you're acting on behalf of a country or are able to control weather. The existence of liquid markets is beneficial for the producers and consumers as the price volatility is reduced and hedging becomes easier. I like to showcase the effect of information on price with the example of fish price in Kerala before and after the introduction of mobile phones to fishermen[1].
The financial world is evolving very quickly with various participants driven by different goals pulling the rug in opposite directions which theoretically should reduce volatility and spreads. However, when people get greedy - and there's a lot of that in finance - bad things happen, e.g. see the natural gas last week[2].
> The existence of liquid markets is beneficial for the producers and consumers as the price volatility is reduced and hedging becomes easier.
Yeah, that's a nice fairy tale. It isn't true though. It's criminally untrue.
I can't eat volatile grain, nor hedged grain. I just eat grain. At a price I can afford, today and tomorrow, not bankrupting me in the process. When you're hungry you really don't care about all the financial jargon. You care about price.
Traders cannot make a profit if they don't manipulate the price. Simple, if a trader always sold for the same price he bought for he wouldn't make any money. So price goes up, trader has profited from the grain I eat, and has taken a few cents out of my pocket. And I don't even trade. I just live on a dollar day in a shithole somewhere.
If everybody bought just the grain they needed to eat, and every grain producer simply put their product on the market for people to buy, without a "liquid global market" and price index, without traders in the middle wanting to profit from it, my food would be affordable. But because the market bets on a price rise in the future, even though the bad weather hasn't materialized yet, my food is unaffordable.
In financial, when someone profits, someone hurts. And the one that hurts is almost always not even in the game.
> Significantly influencing the price of a commodity [...] is pretty much impossible unless you're acting on behalf of a country or are able to control weather.
No. A market can do that by itself. It's what all those terms bullish and bearish and stuff are for. Markets can drive up commodity prices like a rocket. Bad weather coming? "Let's buy all the grain everybody! Guaranteed profit! Just ignore the starving people over there, they'll go away fast enough." And buy the way, all those think tanks and the pentagon predicting a shortage of every natural resource in the near future, that's not going to influence the price at all, right? Great example of how a country manipulates commodity prices btw.
Financial trade is just people profiting from people who are worse off to begin with. And don't start about how nowadays regulations are much tighter and all that, it's just not true. Everybody always says that in times when stuff is stable, but as soon as something big happens everybody starts the "nobody could have forseen this" dance followed by the too-big-to-fail entities being saved by the govt and the bill footed to the people.
This position is further supported by the reality of real estate speculation: in London, in Silicon Valley, you can count the housing units that are owned by extremely wealthy capital holders, and kept empty because the increase in value will exceed any profits taken from filling them (minus the costs of maintaining them).
That's the market actively destroying the fundamental purpose of a good because the dynamics of its value are able to bring more profit than using the good for its existential purpose. If that can happen to housing, it can happen to anything. BurnGpuBurn is absolutely correct here.
Real estate is rather different from the commodities markets, though: It's most definitely not a commodity (if you don't count things like mortgage-backed securities, anyway), and the markets are frighteningly illiquid. There are things like futures and options on real estate, but they operate very differently from your average put on hard white winter wheat.
There's an argument, not entirely (as far as I can tell) unreasonable, that at least some trading firms - the market makers - are benefitting the small folks in these markets. The argument goes that they do siphon profits out of the market, but it's mostly the profits of other financial firms. What they're ultimately nabbing is profits that come from information asymmetry, and that asymmetry usually benefits hedge funds more than farmers. So hedge funds make less money, yeah, but the impact on farmers is greater price stability, which is a benefit to them.
By extension, the implication is that, when hedge fund managers complain loudly about high frequency trading, it's crocodile tears.
And the irony is these bubble markets invariably collapse, because speculation is not a good foundation for sustainable profit.
The opportunity costs of prioritising the financial industry over other activities are almost incalculably huge. Bubbles aren't the only problem. The industry has cannibalised top talent and kept it from working on useful problems, which has created a huge deficit in future potential.
> Yeah, that's a nice fairy tale. It isn't true though. It's criminally untrue.
I can't eat volatile grain, nor hedged grain. I just eat grain. At a price I can afford, today and tomorrow, not bankrupting me in the process.
I think you two are talking about different things. The comment you're responding to is talking about the price discovery and liquidity facilitated through trading. You're (correct me if I'm wrong) talking about how physical commodities are treated as abstractions, which doesn't help e.g. a farmer.
But it does help producers of commodities - they can hedge against (for example) crop failures. And it helps consumers by driving down the price and making the price more predictable. Futures in particular are very helpful for producers.
This is obviously not a perfect process. But I think it's really unfair to call it a fairy tale, or to say that traders are manipulating the price. In an abstract or purely literal sense they are; but in the malicious, legal sense of markets they are not (at least not in the aggregate).
With respect, your last paragraph sounds like an oft-repeated narrative about the financial industry which - though it has kernels of truth - does not charitably reflect the full picture. Finance is not an unmitigated good, but comments like yours which present it as an unmitigated bad are also off the mark.
This is the whole problem in a nutshell. People spinning a fairy tale about "price discovery" or "liquidity" or "abstractions" like it represents something real, and not something specifically so because of how we implemented our financial system, or terminology specifically invented to create that system.
Posing those things as separate, saying "price discovery" and "liquidity" are different from "how physical commodities are treated as abstractions" is just muddying the waters. They're part of the same slang of the system.
The farmer doesn't care if somebody plays Farmville and treats in game abstractions as though they were his real physical produce. Who cares.
But the farmer does care when a lot of people trade in what he produces, and all those traders act like they're playing f-ing Farmville with virtual goods. In reality that trading influences the price the farmer gets paid and the price the consumer has to pay. Big time. Tell me again how it's just an abstraction. The supermarket doesn't accept my abstract money unfortunately.
That farmer worked hard for that grain you know, why do you think it's suddenly morally okay if you tell yourself nice stories about "liquidity" and "abstractions" and "price discovery" while you just want to make a buck on the farmers grain without putting in the labour yourself.
I don't give a hoot that you tell yourself that you're trading in an abstraction of grain to make yourself feel good about your actions. I just see the price of grain go up and my family going hungry, despite the fact that traders keep telling themselves it's all "funny goods that don't really exist"
> But it does help producers of commodities - they can hedge against (for example) crop failures.
I can see how it does, but honestly, that's one of the worst solutions to that problem. I think crop failure is a problem for everyone not just the farmer (we all have to eat, right?), so a solution that involves everyone instead of letting the farmer fend for himself would be preferable, because when the guy needs to fend for himself he'll fall prey to someone offering him a very volatile, hedged, and abstract "solution" to his problems.
A simple granary (sized to community) and enough cash to resow next year is usually enough. No virtual, hedged, liquid or funny stuff needed. It's as old as the hills as well, failing crops have been dealt with by humanity successfully in many civilizations through out history. Without a financial system that requires the farmer to bet on the price of grain next year, I might add.
With respect, your last paragraph sounds like you get tired of the argument, but, respectfully, you don't give me any reason not to believe "finance" in it's current form is one of the most evil thing humanity has ever come up with.
Are you saying the financial system is why we've moved away from subsistence farming, and that this is a bad thing? I'm having a hard time figuring out what, exactly, the world you'd prefer would look like.
Note: I am not a finance person, so please correct me if I'm misunderstanding something.
My understanding is that in futures markets, you make money by predicting what the price of something will be at a time in the future.
Let's say you know of a new battery technology that is much more efficient than anything we have today. Let's further say that this type of battery uses a lot of copper. You think that this will massively increase the amount of copper needed.
In this case, you buy a future (enter a contract) saying you will buy 250,000 tons of copper in January 2020 for $3.20 / lb (which is considerably higher than the price of copper today). Someone with a copper mine can take the other side of that contract and expand their operation (buy equipment, hire workers), knowing that in January of 2020 they will be able to sell that copper at a higher price, and expand their operations.
If the price of copper goes up, in 2020 you buy all of that copper from the mine, resell it, and make a ton of money. The owner of the mine makes a modest profit.
If the price of copper goes down, in 2020 _you still have to buy all of that copper from the mine_, and you lose a ton of money. The owner of the mine makes a modest profit.
You will only enter into such a contract if you have (or think you have) information that the person you are making a contract with does not have, thus allowing them to act on that information sooner and without risk. If your information is wrong, you are the person who loses out, not the person you contracted with, so you're taking on all of the risk for some of the possible benefits.
> A simple granary (sized to community) and enough cash to resow next year is usually enough. No virtual, hedged, liquid or funny stuff needed. It's as old as the hills as well, failing crops have been dealt with by humanity successfully in many civilizations through out history. Without a financial system that requires the farmer to bet on the price of grain next year, I might add.
If you know that the crops are likely to fail, you can buy futures in grain. It's the ultimate "put your money where your mouth is". If you buy grain futures, you are saying "There will be a crop failure. Plant more grain. I will cover the downside if I'm wrong." Thus you make the crop failure less impactful by prompting action earlier.
I agree that a simple granary is _usually_ enough. But a simple granary plus a futures market will be enough even more often.
The futures market comes from the fact that some people are trading actual beans by growing, selling, shipping, buying, or cooking them.
They are typically willing to pay for price insurance to reduce their financial risk. (that could close your factory because of the weather, etc)
(If they trade with other countries they are typically also willing to pay for currency insurance)
At that point a secondary market emerges with arbitrages between different market and points in time.
So far this is to the benefit of everyone. Farmers and Buyers get more stable prices.
This secondary market pins into tertiary markets where you can try to outsmart other players, and to the extent that manipulation is possible it will push back into the primary price or more probable the "insurance" cost. This cost is paid by Joe Random.
This is probably not beneficial but unavoidable and acceptable for having access to price insurance.
A frictionless market with a lot of liquidity should (in theory) result in rapid, accurate and transparent price discovery, which in turn should result in more optimal asset allocation, which in turn should result in people being able to get what they want at a lower price.
In practice, many markets are far from frictionless, and far from liquid, and pricing far from transparent, which is where most (all?) of our problems come from.
The best (and most ironic) example comes from the financial services industry itself: Although markets are the daily bread of the industry, it is ironic that the market for financial services is opaque and noncompetitive. How else could such profits be sustained? How else could the two and twenty compensation convention survive, if it weren't for the fact that the industry acts as an unofficial cartel?
When we complain about financial services, we often forget that the rhetoric of many free-market neoliberals is pure hypocrisy: what they practice is 180 degrees apart from what they preach.
> Traders cannot make a profit if they don't manipulate the price.
Is that supposed to be obvious? It seems very not-obvious to me: e.g., if a trader has no ability at all to manipulate the price, but is able to predict future prices better than anyone else can, then they can make a shedload of money by doing it. (The market will respond to their trades, which I suppose is a kind of manipulation, but that reduces their ability to profit.)
Maybe it's true in practice that no one can actually make money by predicting future price movements better than other people do, and that the only way to succeed is market manipulation. If so, it would be nice to see some evidence.
(There are other options besides "win by manipulating markets" and "win by being good at predicting on account of being extra-smart": for instance, "win by being good at predicting by means of illegal insider trading". That has ethical problems of its own, but they're very different problems from those of market manipulation.)
If the market bets on future grain price increases and makes grain more expensive before the bad weather materializes then sure, that's bad for people trying to buy grain. (Though presumably it's good for farmers.) But that same process of prediction, at least if it works -- which presumably it does, somewhat, else no one would be trying to do it -- also means that once the bad weather does materialize the prices will be lower than they otherwise would have been, because the market can predict that the weather won't always be bad just as well as it can predict that the weather will be bad one day. So, at least when the market is doing what it's meant to, the highest grain prices get reduced and the lowest ones get increased. It's not obvious that that's bad for those not-even-in-the-game people.
(The market will make mistakes, sometimes big ones. In that case, grain may get super-expensive and people will suffer or even die. That's very bad. But it's not specifically a finance problem. Grain can get super-expensive because of mistakes made by farmers or meteorologists, too.)
> Financial trade is just people profiting from people who are worse off to begin with.
There's truth in that. But -- ignoring actual market manipulation, which I appreciate you regard as a major activity of the finance industry -- when someone makes a profit out of your being worse off, they make you better off in the process. Suppose some guy on Wall Street figures out that X is going to get more expensive. You own X but haven't figured it out because you don't have Wall Street's insider knowledge or supercomputers or whatever. So you sell X to Wall Street Guy, and X gets more expensive, and Wall Street Guy makes a profit that you missed out on. Sad. But Wall Street Guy didn't force you to make that trade! Presumably you sold X because you didn't want it any more, or you needed the money. Without Wall Street Guy in the picture, you'd have sold it anyway, and got (very slightly) less for it. So, sure, Wall Street Guy is better off, and you're sad that you missed out -- but you were always going to miss out, and you are a tiny bit better off because Wall Street Guy was there bidding against other people to buy X from you.
I dunno; maybe in practice Wall Street Guy has to do a load of much shadier stuff than merely predicting how the price of X is going to change, and maybe that ends up hurting you. Maybe in practice Wall Street Guy's attempts to react quickly to new information destabilizes things more than his ability to react quickly stabilizes them. But these seem like complicated questions whose answers need a deep examination of the world's financial systems, rather than pointing to a few specific cases where bad things happened and claiming that "traders can't make a profit if they don't manipulate the price".
While there is considerable truth to what you say, it's not the whole truth. Food is a bad example, anyway: it's cheaper now than it has ever been.
"If everybody bought just the grain they needed to eat, and every grain producer simply put their product on the market for people to buy, without a "liquid global market" and price index, without traders in the middle wanting to profit from it, my food would be affordable."
Well, yes, but the grain would be in Saskatchewan rotting and you'd be wherever you are starving.
Worldwide trade existed and worked quite well long before our current financial system. I don't get why on would believe that without Wall Street the world would stop to function. Part of the fairy tale I guess.
> Traders cannot make a profit if they don't manipulate the price.
Traders aren't the only reason prices move.
Clearly a wide spread crop failure would also increase grain prices.
You can still make money as a trader if you do a better job at predicting such events than others.
> If everybody bought just the grain they needed to eat, and every grain producer simply put their product on the market for people to buy, without a "liquid global market" and price index, without traders in the middle wanting to profit from it, my food would be affordable
This is false.
Commodities futures markets exist precisely so the price of bread stays stable and relatively risk-free for a year at a time. The big players are not traders - they are companies that work in grain, use grain, produce grain, etc.
As for markets creating money by driving up prices - this doesn't really happen. You can make money when prices go up or down, and nobody really has the size or the stomach to try and corner a market (which is also illegal). Typically these efforts fail miserably and lose the trader a lot of money.
Countries manipulating prices is a totally different matter, than "markets".
I'd think hard about it before you attack commodities markets as the enemy of food prices, and do a bit of digging as to the actual purpose of those markets.
Go ahead - sell a couple hundred thousand pounds of grain. "Simply" put it on the market... how do you do that reliably? How can you plan as a farmer ? Budget for seed, etc?
I think commodities futures markets exist so that the normal commodities markets don't screw everybody over too much.
You're totally right about there being a few big players in production and so on. That's part of the problem. Because every farmer has had to operate and compete in this insane globally connected commodities market, what we're left with now after decades is a few big players. That's what you get when a German farmer has to compete with the US farmer, the Chinese farmer, and the Russian farmer, all the others and vice versa. Everybody loses and gets bought up by the bigger fish. That's a symptom of this market though, not a cause. And in my eyes, it's not a very good symptom either.
> Go ahead - sell a couple hundred thousand pounds of grain. "Simply" put it on the market... how do you do that reliably? How can you plan as a farmer ? Budget for seed, etc?
Well, I wouldn't know how of course, but that's not the point. Humanity has done the grain thing successfully, on large scales and over long time periods, multiple times in the past. Without a commodities futures market to keep prices stable.
I'm just saying this isn't the only way to do trade, and in a lot of ways, it's a very bad way to do trade.
“Done the grain thing successfully” seems like an odd statement. I don’t know how successful we were at a secure supply chain for grain before national markets were established, but then again we also didn’t have the technology to enable anything but more local markets until the railroad crossed America.
As for competition internationally and “big fish” - I’d say that some of this is due to economies of scale in agriculture especially as automation reduces labor required per acre - but this is also other asymmetries and market factors. State subsidies is one huge factor that incentivizes owning land that doesn’t even produce. Further, as farmers retire their kids want less and less to do with ag and sell the land to bigger companies (or maybe to a housing developer).
I’m not saying “the market” is perfect but it didn’t necessarily get this way by accident either. It serves an important function across the board for all parties involved - including consumers.
> Because every farmer has had to operate and compete in this insane globally connected commodities market, what we're left with now after decades is a few big players. That's what you get when a German farmer has to compete with the US farmer, the Chinese farmer, and the Russian farmer, all the others and vice versa.
I must confess to some confusion. I thought you wanted affordable food. Do you think that you'd get affordable food if you were only ever able to purchase from the providers in your immediate vicinity, who won't face price competition from farmers elsewhere who might be more efficient?
Traders typically provide two prices - the price they will buy at and the price they will sell at. Their profit comes from the spread between. A good trader does not care if the market moves up or down, they make their money on the spread, a trader typically wants as little inventory as possible.
The people who cause markets to move are not the traders, they are the people who buy from and sell to the traders.
Investors also don't produce any value. They get to decide where value should be created. But take all the benefits from it. Other investors however are waiting to eat these investors.
By this logic, every commodity should only ever be sold at cost. Or, better, for free! Any price higher obviously means some poor person somewhere can't get as much as they need.
Now, this is obviously a silly hypothetical. Very few people are going to produce sheet metal for that poor chap if they can't cover their costs plus at least some profit, leading to nobody having any sheet metal. Now the whole world is worse off and lacking sheet metal, and for what?
Some things in the finance industry are valuable. Insurance and its ability to spread risks springs to mind readily. The joint stock company, and its ability to pool resources to grand ends, has unleashed incredible forces.
I worked for the biggest market maker in Europe for three years, from 2008 through to 2011.
My experience disagrees with every statement you made, except the job fulfilling part.
Making markets does not add any value to anyone other than the marketmakers and the stock exchanges.
The only decent thing about those places is that they usually do not beat around the bush. "Does your idea help us be faster? Got proof? Go implement. Money is no objection."
Morals did not exist in that world when I was there.
What I was doing, was helping the 0.01% consolidate their power and wealth at the cost of all other living beings on this one habitable planet.
Then I stopped kidding myself and got out of my golden cage.
Optiver, I presume? I was almost lured into working for them too, being blinded by the high tech playground that it seemed to be. Regarding the adding value, they defend their right to exist as "because of us, instruments are priced properly everywhere and that's good for everyone", isn't it?
I'm sure they do, and that's an axiomatic statement that can be horribly, catastrophically wrong but makes them feel better about their lives.
Never underestimate the very human emotional motivation of coming up with a pleasing rationalization. Just because someone earnestly says 'we are helping, so much!' doesn't mean they're correct.
To me this argument always came across as fabricated and empty.
I have seen too many examples internally at that place, where the (to me) obvious moral choice was neglected or even laughed at.
The "because of us, instruments are priced properly everywhere and that's good for everyone" is interesting.
Does that result solely exist because of us making a market? What is 'properly priced' exactly and why would it be a Bad Thing if it were less 'properly priced'? And why is this even a goal that should be pursued? And should that goal be pursued at all (and I do mean ALL) cost?
Those questions were never answered to my satisfaction.
Exactly, that was my experience too. People who were very capable of analytical rigor around cost/benefit tradeoffs suddenly became very handwavey when it came time to analyze whether the company generated enough social benefit to justify level of profit.
One of my ex was a commodity trader in another big player, Cargill. She was not the most moral being to start with (you simply can't be a successful moral trader, period), but even for her trading with edible commodities was the worst moral shithole - your success would easily help cause hundreds/thousands of deaths in some famine/disaster stricken place, usually in Africa.
She was in energy and oil instead - her success would mean that down the line, we all would pay up a bit for her success (selling expensively when demand was high). And also with oil, she would be trying to create as cheap gas/diesel from oil as possible (meaning passing regulations in some 3rd world country), it took her easily 10 fails to get just slightly above the (very low) bar. The result - engines destroyed over time with crappy fuel, environment polluted with less-than-ideal material burned. But nobody gave a nano-fraction of a fck, it was Africa.
Yeah, traders, they think super high about themselves, most are properly broken human beings, a pure net loss for humanity
> Making markets does not add any value to anyone other than the marketmakers and the stock exchanges.
Could you elaborate on this statement? It is my understanding that the value market markers provide is liquidity and tighter spreads. Worst case, they pull orders when informed volume is detected, but then the book is no worse off than what it would be if the market makers weren't there.
Yes they provide liquidity. But that is not the reason traders become market makers.
The liquidity is something that the exchanges want so they can provide better services to their other users / customers.
What the market makers get in return is some privileges on the exchange, such as favorable credit exempts or short sale treatments. This depends on the exchange.
But being a marketmaker, basically obliging to be able to quote a price on anything and everything, is regarded as much as a nuisance as it is a benefit.
Liquidity reduces the cost of trading for everyone, which is something you can just empirically verify. What do we care what someone's motivation for doing it is? Presumably everyone's motivation in finance is to make money.
Not OP, but I think of jobs like theirs as being about marginal utility - how much better off is the world if trades are executed .001 seconds faster? It seems that for a lot of jobs the answer is not at all.
I don't want to just come out and say you're wrong bluntly but...well this debate has happened on HN many times. I'm a little shocked you worked in the industry and can seriously assert all marketing does is consolidate the power of the top n%. More than just about any other service in finance (except maybe credit/lending and consumer banking), market making drives prices down for everyone. It's a prime vehicle for delivering efficiency.
I can understand arguments that the work wasn't fulfilling, or you didn't enjoy your colleagues...but what you're saying seems to be incorrect, strictly speaking. Were you working in marketing making where most/all trades were OTC?
Well - ok - I may have overstated in that: Yes, market making provides more liquidity. Yes, it makes it more efficient. Yes, for everyone, not just the marketmakers and exchanges.
But no, this is not the reason marketmakers make markets.
They do this in order to make more profit.
The rest is a side effect that they happily spindoctor into their "raison d'etre".
The company I worked for is known for being the primary source of rich people in the Netherlands. And they keep getting richer. Very much the so-called 1%.
Except when the finance industry creates (directly or indirectly) a financial crisis like in 2008. Its the poor, that never stood to gain from the financial system in the first place, that end up hit the worst.
Many of them got to live in really big mcmansions they should not have been allowed to 'afford' for about 10 years. The labor spent building those houses could have been spent building twice as many small houses.
Those people got foreclosed. The banks got bailed out, took property off the market, and prevented the market to properly settle. Tons of people are still locked out of the market in order to protect everyone else’s “investment” by artificially propping up the value.
Wasn't the risk shared between those who got to live in mcmansions and those who gave them the money for that?
Why does one party get to reap all the benefits but pay none of the consequences?
Many people didn’t have this at all and we’re still very negatively impacted by the recession due to loss of employment or raised taxes (eg I personally did not benefit from the pre-recession as I was too young and my family wasn’t particularly well off nor had a mortgage and I entered the job market right in the midst of the recession and I was hit with an income levy introduced to bail the banks out — I was personally lucky as tech wasn’t particularly heavily affected but many people were not so lucky).
Perhaps. My point is that the poor or less well off get impacted by the bad effects without any of the good effects. For example, here, there was an income levy introduced to bail the banks out. For the less well off, that money has much more impact on their lives than on the rich, even though those people never stood to gain at all.
That’s besides the point, which is that these people never stood to gain anything, while the finance industry stood to gain and then when it messed up, the less well off still lost even if they didn’t take part in the game themselves.
Do you have any suggestions for someone who wants to get into the fintech space with no financial experience but 10-12 years of Enterprise software development/architecture and some management?
> We also try to turn money into more money, it's pretty much the game of life whether you play it or not.
That is definitely not the "game of life". Most business works by creating value for others. It's generally positive sum. Indeed, the only way people in zero-sum industries (e.g., betting, a lot of advertising, many kinds of finance) or negative-sum ones (e.g., scams) have anything to siphon off is because of people doing productive work.
One of reasons I'm most glad to get out of finance is that I could stop trying to justify it to myself. As Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
The brain does far, far more than marshal resources and distribute the where they are needed, which in essence is what the financial sector does for the economy.
I think it's a perfect analogy. From the point of view of a species as a whole, the majority of what we see as the brain's functions are only relevant because humans are amazingly inefficient compared to smaller organisms. We need our brains because our reproductive cycle produces "too big to fail" output.
Yes this analogy would work if every brain became a cancerous growth that realigned laws and basic pathways to serve the survival and growth of the brain, but this is not the case, the brain in the body has a maximum size (proportionality) and also serves the rest of the body. Not only the brain's satisfaction, but the skin, the gut, the sense organs all rely on the brain however the brain serves them primarily before serving "itself"
An organism's reproductive gain factor isn't that sensible a metric of its success. A better one is how adaptable it is.
Because of our brains, humans are extremely adaptable. Even with primitive technology we spread throughout the globe, and unlike wild cats or bears we haven't needed to speciate into each climate, develop camouflage fur, etc. The biological investment in an advanced brain gave us the opportunity to thrive everywhere.
Only the "brain" on your analogy is extremely inefficient at locating resources, and the people that compose it are utterly unsuited for that responsibility, driven by amoral greed (with no thought to other considerations), and in that place mostly by a mixture of birth and luck rather than competence.
It turns out that resource allocation tuned to maximize value outperforms resource allocation tuned for fairness in terms of material standard of living.
Not many non-UK (and even UK) people realize that the City of London is actually a separate entity from London. It has it's own administration, police force etc.
This seems like it should be an interesting curiosity to foreigners but is actually completely mundane to anyone from the US, where everything larger than a village is its own "city" with its own municipal government and - of course - at least one police force.
I don't know I think it'd be pretty interesting to find out that Wall Street is not actually part of NYC but has it's own police, government etc... purely for benefit of the banks.
You’re not getting it. “The City of London” is not what you think of as London. It’s a tiny square mile that is essentially sovereign and outside national law. Corporations are allowed to vote there and there are more corporations than people. It’s sort of like if you had Switzerland embedded in Manhattan.
I've been to the City of London many times (though I worked outside it, in Mayfair).
It's really not "essentially sovereign" or "outside national law" as you might argue of an embassy or a military base or even, say, the Channel Islands. People and businesses there are subject to all the laws of the land. Financial firms there are regulated by the FCA, which is based outside the City and appointed by the Treasury, definitely not by the City of London Corporation.
Prestigious financial firms have offices in the City because everyone else does, not because there's some legal or regulatory benefit from being incorporated there - again, very different from those who choose other Crown jurisdictions like Jersey or IOM or the Caymans.
You're right, that was more of a knee-jerk reaction to a statement that it's like regular city governments in the US. The truth is more subtle: the UK benefits from The City's position as a world financial centre, and so parliament is incentivized to give The City a large degree of independence when it comes to setting financial regulation. By keeping them at arm's length they can have their cake and eat it too by setting strict tax rules for the entire country, but leaving loopholes to allow all the international money to flow in.
You can replace "The City" by "the financial sector" here. Once again, the historical curiosity that the City of London has its own local government has nothing to do with the UK's approach to financial regulation. Barclays, Citigroup, and HSBC - all headquartered 3 miles to the east in Canary Wharf, like the FCA itself, instead of in the City - get just the same regulatory benefits and disadvantages as Lloyds or NatWest.
This is definitely not true. Maybe you confused it with Isle of Man or Channel Islands, which are crown dependencies with certain autonomy, often accused to be British tax havens.
That's why there's the Met police vs the City of London police, no? (I blame a wikipedia dive into policing in the UK for knowing that piece of trivia)
How do we know that? Consider that if there's a pattern of 'financial industry becomes the most powerful | financial industry arranges society to serve its interests | society collapses | end of history, not even records remain of the catastrophe (hey, keeping records detracted from profit-taking)' then we'd observe similar results.
Not sure how seriously I'm arguing that, but it does seem that if the situation was sustainable/survivable there would be records of previous instances of that situation.
Really? I personally believe that the Roman Republic would never have collapsed into Empire if not for the incredible destabilizing risk-rewarding weight of the Roman finance industry in the Republic’s final years.
As my father — a development economist — says, “We used to call it the ‘financial services industry.’ You can pinpoint when the US economy changed irrevocably when they dropped the pretence of serving and just became ‘finance.’”
Perfect. Yes, that's exactly my beef with it. Sort of like the difference between the views of running for office as public service vs seeking authority.
It's fairly obvious that speculation doesn't produce social value; and, if you take money to be a proxy for social value, which I think is a good idea, speculation is equivalent to printing money. It's a very pure the-rich-get-richer type of scheme. I dabble in retail trading fairly often, because I sometimes feel like if I have to produce capital, I might as well just "print it", so this is as much a criticisim of myself as of anyone else.
I can think of a few arguments, albeit with gaping holes, as to how money is a good proxy for social value, but would you mind expanding on that a little?
Also, I am curious as to what you mean when you refer to retail trading as printing money. Don't know anything about it (why I'm curious), but from what I have heard about trading in general, it seems to have some reasonable level of risk.
The classic example of the divide between social value and monetary value is volunteering. Volunteers create social value, often to the detriment of their financial standing. I know some people who would dedicate all their time to volunteering (they already dedicate at least half) if they didn't have to do gigs from time to time to make ends meet.
By retail trading, I meant that I'm not what you'd call a big-time trader. I use a broker that is available to retail clients (i.e. everyone). I didn't mean to imply that trading and speculation aren't risky. Trading is like printing money, because while you make money without producing any value, the guy next door makes money by actually producing something. Socially, it's freeloading, like stealing is freeloading. You get value, without providing value. A double-spend attack.
There seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of finance in this thread, even from those that have worked in financial companies.
"First, Finance" is an extremely nebulous term, encompassing many subfields.
At its core, a financial firm like a proprietary trading company that invests money creates value by attempting to optimize the allocation of capital.
Do we give money to Google and trust that they will turn it into something more or do we give it to Elon Musk?
It turns out that this is really hard to do. If this were easy, pro sports players wouldn't go broke funding terrible projects.
While they don't have a direct hand in product design, creation, or sales, they have an indirect one.
Of course, there are firms that really abstract themselves from this process and basically just play the market as a game, with 100% technical analysis and short term positions and no fundamental analysis.
As the OP, I should say that speculation can be harnessed to produce some social value. A publicly traded stock market is economically useful. Commodities markets, well run, smooth out price variation. Derivatives let people get rid of risk in their business. E.g., if you're a wheat farmer it's handy to be able to lock in a price for your wheat even before it's harvested. And if you're a bread maker, it's valuable to insulate yourself from market price swings.
That said, I believe the industry's total value to others could be produced at far, far less total cost than now. And a lot of those very smart, very motivated people could be out there actually creating value for others.
> I honestly think the finance industry could be half the size it is with no real harm to the rest of the economy.
With technology it should have shrunk by a couple of orders of magnitude. You don't need a room full of old men in green visors cranking away at adding machines to get anything done anymore. Instead technology has only made it bigger.
For someone like Warren Buffet, the money comes from enabling corporations that serve consumer interests — that’s going to be the case for anyone doing value investing or similar.
Other kinds of “finance” are more like playing poker where everyone is betting the public’s money.
I can believe someone new to finance didn’t think very hard about which kind of firm they were at.
Most businesses are positive sum. E.g., the sandwich shop down the street buys ingredients at X, puts in labor valued at Y, and sells me a sandwich for Z > X+Y. They have created value. (As have the the people doing the labor, because they took time valued at zero and turned it into marketable labor.)
Money is a representation of the value created by humans. That's why the government must continually increase the money supply [1]: if money's value is to stay stable relative to goods, the supply has to increase as society creates more value.
Finance is sometimes value creating. E.g., the sandwich shop owner is willing to pay the bank for transferring money from my account to theirs. But it can also extract rents (e.g., arbitrary or hidden fees) and be parasitic (as when banks speculate with money insured by society, like during the S&L crisis).
I should possibly have qualified your original 'lost' phrasing, but my point stands.
Yes, value is created, but money isn't, by the actions you describe.
If I 'value add' the ingredients of a sandwich, and then sell it to you, you still have to surrender (or lose) money.
Any sale of goods or services ideally involves both parties determining that the transaction is favourable to their interests -- but it's impossible to avoid the fact that the buyer will have less money as a result.
This isn't a bad thing. Arguably a strong indicator of the health of an economy is the agility of money / wealth within it. But your original observation was:
> But what I didn't understand was that mostly we made money when other people lost it.
... and that's an ineluctable outcome of any financial transaction.
If I give somebody $10 for a sandwich, I didn't lose the money. I traded it for something more valuable. If I spend 8 hours at work and get paid a day's wage, I didn't lose the time; I traded it for something more valuable. Value was created.
When two parties make a bet, though, one of them loses and one of them wins. The losing side doesn't say, "That's great because I now have this cup of coffee I value more." They just write it off as a loss.
When I worked for prop trading firms, in every trade we did one side of a trade won and the other lost. In working for real businesses, both sides of a trade mostly walk away winners. Hopefully this difference is clear to you; it's that distinction I was pointing at.
If you're trying to make some sort of narrow point about my use of the colloquial phrases "made money" and "lost money", I grant that I was indeed being colloquial. Strictly speaking, we also didn't actually make money; I am told only the Federal Reserve gets to make new dollars.
I'm not trying to make 'some sort of narrow point' around any colloquial vernacular.
Merely pointing out that any transaction involves a transfer, and your claim that some transactions are worse because someone has less money at the end of it, is perhaps missing the point.
Unless the people you were dealing with both went into the deal knowing which one would lose money - then it's comparable to your 'placing a bet' analogy.
Sure, I'm not doubting that it was (probably) ethically dubious - and kudos for not participating in that industry any longer.
As to:
> If I give somebody $10 for a sandwich, I didn't lose the money. I traded it for something more valuable.
- that's clearly not true.
You have ten fewer dollars than you did before the transaction.
Whether it's more valuable to you is very much subjective, though if you asked someone if they'd prefer $10 or a sandwich, most people would say the $10.
Between $100 and ten sandwiches, I'd suggest all would choose the money.
Conflating 'winners' with who came out ahead in terms of self-assessed value proposition of a particular transaction is to also miss the point.
> We turned a profit by being smarter or faster or luckier than the people we traded with.
As far as I can tell, this is at best semantic nonsense, and at worst wilful misunderstanding. I never claimed that "some transactions are worse because someone has less money at the end of it". If you read it that way, that's your error. You seem to be hung up on a very particular reading of "lose". It is not the reading I intend, and it's clearly not the reading most people take from it.
"Whether it's more valuable to you is very much subjective, though if you asked someone if they'd prefer $10 or a sandwich, most people would say the $10."
I would say it depends on whether I'm hungry or not.
I respect your opinion about the industry, but I'd encourage you to consider that you may be wrong about the financial sector not making anything better. That may be true about specific firms or pockets of the industry, but valuation, price discovery, liquidity, de-risking and credit are all legitimate benefits facilitated through financial activity.
I'm not arguing investment banks and hedge funds are an unmitigated good! But at minimum, finance (much like tech) is far too complex and mixed to be able to correctly say you're not making anything better if you work in it.
That being said, I can absolutely understand why you'd regret working at a specific firm in the industry.
I can definitely say I wasn't personally making anything better. Any liquidity our little prop trading firm was adding was at best epsilon.
I agree that the industry does produce some value. But ask yourself honestly: what percentage of any given person's time and energy is devoted to value creation? To what extent are they sure their day's work is value-creating rather than value-subtracting for the economy as a whole? Maybe things have changed, but at the time very few people even cared about those answers. Those that did thought about the question very little, and with none of their customary rigor.
The reason I said the industry could be half its size (rather than eliminating it entirely) is that I know it produces some value to the rest of the economy. But if it could be half its size (or smaller) then it's perfectly plausible the average person in finance is a net drain on society.
It's interesting to try to compare finance and tech on whether or not they are beneficial to society. epsilon improvements can be quite useful to society. Clearly some amount of both is useful, but I'd argue that finance has run its course in the sense that pretty much all incremental "improvements" made by finance are basically hurting society.[1]
This is because while things like market making are obviously necessary, you've got to ask yourself: does making trades on a timescale of microseconds or even less as opposed to making trades on a timescale of minutes lead to better outcomes in the real economy?
The answer is almost certainly "no", but at the same time, trading firms that are engaged in zero-sum games are still able to siphon a lot of money from the rest of the economy that goes into just that. So the net outcome for society of that is clearly negative.
We shouldn't be kidding ourselves, though. A lot of the incremental improvements in tech these days are also net negatives to society. Mostly this is because so much of tech is driven by advertisement.
However, there are large parts of tech, including some very traditional parts, in which improvements are clearly beneficial to society, e.g. when it comes to building more powerful and efficient hardware.
[1] An exception might be entirely new sub-sectors of finance that explicitly target beneficial outcomes. Climate finance comes to mind.
> I honestly think the finance industry could be half the size
Me too; but then I think of all those unsavoury traders who would have to get other jobs, eventually inflicting hell on the innocent, and the prospect of keeping them where they are, flies to flypaper, becomes more appealing. (disclaimer: I work in the sector at large)
The sad part for me is that I don't think they (all) start out unsavory. Our company had a lot of fresh-faced college grads flowing into it. They turned up just because they were bright and ambitious and finance looked like a promising career.
I know some of them have gone on to do good things elsewhere. What if more of them did?
While not every business is a zero-sum game, a lot of them are. If I open a coffee shop near another coffee shop and run them out of business by serving better coffee, that's not unethical, it's just capitalism working as intended. What you're probably referring to is what's called rent-seeking. Rents can be described as unproductive profits. Money made through obscure technical means, market position, abuse of trust, etc and not providing a valuable service. Big financial services firms are always a mix of productive services and rent-seeking. It's not really unethical, but it's ethically dubious and it's also considered mandatory in order to stay in business and please the shareholders.
I appreciate the comment, but that coffee shop is not zero sum in two important ways.
One, if you're selling coffee every day to people, then you are creating value for all the people who say, "Hey, this was a good purchase. I'll come back tomorrow." So it's definitely not zero sum in the main economic sense. Value is created with every cup.
Two, if you open up next near another coffee shop, that's still not zero sum. More people will get coffee. Your better coffee means that people will get more for their money. Maybe your competition will force neighboring businesses to up their game. And even if another business ends up closing and exactly no new customers get served, that's still not zero sum, in that you're providing a better product.
I agree big financial firms are a mix of productive and rent-seeking behavior, although a lot of their nominally productive behavior is just helping other rent-seekers, so I think the truly positive-sum service is pretty small. I also disagree that rent-seeking is ethical. That some in the industry consider it "mandatory" is pure self-justification, a way of passing the moral buck.
In my most recent job search, I told exactly one company to (politely) fuck off and never contact me again. It was Goldman Sachs. I think what I actually told them was something to the effect of “GS represents everything that’s wrong with the economy today and should have gone out of business in 2008.” I don’t regret it.
It doesn't matter that you made money because someone lost SOME. Both market participants receive what they wanted to out of it.
For example, you take linear bets - going short a stock - and you bought to cover at a profit to someone that was maybe long and selling at a loss. You say wow so zero sum.
But little did you know, the person that was long was actually collecting premium from their covered call options trade, and is still getting what they wanted out of it. They may not have begun losing more money for their tolerance for another 2% or 10% drop in the stock. They would come out net positive until then, even though their MAXIMUM potential profit was still more.
Both participants still got what they want, and you wouldn't be the wiser - unless of course you were trading products that had no derivatives market. But even then you wouldn't know, because they could be written OTC.
I regret every RPA project we have to build. It’s just so stupid and avoidable by only buying things with APIs.
But it’s apparently the future of a lot of IT, because people aren’t going to stop buying really shitty software or start making architectural demands.
It’s going to be an amazing amount of technical debt in a lot of sectors though.
I mean, some of the integrations I build before my venture into management, decades ago are still running without the need for maintenance. Yet the most recent RPA project my team build has already used 6 hours of maintenance this week.
Well it’s a range of things, this week it was a SAP update that changed the necessary flow because the render speeds changed in the SAP ui.
A month ago it was a change to the invoices from a specific company.
Every week it’s the business noticing an edge case, or something that could be better. We pile these up, but you’ll rarely have a RPA process that handles 100% so there is an never ending race to get closer and closer. ;)
In one of our processes that handles a major process related to payment, we were able to automate the work of two financial workers, but the cost was that it required a new RPA worker to handle the errors, and a RPA worker is more expensive than two financial workers. It was still a gain, because the RPA worker also does other RPA things, but it’s a good illustration of how terrible RPA is at automation compared to the other tools in the toolbox.
Right on. In many ways, makes a lot of sense: UI automation is a quick-to-implement fix which addresses symptoms, with maintainability being the tradeoff. API integration (a la Mulesoft) can require an overhaul in a whole philosophy of organization and delivery, even though it's fundamentally more sustainable.
How do you test RPA bots - just wait for them to break?
If you're interested, it'd be great to hear more about what you think of other tools in the toolbox. Email is on my profile.
What's cool about UI integration is that the interface is uniform - it's text and clickS and keystrokes.
If you are integrating using something like Sikuli, which works by actually looking at the screen pixels (rather than DOM elements, which are an implementation detail), you can use 'smart' techniques like OCR and synonym lists to make a change resistant client.
I was a technical director for about 5 weeks. It was a huge opportunity. But quickly, I found out we had more customers sueing us than paying us, for promising stuff (before my time) the company couldn't possibly deliver (no one could) on time and budget.
I worked as a data scientist trying to figure out how to raise gas prices to the maximum price the market would bear (experimentation mainly). Began to feel really uncomfortable when I realized this wasn't improving society in any meaningful way so I noped out of there once I found a new job.
Of course maybe if we can figure out how to raise & be ok with higher gas prices, maybe we can finally get out of the Middle East... Though I'm sure that's not quite what you were doing :)
Higher gas prices == more efficient usage of gas. And more incentive to move away from gasoline. Isn't that good for the environment and for society in general?
High prices always disproportionally affect the lower classes which are also the most dependant on motor transport to get to their jobs (tend to live outside cities too). As such you're pricing a lot of people out of being afford to drive to work while giving them alternatives that are only affordable to the most wealthy (Teslas are still a luxury product only affordable to a low % of population).
In the short term expensive gas does hurt the lower classes. In the long term, the need for every household to own and maintain at least one automobile is a much bigger drag on the finances of the poor than the well-off.
If higher gas prices lead to more efficient vehicles, and a shift to less driving and personal car ownership, it's a bigger win financially for poorer households than some cheap gas in the here and now. I also acknowledge that it's easy for me to say this because higher gas prices don't affect me much personally - I might feel differently if they did.
I think we as an industry need to stop stretching for excuses for why greedy behavior might unintentionally do something good. It's not a worthwhile cause and it doesn't justify the behavior if the "good" is a theoretical and unintended side effect. The "good" being theorycrafted on the nature of this product is indeed both highly speculative, oversimplifying of the human cost of changes to this economic model, and is obviously not the purpose of the product. That "good" is contingent on and integrated with a number of factors too complicated to boil down to a single sentence: it's something that looks good when oversimplified and makes ourselves feel better if we try not to think too hard about it.
When we ask ourselves whether a product we work on is ethical or not, we have to account for the intent of the product, and not merely stretch to find theoretical ways to justify it to ourselves. We do need to think about unintended side effects - particularly when they could harm others - but we shouldn't be using our theoretical and simplified best-case scenario of unintended side effects as a way to justify the intention and practical use cases of the products we make.
We should ask ourselves: if the "good" of an unintended side effect could be cut out of a product and we'd still make it, is it actually the good of a product? Or is it an excuse we're making to ourselves to make us feel better?
I worked as a sysadmin in a startup which developed ContentID contender (video recognition). Fun fact: half of the IT department was using torrents with no regrets.
You are right. But as someone who probably would fall in the same category, let me tell you why I'll always put a great weight on the "money paid" metric when evaluating alternative jobs: I'm reasonably young (second to last generation of professionals?), and most of us have grown up with a quite nihilistic view of things (prob. due to overexposure to media and dire economic conjectures). A fair share of us has 0 interest in their jobs. That's not defining of our lives as it was for past generations. It's just a tool to enable us to do the things that matter. And the more money we can make, the better. Would we love a job we love? Of course. But any job sucks in some measure(hence why you get paid for it), so might as well get paid a lot for it and retire at 45. Of course there is a line somewhere (actual harm caused by your products), but copyright infringement against big labels is hardly over that line.
I only regret experiencing poor leadership styles (but am also thankful to see them.) The product is a result of the team led by leadership so any and all of the factors in there ultimately lead to what is built.
Reading the other posters though I can see that there are some unethical products being built where you can impact someone else negatively.
i worked on an ad campaign for an international company and was instructed by my client to mislead customers and hide important information.
i quit the job at TBWA advertising and switched to the startup world.
i’m not getting paid the same, but my conscience sleeps well enough.
I think in tech it is hard to see how the product you build is going to be used sometimes. If I work on something in AWS say EMR which enables the "evil corp" to analyze data and influence election outcome. But the same platform can be used by CERN to further their research work.
OTOH if I work for Shell or Dow I am pretty clear who I am working for.
I once worked on an analytics product for a company. The product would get the details of your machine's hardware details, commonly used softwares, most visited websites and so on.
This product was installed on selected list of people who where made aware of the data being collected.
I previously worked for a company in internet dating and I implemented a matching algorithm that actively segregated people according to their language, country, income, race and education. For example we would match people differently if they were assumed poor, rich, black, white, etc
I don't regret working there per see, I didn't make the rules, but it opened my eyes that the dream of everyone being treated equally on the internet is dying. Before, you could assume the internet wouldn't discriminate because it's digital and detached from your physical self, but more and more companies have profiles about you and your experience will vary depending on who you are.
Statistically it might make sense to segregate and discriminate groups of people. But morally?
It's like how the public wouldn't really accept that if statistics show that all planes are blown up by people from country X, everyone from country X is thoroughly searched and no one else.
Also note that in case of the dating app, if you assume people like X want to date with people like Y and you don't allow them to match anyone else you, you can never validate/improve your assumptions.
Well, depending on how the service marketed itself, I don't think there's anything wrong with doing that. If people want to use an internet dating site to find someone they are happy with, and if they are more likely to be happy with someone similar to them, then you are providing what they asked for. If they find they aren't happy with similar people, I'm sure there are other dating services which deliver that specifically.
It's not our job and it's not right to force our values on others because we think it will make them better people when that's not what they asked for. That said, I think it would be different if a news organization was doing the equivalent, and serving items that confirmed prior ideas. the difference there is that in one case they are asking to be happy, and in the other they are asking to be informed. This does of course assume people actually want to be informed and news isn't just an entertainment medium for the customer as well now...
This was my line of reasoning as well. You can't tailor an entire business around the 1% of cases where a sheep herder in Asia and a multimillionaire from Texas really hit it off.
In this example it sounds like the app was making assumptions and pre-segregating matches based on implied attributes rather than specified preferences.
So even though a user might only say "show me matches between 18-35 years old" the app would apply additional filtering based on the user's supplied attributes in an effort to improve "relevance".
I'm not saying you're wrong, or that this was wrong/right but I did want to clarify what the OP seemed to be saying.
It makes business/economical sense, and some of the algorythm's rules were logical (ie : have people of same country/language meet), but I think the way we discriminated on assumed income and race to be a bit more questionable.
Another thing is that they used to bought ads targeting female users in developing countries to "feed them" to users of richer countries hoping to bait them to pay money (to send digital gifts for example).
The connection criteria should go deeper than the list the OP mentioned. Real connections happen when your principles, beliefs, goals and dreams resonate with another. Your skin colour, location etc. can be completely irrelevant in that equation.
Were the OP working on an algorithm that would go 'next level' and extract those qualities from the base data given, then I am sure that would have been a far more rewarding endeavour than just matching skin colour or income level.
(Note: I am of sub-continental heritage and married to an Australian girl whom I met while going to ballroom dancing lessons).
I'm not saying its not possible, but the list of aggravating factors and even the definition of romance or love would all fall into the equation and quickly turn the service worthless. If a significant user base can find what they need with the minimal and most topical filters it wouldn't make sense to dilute it any further.
“everyone being treated equally on the internet” never heard of this phenomenon before.
Stray thought:
if you are not anonymous - you will be subject to discrimination.
if you are anonymous and others not - you will be subject to discrimination.
if everyone is anonymous you can’t discriminate - but its not very useful.
I have a bit of an hard time articulating what I mean (ESL), but what I mean is that these days depending on what profile companies have on you (your assumed interests, income, education etc), your experience on the internet, apps will differ more and more. In order to improve retention and engagement, they will try to tailor the experience and give you what they think you want instead of letting you get it yourself, effectively creating a bubble around you.
In the context of my comment (internet dating company), it means even when you try to meet new people, we will make broad assumptions and present you people we think will match well with your assumed race, income, education. All for upping that retention a few .1%
In earlier internet, the experience on a single website, for example, was the same for everybody, no matter your demographic. I understand why it evolved, but I regret it a bit.
I'd say there is at least some correlation. Not a great indicator, but better than nothing and helpful since it is in the user agent. They aren't curing cancer, so accuracy is less important.
I find this so relatable, Instagram and YouTube especially, have refined intense recommendation algorithms that make me wonder.... Are they just showing me what I want to see?
The thought of "original internet equality" brought me back to the days where you would land on obscure forums via a search engine, and you would find posts by accounts like "str_master", "jsmith", "quizboy".
The most you could discriminate them by was their number of posts on that forum, moderator privileges etc.
Not useful? It was tremendously useful when I was a kid. I could participate in online discussions, make friends, learn things, and have all manner of fun without worrying about someone persecuting me over my age. No one ever felt any need to prod me about my gender, age, nationality, religious persuasion, or anything like that. Communities were organized around topics, and reputation was built from the ground up. It was quite useful, I assure you.
Black people are more likely to date black people, white people are more likely to date white people, and rich people are more likely to date rich people. By tailoring the matching algorithm to take this into account, you increase the chance your users will find a good match. This seems user friendly to me. Were you also offended that the algorithm matched people differently based on age?
Maybe this is my own hubris speaking, but over my career as a dev, I've worked on a few projects that lacked vision. I wouldn't say I regret the work because I learned quite a lot on these projects and none of them had a negative impact on society. But I do regret all the time spent in a sort of disengaged malaise rolling out features for projects I didn't believe in.
I did my masters on compiling Matlab, which involved coding parts of the compiler. Compilers are cool, Matlab isn't. My decision was based at least partly on easy availability of funding, and I was a poor grad student at the time.
I wish I'd done a master that was more in tune with my interests; the regret is largely about wasting time.
It has a very strange type system. Funny syntax. Lots of unexpected behavior. Also could be compiled relatively easily if it behaved better, there are a lot of funky edge cases. It's also bad as a general computing language - anything where you aren't just computing on a bunch of matrices.
Nowadays I'd say just use python -- it's not _quite_ as nice when it comes to computing on matrices, but it's _much_ nicer when it comes to everything else.
I know what you mean about Matlab as a software engineer. But it seems like non-software engineers like aerospace love "autocode" to get their Matlab code in embedded systems. I know for a fact such technology has been used in spacecraft if it makes you feel any better.
I worked for a small business to track surgical trays by bar code and rfid chips. I was fired after I found out they wanted to use the code to track people and invade their privacy. I raised ethical issues only to be told ethics does not matter only the bottom line.
Many libraries put rfid chips in their books. While chipping a lot of books some years ago, I couldn't let go of the thought that they could be used for nefarious tracking.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 341 ms ] threadThat triggered my move to education and medical software.
I work for one of the big video game publishers. If you believe the internet we slaughter puppies and are the cause of all unhappiness in the world.
The actual work is gruelling, frought with long hours and very challenging. So when you finally get your ducks in a row after countless hours of overtime and stress to see the public’s reaction is heartbreaking.
I regret working on games, but the technical challenges are stimulating enough that I continue to do it.
Buy a bubbletea, get the ingame content: Straw and bubbles.
That's not a knock on the developers or content quality though. It's a knock on the business model. You guys make beautiful things.
Look at Fallout 76. Content wise, it’s a decent game. The graphics are better than the previous game and they made attempts to rework some of the mechanics.
Where it failed was the utter lack of quality control due to timelines and the inclusion of micro transactions. The game obviously wasn’t ready. Plus the added shenanigans of the botched launcher rollout.
Add it all up and it’s easy to see why people are pissed, but they’re mad at Bethesda for pushing such as obvious cash grab as something innovative and new.
Obviously developers work hard and create awesome stuff. It’s just a shame these companies pile on the crap to suck every spare dollar out their customers instead of just releasing a great game that isn’t a bug filled mess due to botched release timelines.
I guess it's dishonest to push so hard to have "high quality" games with a lot of content when you know that it's impossible to actually cover the cost with the list price, but it's what people demand. And it gets harder every year.
Every time I'm in a corporate game development gig I have regrets, because instead of working on a game I could personally appreciate I end up working on copycat mobile games; poorly designed games; games with no creativity behind them. Working on a game I would never consider playing myself, a game I would never recommend to a friend.
The best gamedev experience I had was working on an indie title with a very small and tight team. But that enterprise went bankrupt and the team disbanded.
Hope to bring that back someday, but lack the discipline at the moment.
Is the resources required to make a hit PC game too high today for an upstart to succeed, or is it just big gaming houses controlling the distribution channels?
They are almost on par with giving you the same satisfaction that your best gamed experience gave you with better pay and should I say most likely better working conditions as well!
[1] https://rewind.site
It pays much worse than game programming though, unless you make a major hit, so you'll need to keep a day job, especially now that there's way too many games released every year that it has the same visibility problem as like, Steam does.
But you get to work with all sorts of people, and do so in person (like I'm going to an event in a couple weeks where I will be playtesting other designers' board games, and even a couple games by publishers themselves, and get to talk to and be friendly with the people who work for the publisher), and I've found it generally more fulfilling than my time in video games, personally.
Although that being said, I do miss video games and I've started working on one in my spare time again recently.
This is why I got into development. I am so far away from that in the dev world nowadays. It is sad because it sounds like the video game industry does not promote healthy work environments.
Professionally, I have never worked in game development and doubt I ever will, but I have a couple of web versions of Star Castle (https://arcade.ly/games/starcastle/) and Asteroids (https://arcade.ly/games/asteroids/) that I've built that I feel 10-year-old me would probably have enjoyed.
[1] Actually it still is, but now using WebGL. Watch this space.
I also spent my childhood programming Trek games on the sinclair (kit).
That's the hallmark of having gamers as your audience. They reward the copycat garbage and publishers that mistreat them and exploit them, but they would never think of buying an indie game. They get what they pay for, and unfortunately so do the rest of us.
I respect Blizzard's history and games, however I feel it is going downhill, especially after their Diablo Immortal fiasco: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MmkHAlhCvWg To those who are unaware: Blizzard has historically been a company making awesome games mainly for PC. Blizzcon is an annual conference where hardcore Blizzard fans (mostly PC gamers) come to learn what's next for them. Diablo 3 was released 6 years ago, so naturally people have been expecting the next installment. And then Blizzard says to those people that the next Diablo is a mobile-only game (co-)developed by a Chinese company. Naturally, this isn't what most of the series' fans were expecting and are excited about.
You certainly have a point, but I think it's also really easy to develop a characterization of a company based on relatively shallow information. I had a conversation with a friend recently who's not quite in the same situation, but is worth recounting anyway. We live in Vancouver, BC, home of one of EA's campuses. He went to school for game design, then proceeded to not do anything relevant for about 6 years. He has no professional game design experience to speak of, yet has a tendency to speak as though he does. It seemed to be a surprise when I broke this down for him. When I asked "We know multiple people at EA right now, who, despite EA's reputation, speak highly of the company. You have a certification of some sort, why haven't you applied?". He proceeded to describe what he thought of EA, based on some of the decisions they've made, some of the games he's disliked, and the internet's opinion of them. The conversation went well, but I had to feed him some harsh realities, I hope he does well.
My point is not so much that it's not valuable information, but it's not a lot of information to bet potentially very valuable experience on. If you can say "I worked for Blizzard and it really wasn't for me. But I gave it a shot." then that might give you a lot more information in terms of what you do want to do.
This relates to me a little as well. I'm at a crossroads as a developer. Having been a web developer for a few years, with no degree at the moment, I'm trying to figure out where I want to be. A few years ago the prospect of working for a large online auction corp. I had a very strong suspicion that I would not do well—culturally and otherwise—at this company, but it was double the money and I was at that time not doing anything constructive. So I set my ego aside for a while and proceeded to take the job and subsequently confirm my suspicion. It wasn't all bad, but near the end it got pretty bad. It was a mistake I don't regret. It cost me a lot emotionally, but now I know which kind of companies I won't work for. I have a lot more information to go on, and sometimes those risks are worth taking.
I've been there. I often wonder how many others in the industry have.
Ethics not being a desirable quality to some (many? That seems too bold to assert) businesses is ironically part of the reason why ethics is so important to hold onto as an engineer. Some businesses would be elated to find software engineers that have discarded their sense of ethics entirely, to the profit of themselves and the harm of our society.
It took me a while to realize the entire thing was just a scam and that the only reason we were getting traffic was due to advertising shenanigans.
At the time, it was one of the best sites out there on account of having the most correct (or rather, least incorrect) events. Lots of websites contained many errors, such as listing "London, UK" instead of "London, Canada". Mixing up "Ryan Adams" and "Bryan Adams" was also a common one. We corrected a lot of that. I did "big data" kind of stuff before it was cool (no machine learning though, just old-fashioned rule-based logic).
Some were even scummier than TicketMaster. For example there was one that would simply try to guess ticket/tour dates and venues and then sell massively overpriced "early bird" tickets for them. Sometimes their guesses were more-or-less reliable, other times it was wildly off.
And yeah, I agree. The entire endeavour is useless. It was my first real programming job, and since then I've been a lot more careful what kind of companies I work for.
https://www.iq-mag.net/2018/09/cbc-news-details-ticketmaster...
I would be worried that the platform is now used to silently steal the contacts list of millions of users without their informed consent.
* Would this product exist without the malicious use cases?
* Can the company sustain itself without the malicious use case?
* Are there ways to mitigate the malicious use cases, and could they be reasonably implemented?
* Is the true intent of the business - when you assess it honestly - for it to be used in the "good" scenario, or in the malicious scenario?
* Are the malicious scenarios being reinforced/rewarded?
* What portion of revenue is directly caused by the malicious use cases?
* Is the company marketing or appealing to the malicious use cases? Are they trying to actively warn against/discourage them?
* What are the worst case scenarios of the malicious use case? Are they theoretical or real?
* What are the best case scenarios of the "golden path" use case? Are they theoretical or real?
And we also need to pay attention as we answer the questions above, looking out for if/when we make shallow justifications rather than honestly assessing the answers to the questions above. Look out for situations where our response is hedged by an excuse that's irrelevant to your ethical duties as a software engineer, such as:
* "but we can't leave money on the table"
* "but people would lose their jobs if we didn't do this"
* "but this is what our competitors do"
* "but if we didn't do this, someone else would"
* "but it also causes [theoretical/unintended side effect that sounds good on paper]" (particularly important to watch out for when that unintended side effect is an oversimplified version of reality)
* "but it's not our choice how it is used" (particularly relevant in situations where the business model relies on the malicious use case, and/or there are opportunities to mitigate the harmful use case that are intentionally going unexplored... or situations where your product itself is using techniques such as behavioral conditioning to train a user's choices)
If you admit that you're selling "luxury" goods, then you shouldn't be providing people, who don't have the money, with loan options. Least of all loans with 20%+ yearly interests.
As it happens very few customers actually choose the loan option. I think it took a week or so before the first customer even tried using that payment option.
I ended up leaving mainly because it was an unhealthy, high-pressure environment where a lot of the most celebrated people were giant dicks. But I stayed away because I realized that we weren't making anything better. We just situated ourselves near a river of (other people's) money and tried to siphon off a bit of the flow. It was depressing.
I'm glad I never went back. I honestly think the finance industry could be half the size it is with no real harm to the rest of the economy. And given what a mess the 2008 crisis was, trimming the industry way back might be overall beneficial.
Is the job fulfilling? Depends on your goals - for me I've gained a huge knowledge of low level programming, and front line experience on how far one can go with both software and hardware to 'win' against other competitors in the space. That's invaluable stuff for me.
Is the job moral? Anyone who puts their money on the line knows the risks, this isn't stealing from the poor. People who invest must understand risk, and risk is really the only way things move forward in the first place. But it also implies there can and will be people who lose out.
People with less knowledge. Less technology.
There should not be an additional layer of risk involved only because people bet on other people.
If I buy a share from company x, the success of that company should represent the share price. But that is partially true.
And NO enough people have no idea what they are doing. In Germany we increased the requirements for trading. You have to read stuff and sign off otherwise the bank will not allow you to buy certain products.
Is the job moral? No.
I have zero ethical qualms about winning when I know that the other people I'm competing against are millionaires, have institutional backing, have government approval or all of the above.
Physicists working on physics research might be a problem if those physicists could just divert money elsewhere in the economy into their own research programs. As it is, there's a complex system of controls so that public research money is generally used for some reasonably good purpose.
One of my observations, to make a living you need an angle. This isn't necessarily 'bad'. A mechanic has years of experience and tools, and a lift. In return for parting with cash he'll do something for you (hopefully). Trading houses use their angle to do something to you, namely siphon off some of your money without providing you anything.
The problem here is that, for example, at least in the US, not everyone with a pension or who "contibutes" to a retirement plan is comfortable or even aware of the risks. That ignorance is not a defense, per-se, but if you've got blinders on that you're fleecing pennies off the already rich you are sorely mistaken.
I'd go so far as to argue that turning money into more money without providing a good or service in exchange is squarely immoral.
>There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest: and lending money at interest — what we call investment — is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or “usury” as they called it), they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only dunking of the private moneylender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said.
>That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed (or so it seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.
Perhaps it's time to consider forming some fundamental principles and reasoning from them instead?
So I don't see where this should stop us from trying to form principles as an alternative to arguing that something must be or must not be true because of what someone wrote down millennia ago.
For example, here's Aristotle on usury[1]:
>There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another. The most hated sort, and with the greatest reason, is usury, which makes a gain out of money itself, and not from the natural object of it. For money was intended to be used in exchange, but not to increase at interest. And this term interest, which means the birth of money from money, is applied to the breeding of money because the offspring resembles the parent. Wherefore of an modes of getting wealth this is the most unnatural.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usury
[1] http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html
This is really interesting. I'm at least passingly aware about high speed/frequency trading, but don't know much about the topic in depth.
How low is low in this field? I'm picturing RTOSes running AVX512-heavy hand-optimized code, FPGA farms, custom network ASICs... how overly optimistic am I being here? Heh
Of course, such a vision is very lop-sided, since HFT depends heavily on high-level intelligence. So perhaps it's realtime(ish) Linux and lots of GPUs.
When I was working in this field, 2008-2011, there were guys doing fpgas, custom tcp/ip stacks, custom network drivers, dedicated networks and network cards for exchange data coming in and for going out. Mostly linux.
Hardware and lowlevel fun.
Allthough the fastest trades were always done by this one catalonian guy using Windows and .NET. I kid you not.
Good times. Soulless. But good.
And wow, so I wasn't too far off the mark. FPGAs and exotic networking. Huh.
I remember reading a story about a trading floor running on SQL Server, which was doing continuous throughput of 6000 queries/second. I didn't know enough at the time to discern what percentage of that was writes, but I think the point may have been that it was all of it. This was quite a few years ago. So perhaps Windows isn't actually the slowe{st,r} system out there for certain tasks.
But again: not an RTOS expert. We had a lab that would constantly test configurations of hardware and software. And I remember them finding RTOS not being helpful.
Oh yeah. I remember reading something along the same lines about x86 a while back. I guess it didn't really go in properly, heh. Thanks
I'm reminded of the "x86 is high level" thing: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9264195
Also, I think the iPhone 6's NVMe apparently uses a Cortex-R: https://ramtin-amin.fr/#nvmepcie
FPGA feed handlers are common, but now that can also be rented.
Whether you're using GPUs depends on what you're up to. A lot of the strategy testing requires a bunch of computing power but not speed. You then take your conclusions and implement something fast that doesn't necessarily use the GPU.
Realtime, but soft real time. It's not like a vehicle ABS system where you have to brake within x milliseconds or someone gets killed. I've seen places where they see the degradation over time and eventually decide it's time for the newest hardware, again.
I also just found http://redd.it/8dhp7q asking about AVX512 slowdowns too.
TIL about FPGA feed handlers. (http://redd.it/56tw4n, one of the first hits for the term, was mildly interesting)
Hmm, good point about not needing speed. Yeah, 24 execution units each capable of 3 billion ops/sec is probably more performance than is needed :)
Interestingly, I would have imagine HFT as needing ABS-style hard realtime. But no, it neither needs that nor is simple enough to be encapsulated by that sort of embedded-style approach.
However, nowadays the banking tech sector here in the UK seems to be more mature. Our traders are quite often from a STEM background which gives them an understanding of technology, and they don't adhere to the dicky stereotype you often hear about. But most of all, I've always found my tech colleagues to be extremely smart but also down to earth, pragmatic and meritocratic which is the reason why I've ended up remaining in banking.
It depends on how you look at things I guess.
For instance, when trading in commodities like grain, and deploying a strategy to push the price up over a long time period (whether or not it's a single entity doing so or all traders in unison), people somewhere in the world aren't able to buy that grain and go hungry.
Same with all the foodstuffs. But what about other stuff, metals? What happens if you drive those prices up? Well, again, somewhere in the world some poor chap now cannot afford the metal roof sheet that goes on top of his shed, and he'll sleep under the stars.
I think most if not all finance trading negatively impacts the people that are too poor to even dream about finance trading. When there's a buck to be made in finance, there's always a sucker paying for it. Somewhere along the line that sucker becomes someone who isn't even in the whole financial trading circus, and he'll in the end foot the bill. It must be this way, because the financial industry itself doesn't produce or increase the value of things, it just manipulates the price tags.
Significantly influencing the price of a commodity with liquid markets, such as corn or soybeans is pretty much impossible unless you're acting on behalf of a country or are able to control weather. The existence of liquid markets is beneficial for the producers and consumers as the price volatility is reduced and hedging becomes easier. I like to showcase the effect of information on price with the example of fish price in Kerala before and after the introduction of mobile phones to fishermen[1].
The financial world is evolving very quickly with various participants driven by different goals pulling the rug in opposite directions which theoretically should reduce volatility and spreads. However, when people get greedy - and there's a lot of that in finance - bad things happen, e.g. see the natural gas last week[2].
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Changes-in-fish-price-vo...
[2]: https://www.ft.com/content/b7c525f6-ec44-11e8-89c8-d36339d83...
Yeah, that's a nice fairy tale. It isn't true though. It's criminally untrue.
I can't eat volatile grain, nor hedged grain. I just eat grain. At a price I can afford, today and tomorrow, not bankrupting me in the process. When you're hungry you really don't care about all the financial jargon. You care about price.
Traders cannot make a profit if they don't manipulate the price. Simple, if a trader always sold for the same price he bought for he wouldn't make any money. So price goes up, trader has profited from the grain I eat, and has taken a few cents out of my pocket. And I don't even trade. I just live on a dollar day in a shithole somewhere.
If everybody bought just the grain they needed to eat, and every grain producer simply put their product on the market for people to buy, without a "liquid global market" and price index, without traders in the middle wanting to profit from it, my food would be affordable. But because the market bets on a price rise in the future, even though the bad weather hasn't materialized yet, my food is unaffordable.
In financial, when someone profits, someone hurts. And the one that hurts is almost always not even in the game.
> Significantly influencing the price of a commodity [...] is pretty much impossible unless you're acting on behalf of a country or are able to control weather.
No. A market can do that by itself. It's what all those terms bullish and bearish and stuff are for. Markets can drive up commodity prices like a rocket. Bad weather coming? "Let's buy all the grain everybody! Guaranteed profit! Just ignore the starving people over there, they'll go away fast enough." And buy the way, all those think tanks and the pentagon predicting a shortage of every natural resource in the near future, that's not going to influence the price at all, right? Great example of how a country manipulates commodity prices btw.
Financial trade is just people profiting from people who are worse off to begin with. And don't start about how nowadays regulations are much tighter and all that, it's just not true. Everybody always says that in times when stuff is stable, but as soon as something big happens everybody starts the "nobody could have forseen this" dance followed by the too-big-to-fail entities being saved by the govt and the bill footed to the people.
That's the market actively destroying the fundamental purpose of a good because the dynamics of its value are able to bring more profit than using the good for its existential purpose. If that can happen to housing, it can happen to anything. BurnGpuBurn is absolutely correct here.
There's an argument, not entirely (as far as I can tell) unreasonable, that at least some trading firms - the market makers - are benefitting the small folks in these markets. The argument goes that they do siphon profits out of the market, but it's mostly the profits of other financial firms. What they're ultimately nabbing is profits that come from information asymmetry, and that asymmetry usually benefits hedge funds more than farmers. So hedge funds make less money, yeah, but the impact on farmers is greater price stability, which is a benefit to them.
By extension, the implication is that, when hedge fund managers complain loudly about high frequency trading, it's crocodile tears.
The opportunity costs of prioritising the financial industry over other activities are almost incalculably huge. Bubbles aren't the only problem. The industry has cannibalised top talent and kept it from working on useful problems, which has created a huge deficit in future potential.
I think you two are talking about different things. The comment you're responding to is talking about the price discovery and liquidity facilitated through trading. You're (correct me if I'm wrong) talking about how physical commodities are treated as abstractions, which doesn't help e.g. a farmer.
But it does help producers of commodities - they can hedge against (for example) crop failures. And it helps consumers by driving down the price and making the price more predictable. Futures in particular are very helpful for producers.
This is obviously not a perfect process. But I think it's really unfair to call it a fairy tale, or to say that traders are manipulating the price. In an abstract or purely literal sense they are; but in the malicious, legal sense of markets they are not (at least not in the aggregate).
With respect, your last paragraph sounds like an oft-repeated narrative about the financial industry which - though it has kernels of truth - does not charitably reflect the full picture. Finance is not an unmitigated good, but comments like yours which present it as an unmitigated bad are also off the mark.
Posing those things as separate, saying "price discovery" and "liquidity" are different from "how physical commodities are treated as abstractions" is just muddying the waters. They're part of the same slang of the system.
The farmer doesn't care if somebody plays Farmville and treats in game abstractions as though they were his real physical produce. Who cares.
But the farmer does care when a lot of people trade in what he produces, and all those traders act like they're playing f-ing Farmville with virtual goods. In reality that trading influences the price the farmer gets paid and the price the consumer has to pay. Big time. Tell me again how it's just an abstraction. The supermarket doesn't accept my abstract money unfortunately.
That farmer worked hard for that grain you know, why do you think it's suddenly morally okay if you tell yourself nice stories about "liquidity" and "abstractions" and "price discovery" while you just want to make a buck on the farmers grain without putting in the labour yourself.
I don't give a hoot that you tell yourself that you're trading in an abstraction of grain to make yourself feel good about your actions. I just see the price of grain go up and my family going hungry, despite the fact that traders keep telling themselves it's all "funny goods that don't really exist"
> But it does help producers of commodities - they can hedge against (for example) crop failures.
I can see how it does, but honestly, that's one of the worst solutions to that problem. I think crop failure is a problem for everyone not just the farmer (we all have to eat, right?), so a solution that involves everyone instead of letting the farmer fend for himself would be preferable, because when the guy needs to fend for himself he'll fall prey to someone offering him a very volatile, hedged, and abstract "solution" to his problems.
A simple granary (sized to community) and enough cash to resow next year is usually enough. No virtual, hedged, liquid or funny stuff needed. It's as old as the hills as well, failing crops have been dealt with by humanity successfully in many civilizations through out history. Without a financial system that requires the farmer to bet on the price of grain next year, I might add.
With respect, your last paragraph sounds like you get tired of the argument, but, respectfully, you don't give me any reason not to believe "finance" in it's current form is one of the most evil thing humanity has ever come up with.
My understanding is that in futures markets, you make money by predicting what the price of something will be at a time in the future.
Let's say you know of a new battery technology that is much more efficient than anything we have today. Let's further say that this type of battery uses a lot of copper. You think that this will massively increase the amount of copper needed.
In this case, you buy a future (enter a contract) saying you will buy 250,000 tons of copper in January 2020 for $3.20 / lb (which is considerably higher than the price of copper today). Someone with a copper mine can take the other side of that contract and expand their operation (buy equipment, hire workers), knowing that in January of 2020 they will be able to sell that copper at a higher price, and expand their operations.
If the price of copper goes up, in 2020 you buy all of that copper from the mine, resell it, and make a ton of money. The owner of the mine makes a modest profit.
If the price of copper goes down, in 2020 _you still have to buy all of that copper from the mine_, and you lose a ton of money. The owner of the mine makes a modest profit.
You will only enter into such a contract if you have (or think you have) information that the person you are making a contract with does not have, thus allowing them to act on that information sooner and without risk. If your information is wrong, you are the person who loses out, not the person you contracted with, so you're taking on all of the risk for some of the possible benefits.
> A simple granary (sized to community) and enough cash to resow next year is usually enough. No virtual, hedged, liquid or funny stuff needed. It's as old as the hills as well, failing crops have been dealt with by humanity successfully in many civilizations through out history. Without a financial system that requires the farmer to bet on the price of grain next year, I might add.
If you know that the crops are likely to fail, you can buy futures in grain. It's the ultimate "put your money where your mouth is". If you buy grain futures, you are saying "There will be a crop failure. Plant more grain. I will cover the downside if I'm wrong." Thus you make the crop failure less impactful by prompting action earlier.
I agree that a simple granary is _usually_ enough. But a simple granary plus a futures market will be enough even more often.
They are typically willing to pay for price insurance to reduce their financial risk. (that could close your factory because of the weather, etc) (If they trade with other countries they are typically also willing to pay for currency insurance)
At that point a secondary market emerges with arbitrages between different market and points in time.
So far this is to the benefit of everyone. Farmers and Buyers get more stable prices.
This secondary market pins into tertiary markets where you can try to outsmart other players, and to the extent that manipulation is possible it will push back into the primary price or more probable the "insurance" cost. This cost is paid by Joe Random.
This is probably not beneficial but unavoidable and acceptable for having access to price insurance.
In practice, many markets are far from frictionless, and far from liquid, and pricing far from transparent, which is where most (all?) of our problems come from.
The best (and most ironic) example comes from the financial services industry itself: Although markets are the daily bread of the industry, it is ironic that the market for financial services is opaque and noncompetitive. How else could such profits be sustained? How else could the two and twenty compensation convention survive, if it weren't for the fact that the industry acts as an unofficial cartel?
When we complain about financial services, we often forget that the rhetoric of many free-market neoliberals is pure hypocrisy: what they practice is 180 degrees apart from what they preach.
Is that supposed to be obvious? It seems very not-obvious to me: e.g., if a trader has no ability at all to manipulate the price, but is able to predict future prices better than anyone else can, then they can make a shedload of money by doing it. (The market will respond to their trades, which I suppose is a kind of manipulation, but that reduces their ability to profit.)
Maybe it's true in practice that no one can actually make money by predicting future price movements better than other people do, and that the only way to succeed is market manipulation. If so, it would be nice to see some evidence.
(There are other options besides "win by manipulating markets" and "win by being good at predicting on account of being extra-smart": for instance, "win by being good at predicting by means of illegal insider trading". That has ethical problems of its own, but they're very different problems from those of market manipulation.)
If the market bets on future grain price increases and makes grain more expensive before the bad weather materializes then sure, that's bad for people trying to buy grain. (Though presumably it's good for farmers.) But that same process of prediction, at least if it works -- which presumably it does, somewhat, else no one would be trying to do it -- also means that once the bad weather does materialize the prices will be lower than they otherwise would have been, because the market can predict that the weather won't always be bad just as well as it can predict that the weather will be bad one day. So, at least when the market is doing what it's meant to, the highest grain prices get reduced and the lowest ones get increased. It's not obvious that that's bad for those not-even-in-the-game people.
(The market will make mistakes, sometimes big ones. In that case, grain may get super-expensive and people will suffer or even die. That's very bad. But it's not specifically a finance problem. Grain can get super-expensive because of mistakes made by farmers or meteorologists, too.)
> Financial trade is just people profiting from people who are worse off to begin with.
There's truth in that. But -- ignoring actual market manipulation, which I appreciate you regard as a major activity of the finance industry -- when someone makes a profit out of your being worse off, they make you better off in the process. Suppose some guy on Wall Street figures out that X is going to get more expensive. You own X but haven't figured it out because you don't have Wall Street's insider knowledge or supercomputers or whatever. So you sell X to Wall Street Guy, and X gets more expensive, and Wall Street Guy makes a profit that you missed out on. Sad. But Wall Street Guy didn't force you to make that trade! Presumably you sold X because you didn't want it any more, or you needed the money. Without Wall Street Guy in the picture, you'd have sold it anyway, and got (very slightly) less for it. So, sure, Wall Street Guy is better off, and you're sad that you missed out -- but you were always going to miss out, and you are a tiny bit better off because Wall Street Guy was there bidding against other people to buy X from you.
I dunno; maybe in practice Wall Street Guy has to do a load of much shadier stuff than merely predicting how the price of X is going to change, and maybe that ends up hurting you. Maybe in practice Wall Street Guy's attempts to react quickly to new information destabilizes things more than his ability to react quickly stabilizes them. But these seem like complicated questions whose answers need a deep examination of the world's financial systems, rather than pointing to a few specific cases where bad things happened and claiming that "traders can't make a profit if they don't manipulate the price".
"If everybody bought just the grain they needed to eat, and every grain producer simply put their product on the market for people to buy, without a "liquid global market" and price index, without traders in the middle wanting to profit from it, my food would be affordable."
Well, yes, but the grain would be in Saskatchewan rotting and you'd be wherever you are starving.
Traders aren't the only reason prices move. Clearly a wide spread crop failure would also increase grain prices. You can still make money as a trader if you do a better job at predicting such events than others.
This is false.
Commodities futures markets exist precisely so the price of bread stays stable and relatively risk-free for a year at a time. The big players are not traders - they are companies that work in grain, use grain, produce grain, etc.
As for markets creating money by driving up prices - this doesn't really happen. You can make money when prices go up or down, and nobody really has the size or the stomach to try and corner a market (which is also illegal). Typically these efforts fail miserably and lose the trader a lot of money.
Countries manipulating prices is a totally different matter, than "markets".
I'd think hard about it before you attack commodities markets as the enemy of food prices, and do a bit of digging as to the actual purpose of those markets.
Go ahead - sell a couple hundred thousand pounds of grain. "Simply" put it on the market... how do you do that reliably? How can you plan as a farmer ? Budget for seed, etc?
You're totally right about there being a few big players in production and so on. That's part of the problem. Because every farmer has had to operate and compete in this insane globally connected commodities market, what we're left with now after decades is a few big players. That's what you get when a German farmer has to compete with the US farmer, the Chinese farmer, and the Russian farmer, all the others and vice versa. Everybody loses and gets bought up by the bigger fish. That's a symptom of this market though, not a cause. And in my eyes, it's not a very good symptom either.
> Go ahead - sell a couple hundred thousand pounds of grain. "Simply" put it on the market... how do you do that reliably? How can you plan as a farmer ? Budget for seed, etc?
Well, I wouldn't know how of course, but that's not the point. Humanity has done the grain thing successfully, on large scales and over long time periods, multiple times in the past. Without a commodities futures market to keep prices stable.
I'm just saying this isn't the only way to do trade, and in a lot of ways, it's a very bad way to do trade.
As for competition internationally and “big fish” - I’d say that some of this is due to economies of scale in agriculture especially as automation reduces labor required per acre - but this is also other asymmetries and market factors. State subsidies is one huge factor that incentivizes owning land that doesn’t even produce. Further, as farmers retire their kids want less and less to do with ag and sell the land to bigger companies (or maybe to a housing developer).
I’m not saying “the market” is perfect but it didn’t necessarily get this way by accident either. It serves an important function across the board for all parties involved - including consumers.
I must confess to some confusion. I thought you wanted affordable food. Do you think that you'd get affordable food if you were only ever able to purchase from the providers in your immediate vicinity, who won't face price competition from farmers elsewhere who might be more efficient?
The people who cause markets to move are not the traders, they are the people who buy from and sell to the traders.
Now, this is obviously a silly hypothetical. Very few people are going to produce sheet metal for that poor chap if they can't cover their costs plus at least some profit, leading to nobody having any sheet metal. Now the whole world is worse off and lacking sheet metal, and for what?
Some things in the finance industry are valuable. Insurance and its ability to spread risks springs to mind readily. The joint stock company, and its ability to pool resources to grand ends, has unleashed incredible forces.
My experience disagrees with every statement you made, except the job fulfilling part.
Making markets does not add any value to anyone other than the marketmakers and the stock exchanges.
The only decent thing about those places is that they usually do not beat around the bush. "Does your idea help us be faster? Got proof? Go implement. Money is no objection."
Morals did not exist in that world when I was there.
What I was doing, was helping the 0.01% consolidate their power and wealth at the cost of all other living beings on this one habitable planet.
Then I stopped kidding myself and got out of my golden cage.
Never underestimate the very human emotional motivation of coming up with a pleasing rationalization. Just because someone earnestly says 'we are helping, so much!' doesn't mean they're correct.
To me this argument always came across as fabricated and empty.
I have seen too many examples internally at that place, where the (to me) obvious moral choice was neglected or even laughed at.
The "because of us, instruments are priced properly everywhere and that's good for everyone" is interesting.
Does that result solely exist because of us making a market? What is 'properly priced' exactly and why would it be a Bad Thing if it were less 'properly priced'? And why is this even a goal that should be pursued? And should that goal be pursued at all (and I do mean ALL) cost?
Those questions were never answered to my satisfaction.
She was in energy and oil instead - her success would mean that down the line, we all would pay up a bit for her success (selling expensively when demand was high). And also with oil, she would be trying to create as cheap gas/diesel from oil as possible (meaning passing regulations in some 3rd world country), it took her easily 10 fails to get just slightly above the (very low) bar. The result - engines destroyed over time with crappy fuel, environment polluted with less-than-ideal material burned. But nobody gave a nano-fraction of a fck, it was Africa.
Yeah, traders, they think super high about themselves, most are properly broken human beings, a pure net loss for humanity
Could you elaborate on this statement? It is my understanding that the value market markers provide is liquidity and tighter spreads. Worst case, they pull orders when informed volume is detected, but then the book is no worse off than what it would be if the market makers weren't there.
The liquidity is something that the exchanges want so they can provide better services to their other users / customers.
What the market makers get in return is some privileges on the exchange, such as favorable credit exempts or short sale treatments. This depends on the exchange.
But being a marketmaker, basically obliging to be able to quote a price on anything and everything, is regarded as much as a nuisance as it is a benefit.
Yes. And I do not see this as a boon. It reduces the cost of trading for traders at the expense of _everything_else_.
Eg: search for 'whack bully oil prices'.
I can understand arguments that the work wasn't fulfilling, or you didn't enjoy your colleagues...but what you're saying seems to be incorrect, strictly speaking. Were you working in marketing making where most/all trades were OTC?
But no, this is not the reason marketmakers make markets.
They do this in order to make more profit.
The rest is a side effect that they happily spindoctor into their "raison d'etre".
The company I worked for is known for being the primary source of rich people in the Netherlands. And they keep getting richer. Very much the so-called 1%.
And a disclaimer: I'm an engineer. Not a trader.
> Is the job moral? ...
But in what way do you consider your job meaningful?
Except when the finance industry creates (directly or indirectly) a financial crisis like in 2008. Its the poor, that never stood to gain from the financial system in the first place, that end up hit the worst.
That is definitely not the "game of life". Most business works by creating value for others. It's generally positive sum. Indeed, the only way people in zero-sum industries (e.g., betting, a lot of advertising, many kinds of finance) or negative-sum ones (e.g., scams) have anything to siphon off is because of people doing productive work.
One of reasons I'm most glad to get out of finance is that I could stop trying to justify it to myself. As Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
It is strange that an industry whose only purpose is to service the productive economy should be 20% of GDP.
Here's an interesting take of the downsides to having such a large financial sector within an economy: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/oct/05/the-finance-cur...
The brain does far, far more than marshal resources and distribute the where they are needed, which in essence is what the financial sector does for the economy.
Because of our brains, humans are extremely adaptable. Even with primitive technology we spread throughout the globe, and unlike wild cats or bears we haven't needed to speciate into each climate, develop camouflage fur, etc. The biological investment in an advanced brain gave us the opportunity to thrive everywhere.
Thats why the city of london is older than England it's self. because it provided finance for various powerful people to do "powerful people" things
Venice for example was ruled by a mercantile banking dynasty.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Police
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Remembrancer
It's really not "essentially sovereign" or "outside national law" as you might argue of an embassy or a military base or even, say, the Channel Islands. People and businesses there are subject to all the laws of the land. Financial firms there are regulated by the FCA, which is based outside the City and appointed by the Treasury, definitely not by the City of London Corporation.
Prestigious financial firms have offices in the City because everyone else does, not because there's some legal or regulatory benefit from being incorporated there - again, very different from those who choose other Crown jurisdictions like Jersey or IOM or the Caymans.
This is definitely not true. Maybe you confused it with Isle of Man or Channel Islands, which are crown dependencies with certain autonomy, often accused to be British tax havens.
yes I am a wonk
Not sure how seriously I'm arguing that, but it does seem that if the situation was sustainable/survivable there would be records of previous instances of that situation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pujo_Committee
Also, I am curious as to what you mean when you refer to retail trading as printing money. Don't know anything about it (why I'm curious), but from what I have heard about trading in general, it seems to have some reasonable level of risk.
By retail trading, I meant that I'm not what you'd call a big-time trader. I use a broker that is available to retail clients (i.e. everyone). I didn't mean to imply that trading and speculation aren't risky. Trading is like printing money, because while you make money without producing any value, the guy next door makes money by actually producing something. Socially, it's freeloading, like stealing is freeloading. You get value, without providing value. A double-spend attack.
"First, Finance" is an extremely nebulous term, encompassing many subfields.
At its core, a financial firm like a proprietary trading company that invests money creates value by attempting to optimize the allocation of capital.
Do we give money to Google and trust that they will turn it into something more or do we give it to Elon Musk?
It turns out that this is really hard to do. If this were easy, pro sports players wouldn't go broke funding terrible projects.
While they don't have a direct hand in product design, creation, or sales, they have an indirect one.
Of course, there are firms that really abstract themselves from this process and basically just play the market as a game, with 100% technical analysis and short term positions and no fundamental analysis.
That said, I believe the industry's total value to others could be produced at far, far less total cost than now. And a lot of those very smart, very motivated people could be out there actually creating value for others.
With technology it should have shrunk by a couple of orders of magnitude. You don't need a room full of old men in green visors cranking away at adding machines to get anything done anymore. Instead technology has only made it bigger.
Where did / do you think money comes from?
Other kinds of “finance” are more like playing poker where everyone is betting the public’s money.
I can believe someone new to finance didn’t think very hard about which kind of firm they were at.
Most businesses are positive sum. E.g., the sandwich shop down the street buys ingredients at X, puts in labor valued at Y, and sells me a sandwich for Z > X+Y. They have created value. (As have the the people doing the labor, because they took time valued at zero and turned it into marketable labor.)
Money is a representation of the value created by humans. That's why the government must continually increase the money supply [1]: if money's value is to stay stable relative to goods, the supply has to increase as society creates more value.
Finance is sometimes value creating. E.g., the sandwich shop owner is willing to pay the bank for transferring money from my account to theirs. But it can also extract rents (e.g., arbitrary or hidden fees) and be parasitic (as when banks speculate with money insured by society, like during the S&L crisis).
[1] E.g., https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2
Yes, value is created, but money isn't, by the actions you describe.
If I 'value add' the ingredients of a sandwich, and then sell it to you, you still have to surrender (or lose) money.
Any sale of goods or services ideally involves both parties determining that the transaction is favourable to their interests -- but it's impossible to avoid the fact that the buyer will have less money as a result.
This isn't a bad thing. Arguably a strong indicator of the health of an economy is the agility of money / wealth within it. But your original observation was:
> But what I didn't understand was that mostly we made money when other people lost it.
... and that's an ineluctable outcome of any financial transaction.
When two parties make a bet, though, one of them loses and one of them wins. The losing side doesn't say, "That's great because I now have this cup of coffee I value more." They just write it off as a loss.
When I worked for prop trading firms, in every trade we did one side of a trade won and the other lost. In working for real businesses, both sides of a trade mostly walk away winners. Hopefully this difference is clear to you; it's that distinction I was pointing at.
If you're trying to make some sort of narrow point about my use of the colloquial phrases "made money" and "lost money", I grant that I was indeed being colloquial. Strictly speaking, we also didn't actually make money; I am told only the Federal Reserve gets to make new dollars.
Merely pointing out that any transaction involves a transfer, and your claim that some transactions are worse because someone has less money at the end of it, is perhaps missing the point.
Unless the people you were dealing with both went into the deal knowing which one would lose money - then it's comparable to your 'placing a bet' analogy.
Sure, I'm not doubting that it was (probably) ethically dubious - and kudos for not participating in that industry any longer.
As to:
> If I give somebody $10 for a sandwich, I didn't lose the money. I traded it for something more valuable.
- that's clearly not true.
You have ten fewer dollars than you did before the transaction.
Whether it's more valuable to you is very much subjective, though if you asked someone if they'd prefer $10 or a sandwich, most people would say the $10.
Between $100 and ten sandwiches, I'd suggest all would choose the money.
Conflating 'winners' with who came out ahead in terms of self-assessed value proposition of a particular transaction is to also miss the point.
> We turned a profit by being smarter or faster or luckier than the people we traded with.
This is the essence of trade.
I would say it depends on whether I'm hungry or not.
Parent was asserting a perishable item is inherently more valuable than the means to purchase same.
What? You literally did say that:
> I traded it [$10] for something more valuable [a sandwich].
You clearly aren't.
Are you quoting God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater there?
I'm not arguing investment banks and hedge funds are an unmitigated good! But at minimum, finance (much like tech) is far too complex and mixed to be able to correctly say you're not making anything better if you work in it.
That being said, I can absolutely understand why you'd regret working at a specific firm in the industry.
I agree that the industry does produce some value. But ask yourself honestly: what percentage of any given person's time and energy is devoted to value creation? To what extent are they sure their day's work is value-creating rather than value-subtracting for the economy as a whole? Maybe things have changed, but at the time very few people even cared about those answers. Those that did thought about the question very little, and with none of their customary rigor.
The reason I said the industry could be half its size (rather than eliminating it entirely) is that I know it produces some value to the rest of the economy. But if it could be half its size (or smaller) then it's perfectly plausible the average person in finance is a net drain on society.
This is because while things like market making are obviously necessary, you've got to ask yourself: does making trades on a timescale of microseconds or even less as opposed to making trades on a timescale of minutes lead to better outcomes in the real economy?
The answer is almost certainly "no", but at the same time, trading firms that are engaged in zero-sum games are still able to siphon a lot of money from the rest of the economy that goes into just that. So the net outcome for society of that is clearly negative.
We shouldn't be kidding ourselves, though. A lot of the incremental improvements in tech these days are also net negatives to society. Mostly this is because so much of tech is driven by advertisement.
However, there are large parts of tech, including some very traditional parts, in which improvements are clearly beneficial to society, e.g. when it comes to building more powerful and efficient hardware.
[1] An exception might be entirely new sub-sectors of finance that explicitly target beneficial outcomes. Climate finance comes to mind.
Me too; but then I think of all those unsavoury traders who would have to get other jobs, eventually inflicting hell on the innocent, and the prospect of keeping them where they are, flies to flypaper, becomes more appealing. (disclaimer: I work in the sector at large)
I know some of them have gone on to do good things elsewhere. What if more of them did?
One, if you're selling coffee every day to people, then you are creating value for all the people who say, "Hey, this was a good purchase. I'll come back tomorrow." So it's definitely not zero sum in the main economic sense. Value is created with every cup.
Two, if you open up next near another coffee shop, that's still not zero sum. More people will get coffee. Your better coffee means that people will get more for their money. Maybe your competition will force neighboring businesses to up their game. And even if another business ends up closing and exactly no new customers get served, that's still not zero sum, in that you're providing a better product.
I agree big financial firms are a mix of productive and rent-seeking behavior, although a lot of their nominally productive behavior is just helping other rent-seekers, so I think the truly positive-sum service is pretty small. I also disagree that rent-seeking is ethical. That some in the industry consider it "mandatory" is pure self-justification, a way of passing the moral buck.
It doesn't matter that you made money because someone lost SOME. Both market participants receive what they wanted to out of it.
For example, you take linear bets - going short a stock - and you bought to cover at a profit to someone that was maybe long and selling at a loss. You say wow so zero sum.
But little did you know, the person that was long was actually collecting premium from their covered call options trade, and is still getting what they wanted out of it. They may not have begun losing more money for their tolerance for another 2% or 10% drop in the stock. They would come out net positive until then, even though their MAXIMUM potential profit was still more.
Both participants still got what they want, and you wouldn't be the wiser - unless of course you were trading products that had no derivatives market. But even then you wouldn't know, because they could be written OTC.
But it’s apparently the future of a lot of IT, because people aren’t going to stop buying really shitty software or start making architectural demands.
It’s going to be an amazing amount of technical debt in a lot of sectors though.
I mean, some of the integrations I build before my venture into management, decades ago are still running without the need for maintenance. Yet the most recent RPA project my team build has already used 6 hours of maintenance this week.
So stupid.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robotic_process_automation
A month ago it was a change to the invoices from a specific company.
Every week it’s the business noticing an edge case, or something that could be better. We pile these up, but you’ll rarely have a RPA process that handles 100% so there is an never ending race to get closer and closer. ;)
In one of our processes that handles a major process related to payment, we were able to automate the work of two financial workers, but the cost was that it required a new RPA worker to handle the errors, and a RPA worker is more expensive than two financial workers. It was still a gain, because the RPA worker also does other RPA things, but it’s a good illustration of how terrible RPA is at automation compared to the other tools in the toolbox.
How do you test RPA bots - just wait for them to break?
If you're interested, it'd be great to hear more about what you think of other tools in the toolbox. Email is on my profile.
If you are integrating using something like Sikuli, which works by actually looking at the screen pixels (rather than DOM elements, which are an implementation detail), you can use 'smart' techniques like OCR and synonym lists to make a change resistant client.
If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
If higher gas prices lead to more efficient vehicles, and a shift to less driving and personal car ownership, it's a bigger win financially for poorer households than some cheap gas in the here and now. I also acknowledge that it's easy for me to say this because higher gas prices don't affect me much personally - I might feel differently if they did.
I think we as an industry need to stop stretching for excuses for why greedy behavior might unintentionally do something good. It's not a worthwhile cause and it doesn't justify the behavior if the "good" is a theoretical and unintended side effect. The "good" being theorycrafted on the nature of this product is indeed both highly speculative, oversimplifying of the human cost of changes to this economic model, and is obviously not the purpose of the product. That "good" is contingent on and integrated with a number of factors too complicated to boil down to a single sentence: it's something that looks good when oversimplified and makes ourselves feel better if we try not to think too hard about it.
When we ask ourselves whether a product we work on is ethical or not, we have to account for the intent of the product, and not merely stretch to find theoretical ways to justify it to ourselves. We do need to think about unintended side effects - particularly when they could harm others - but we shouldn't be using our theoretical and simplified best-case scenario of unintended side effects as a way to justify the intention and practical use cases of the products we make.
We should ask ourselves: if the "good" of an unintended side effect could be cut out of a product and we'd still make it, is it actually the good of a product? Or is it an excuse we're making to ourselves to make us feel better?
Take that as you will.
edit: wording.
"We want x But have to do y because then we can retire."
Problem is life doesn't work the way we plan it. Every moment is what you create. It doesn't take much for your entire world to be thrown into chaos.
Quit making excuses about not living your life the way you want to.
Reading the other posters though I can see that there are some unethical products being built where you can impact someone else negatively.
i’m not getting paid the same, but my conscience sleeps well enough.
OTOH if I work for Shell or Dow I am pretty clear who I am working for.
I don't regret working there per see, I didn't make the rules, but it opened my eyes that the dream of everyone being treated equally on the internet is dying. Before, you could assume the internet wouldn't discriminate because it's digital and detached from your physical self, but more and more companies have profiles about you and your experience will vary depending on who you are.
It's like how the public wouldn't really accept that if statistics show that all planes are blown up by people from country X, everyone from country X is thoroughly searched and no one else.
Also note that in case of the dating app, if you assume people like X want to date with people like Y and you don't allow them to match anyone else you, you can never validate/improve your assumptions.
It's not our job and it's not right to force our values on others because we think it will make them better people when that's not what they asked for. That said, I think it would be different if a news organization was doing the equivalent, and serving items that confirmed prior ideas. the difference there is that in one case they are asking to be happy, and in the other they are asking to be informed. This does of course assume people actually want to be informed and news isn't just an entertainment medium for the customer as well now...
So even though a user might only say "show me matches between 18-35 years old" the app would apply additional filtering based on the user's supplied attributes in an effort to improve "relevance".
I'm not saying you're wrong, or that this was wrong/right but I did want to clarify what the OP seemed to be saying.
Another thing is that they used to bought ads targeting female users in developing countries to "feed them" to users of richer countries hoping to bait them to pay money (to send digital gifts for example).
Were the OP working on an algorithm that would go 'next level' and extract those qualities from the base data given, then I am sure that would have been a far more rewarding endeavour than just matching skin colour or income level.
(Note: I am of sub-continental heritage and married to an Australian girl whom I met while going to ballroom dancing lessons).
The algorithm will put you in the bottom pile, because your race is different than the women in your local area
In the context of my comment (internet dating company), it means even when you try to meet new people, we will make broad assumptions and present you people we think will match well with your assumed race, income, education. All for upping that retention a few .1%
In earlier internet, the experience on a single website, for example, was the same for everybody, no matter your demographic. I understand why it evolved, but I regret it a bit.
The most you could discriminate them by was their number of posts on that forum, moderator privileges etc.
Classic cartoon from 1993 celebrating the equality of the anonymous internet
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...
Black people are more likely to date black people, white people are more likely to date white people, and rich people are more likely to date rich people. By tailoring the matching algorithm to take this into account, you increase the chance your users will find a good match. This seems user friendly to me. Were you also offended that the algorithm matched people differently based on age?
I wish I'd done a master that was more in tune with my interests; the regret is largely about wasting time.
Nowadays I'd say just use python -- it's not _quite_ as nice when it comes to computing on matrices, but it's _much_ nicer when it comes to everything else.
Facebook tracks people too using their own smartphones.