Can someone please explain to me why HN readers dislike Wall St so much? There are honestly a lot of interesting things to be "hacked" and a hell of a lot of money to be made if you're good at finance. The personality traits that make people a success at startups (perseverance, critical thinking, people skills, creativity, analytical skills, etc) are the same ones that make people a success on Wall Street. A Wall Street job is not a wrong choice, and neither is doing a startup, in fact there are a lot of similarities.
Primarily because most of these people aren't really creating things. They're moving money around, but as we've clearly seen in the last few years, they're doing a very poor job of optimizing capital placement in the economy.
There's no question that there's lots of money to be made on Wall St., but such activities don't really seem to improve the world or anybody's life other than the bankers. Compare that to people who form startups that can literally change the world for the better.
Wall St, with its massively inflated salaries and bonuses creates a huge brain-drain which attracts bright students away from more socially-useful activities. I think anger about that is the primary source.
There is plenty of software that does not really make the world a better place. How much of the time do we engineers spend complaining about crappy code that doesn't work? Or take video games, sure they provide entertainment, but do they have a net positive impact on society? It's dubious at best (not that I don't love SC2).
I don't want to sound too negative, but maybe a lot of finance people aren't adding much value, but neither are most programmers. And there are clearly counterexamples in both industries.
Furthermore, try to imagine our economy without the stock market. It would be very different. That's a clear indication that there is some value there. Granted the market is surely not an optimal system, but that's a hard problem that smart minds absolutely need to be working on.
Entertainment is essential to every civilization as the Romans discovered with their bread and circuses.
Of course you may have a point when games like World of Warcraft ruin people's lives, but from a monetary (and thus time) magnitude, wall st. has wiped out people's savings that have taken decades to build.
Why do people think Wall St took their savings? It's your own decision what you do with your money, and if someone invests in something they don't understand then it's their own fault if they get burned! The stock market has rebounded astonishingly. The people who lost their life savings panicked and that's their own decision. In 2008 I had about 2k which was invested in two stocks (my entire portfolio, everything else was going to tuition). I sold out at the bottom of the market for a 40% loss. If I held them today I would have about a 45% _gain_, not bad for 2 years! Even if the market had not rebounded that is the risk you take for investing in stocks instead of something else. Remember, Wall St is a lot more than consumer investments anyway.
Also, I didn't say there wasn't value in entertainment, I said that it probably doesn't provide more utility than Wall Street's activities although really it's comparing apples to bowling balls.
Can you honestly say that to the people who were buying triple A investments that turned out to be junk thanks to credit default swaps? Who's fault do you think that is?
Do you blame sick people for not being smarter than a doctor in diagnosing their own sickness?
Do you blame people for dying in a bridge that collapsed because they weren't smart enough to see it was poorly designed?
I could go on and on. The point is that Wall Street has somehow become the only place with no accountability, and everyone is supposed to be an expert.
