Science or Finance: Picking a Career Path

[twofish-quant]

Yea, Wall Street is associated with finance. I value what WS does, but it doesn’t represent all of finance, despite what the public seems to think.

I work on Wall Street, and one reason I feel good about what I do is because I've seen the huge damage that can happen when people do what I do, but do it badly. Bad finance can destroy the world and almost did. Good finance causes things to "just work."

 

[twofish-quant]

I just think the financial services sector of our economy is bloated and the scientific research sector is too small.

Personally, I sort of agree, but to underfund science is a decision that US voters have made, and I'm pessimistic that this is going to change without a basic change in the priorities of US society.

One of the things that I'd like to do is to get the President of China to give a major speech saying "China has decided to colonize Mars." At that point that will hopefully give the US a kick in the pants.

 

[twofish-quant]

I largely say stick with science because I think the world will be a better place when our most intelligent people quit getting diverted into finance.

I'm a physics Ph.D. working on Wall Street, and I disagree a lot. I *do* think the world would be better if we were working on Mars missions, rather than on finance *BUT* if you self-sacrifice to make that happen, you'll find that 1) you'll mess up your own life and 2) you really won't get anything done.

If you go into academia, it eat you up and spit you out. If you go into finance, you will get money, you will get an understanding of how the world works, and you can use that understanding to change things.

One problem with science is the "second Einstein" problem. One Einstein is going to change the world, so it's a bummer if you are the second Einstein. Finance has a lot of problems that require lots of warm bodies.

I'm a little cynical about the whole "quant" revolution, which I think proved to be a huge brain drain taking American engineering talent and putting it to work for Wall Street hedge funds.

I'm a cynical idealist. There were a lot of incompetent finance people on Wall Street, but what makes me feel good is that there are competent people here, and I just am horrified at how bad things could have gotten if there were *ONLY* incompetent people running finance.

Personally, I think you *NEED* some of the the smartest and wisest people working in finance, because if finance falls apart, so does everything else.

Again, plenty of smart people that could have been doing good things for the world if they weren't too busy skimming off the top of the subprime mortage housing bubble.

Some of us were involved in keeping our firms out of mortgage housing bubble so when things fell apart, there were still some people left standing. Yes, things were bad, but if you don't have some intelligent and competent people in finance, you'll just have the idiots run things, and we've seen how bad that can get.

Honestly, I really do think that I've done more good for the world doing what I did than I could have done being a physics professor, because I help keep things from getting a lot worse than they were. And also it feels good to be in the center of history.

I think we should colonize Mars, but that is just not going to happen if the finance people mess up and we enter a Second Great Depression.

 

[twofish-quant]

One other thing. I think that talking about "choosing" science over finance misses the point that for a lot of us there is no choice. I'd be perfectly happy to work as a physics professor for a third the salary I'm making in finance, but I'm not getting any job offers.

Why am I not getting any job offers? Well no one is willing to fund a professorship that I'm eligible for, and one of the reasons I ended up in finance was that after I figured out that much of the world revolves around money, I figured that it would be a good idea to learn about how money works.

One curious thing is that people whose main goal in life is feel rich and successful then you should probably stay away from Wall Street, since if you don't have your head screwed on straight, you'll likely mess up your own life there if you are lucky, and if you are not then you'll mess up everyone else's. One thing that surprises people is 1) how poor you can feel on Wall Street and 2) how poor you can be on Wall Street. For 1), if you make $350K, but you are constantly around people that make millions, you are going to end up feeling like a pauper. $350K might sound like a lot of money, and it is a lot of money, but you'll find if you walk down Fifth Avenue that you have huge numbers of stores that sell stuff that you can't even begin to afford, and if walk in midtown on Friday and Saturday evenings you'll see the streets full of black limousines talking people from apartments you couldn't possibly afford to restaurants and clubs that won't like you in even assuming that you could afford them, which you probably couldn't.

If you try to deal with it by living a lifestyle that you can't afford, you are going to broke pretty quickly. If you make $1M/year, but you are spending $2M/year you are doing to be broke pretty quickly, and it's surprising (or may be it isn't) how many people that make crazy salaries, end up quite poor and miserable.