Emperor Charles explains why there are laws
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can't see youtube at work. You'll have to summarize for the increasingly larger portion who work behind those walls.
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
I've given up... When people just post a youtube link, I just ignore the thread for exactly that reason.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels) -
can't see youtube at work. You'll have to summarize for the increasingly larger portion who work behind those walls.
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
Ok, sorry about that :) First speech:
The world is full of lies! "Thou shalt not kill." "Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness." "Thou shalt not commit adultery." These are all lies, all deceptions. "I don't want to be killed." "I don't want to be a victim of theft." That is why they use lies like justice and morals to protect their weak selves. The original truth is the survival of the fittest. One must devour it all, whether it be other humans, wealth, power, or the world itself! Britannia will destroy this world's lies and bring forth the truth! All hail Britannia!
Second speech:
All men are not created equal. Some are born smarter, or more beautiful, or with parents of greater status. Some, by contrast, are born weak of body, or mind, or with few, if any, talents. All men are different. Yes, the very existence of man is discriminatory! That is why there is war, violence and unrest. Inequality is not evil. Equality is.
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can't see youtube at work. You'll have to summarize for the increasingly larger portion who work behind those walls.
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
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I've given up... When people just post a youtube link, I just ignore the thread for exactly that reason.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels)Would you mind discussing working for a hedge fund with me?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
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Would you mind discussing working for a hedge fund with me?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
Sure... Here are the basics of doing front-office hedge fund work as a geek: 1) Despite making more money than most of your friends, you feel like a lower class peon and an outsider at the office, because you're surrounded by millionaires whose biggest problem is that their Porsche (Not that one, the other one!) is in the shop, their nanny (Not that one, the other one!) can't watch the kids this weekend, or the renovations on their summer home (Not that one, the other one!) are taking too long. (They're good guys, but it's still kind of depressing - I live in a studio apartment and ride the subway to work) 2) Everything is high-stress, because every problem has to be fixed ten minutes ago and one incorrect number presented to a user could lead to significant financial loss (Think of the decimal point in "Office Space"). 3) To add to the stress in #2, hedge funds are small businesses, so chances are you're either working on your own (In terms of development) or with one or two other people. You might have IT infrastructure )Networks, E-mail, DBAs) from a parent organization or support firm, but you don't have a testing team or a project manager. You're gathering requirements, building specs and designs, implementing, testing, and maintaining all by yourself. 4) Ever heard of the phrase "New York Minute?" In a hedge fund, it goes further. Your latest project will take six months to spec out, design, develop, and properly test, but you only have a couple weeks. Instead of a spec document, you have a page of notes. Instead of a detailed design, you have that same page of notes. Instead of a testing framework, you fall back on the "weakest link" approach, as I call it, because you don't have time to make everything perfect... It goes something like this: "Components A and B can't possibly be allowed to fail, so let's make them as simple as possible... And when they DO fail, make sure they fail in such a manner that it alerts you of the problem and intentionally crashes instead of providing bad data...... As for Components X, Y, and Z... Get them to about 80% confidence, and make sure the error reporting is detailed enough that you can trace the inevitable problems quickly." (Corollary: Don't even think about C++. You don't have time to do it properly. C# and Java give the best combinations of built-in stability and development time) 5) Your "requirements document" is a two sentence e-mail saying "Hey, X takes too long. Make it better." You don't know what X is, how it's used, or how to mak
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Sure... Here are the basics of doing front-office hedge fund work as a geek: 1) Despite making more money than most of your friends, you feel like a lower class peon and an outsider at the office, because you're surrounded by millionaires whose biggest problem is that their Porsche (Not that one, the other one!) is in the shop, their nanny (Not that one, the other one!) can't watch the kids this weekend, or the renovations on their summer home (Not that one, the other one!) are taking too long. (They're good guys, but it's still kind of depressing - I live in a studio apartment and ride the subway to work) 2) Everything is high-stress, because every problem has to be fixed ten minutes ago and one incorrect number presented to a user could lead to significant financial loss (Think of the decimal point in "Office Space"). 3) To add to the stress in #2, hedge funds are small businesses, so chances are you're either working on your own (In terms of development) or with one or two other people. You might have IT infrastructure )Networks, E-mail, DBAs) from a parent organization or support firm, but you don't have a testing team or a project manager. You're gathering requirements, building specs and designs, implementing, testing, and maintaining all by yourself. 4) Ever heard of the phrase "New York Minute?" In a hedge fund, it goes further. Your latest project will take six months to spec out, design, develop, and properly test, but you only have a couple weeks. Instead of a spec document, you have a page of notes. Instead of a detailed design, you have that same page of notes. Instead of a testing framework, you fall back on the "weakest link" approach, as I call it, because you don't have time to make everything perfect... It goes something like this: "Components A and B can't possibly be allowed to fail, so let's make them as simple as possible... And when they DO fail, make sure they fail in such a manner that it alerts you of the problem and intentionally crashes instead of providing bad data...... As for Components X, Y, and Z... Get them to about 80% confidence, and make sure the error reporting is detailed enough that you can trace the inevitable problems quickly." (Corollary: Don't even think about C++. You don't have time to do it properly. C# and Java give the best combinations of built-in stability and development time) 5) Your "requirements document" is a two sentence e-mail saying "Hey, X takes too long. Make it better." You don't know what X is, how it's used, or how to mak
I think that's the longest post I've ever felt worth reading and actually read. I wasn't necessarily referring to the programming aspect of it as much as the work environment aspect. Do you find working for the financial industry a moral dilemma with what they've been found doing?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
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I think that's the longest post I've ever felt worth reading and actually read. I wasn't necessarily referring to the programming aspect of it as much as the work environment aspect. Do you find working for the financial industry a moral dilemma with what they've been found doing?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
wolfbinary wrote:
Do you find working for the financial industry a moral dilemma with what they've been found doing?
That's a question that's crossed my mind more than once... I haven't been involved in the kind of sectors that screw the public... My fund does convertible arbitrage on the buy side, and that's kind of a closed system in that the competition is really between different convertible desks, not between us and the private investors. Then again, I probably just don't understand it well enough to know exactly who's getting screwed... Since there's no clear immorality, I sidestep the dilemma pretty well. Gotta remember... Only a portion of the industry is really immoral and harmful, though greed is pretty universal. At worst, I feel like I'm just not contributing to the human race with my day job, hence the first line of my signature, which I added after publishing my first novel.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels) -
WTF is that shit?
"If climate has not "tipped" in over 4 billion years it's not going to tip now due to mankind." Richard S. Lindzen, Atmospheric Physicist, IPCC "It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you here are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period." Professor Richard Feynman
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WTF is that shit?
"If climate has not "tipped" in over 4 billion years it's not going to tip now due to mankind." Richard S. Lindzen, Atmospheric Physicist, IPCC "It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you here are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period." Professor Richard Feynman
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wolfbinary wrote:
Do you find working for the financial industry a moral dilemma with what they've been found doing?
That's a question that's crossed my mind more than once... I haven't been involved in the kind of sectors that screw the public... My fund does convertible arbitrage on the buy side, and that's kind of a closed system in that the competition is really between different convertible desks, not between us and the private investors. Then again, I probably just don't understand it well enough to know exactly who's getting screwed... Since there's no clear immorality, I sidestep the dilemma pretty well. Gotta remember... Only a portion of the industry is really immoral and harmful, though greed is pretty universal. At worst, I feel like I'm just not contributing to the human race with my day job, hence the first line of my signature, which I added after publishing my first novel.
Proud to have finally moved to the A-Ark. Which one are you in?
Author of the Guardians Saga (Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels)"convertible arbitrage on the buy side" huh? You are in too deep. ;P
Ian Shlasko wrote:
Then again, I probably just don't understand it well enough to know exactly who's getting screwed... Since there's no clear immorality, I sidestep the dilemma pretty well.
Fair enough. I can see that. I was in a similar situation more than once. The more I knew about what my last company did the less I liked working for them. I loved my team, but that was about it.
Ian Shlasko wrote:
Gotta remember... Only a portion of the industry is really immoral and harmful, though greed is pretty universal. At worst, I feel like I'm just not contributing to the human race with my day job, hence the first line of my signature, which I added after publishing my first novel.
When you say portion do you mean more or less than half? :laugh: ;P I know the whole industry isn't, but it's not the good part people are usually talking about. There are legitimate functions they serve, but obviously the fraud portion is the portion that's taken over the bulk of things in the big companies or they wouldn't have so spectacularly blown things up. Have you sold many copies of your novel?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
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"convertible arbitrage on the buy side" huh? You are in too deep. ;P
Ian Shlasko wrote:
Then again, I probably just don't understand it well enough to know exactly who's getting screwed... Since there's no clear immorality, I sidestep the dilemma pretty well.
Fair enough. I can see that. I was in a similar situation more than once. The more I knew about what my last company did the less I liked working for them. I loved my team, but that was about it.
Ian Shlasko wrote:
Gotta remember... Only a portion of the industry is really immoral and harmful, though greed is pretty universal. At worst, I feel like I'm just not contributing to the human race with my day job, hence the first line of my signature, which I added after publishing my first novel.
When you say portion do you mean more or less than half? :laugh: ;P I know the whole industry isn't, but it's not the good part people are usually talking about. There are legitimate functions they serve, but obviously the fraud portion is the portion that's taken over the bulk of things in the big companies or they wouldn't have so spectacularly blown things up. Have you sold many copies of your novel?
That's called seagull management (or sometimes pigeon management)... Fly in, flap your arms and squawk a lot, crap all over everything and fly out again... by _Damian S_
wolfbinary wrote:
"convertible arbitrage on the buy side" huh? You are in too deep
"convertible" = Convertible bonds... Bonds (Kind of like loans given to companies) that can be converted into shares of stock. Very complicated instruments, traded by a very small subset of hedge funds. "arbitrage" = The prices of CBs move up and down in relation to the price of the stock they convert into, but it's not an instant reaction... As an analogy: Hot dogs (with buns) are $1 a piece... Buns are $0.25. Buns suddenly rise in price to $0.30, but the hot dog vendors haven't updated their prices yet... So we buy hot dogs right away, because we know that when they post their new price tomorrow, it'll probably be $1.05 to take the new bun price into account, so we'll sell it to someone for $1.05 tomorrow and make $0.05 in profit. That's arbitrage... You trade based on correlation between related or unrelated products. Not a perfect analogy, but it's kinda the idea. "buy side" = We're not one of the big firms that sell to everyone and keep huge lists of customers. We're a customer, buying from those big guys and selling to other big guys.
wolfbinary wrote:
When you say portion do you mean more or less than half? :laugh: ;-P I know the whole industry isn't, but it's not the good part people are usually talking about. There are legitimate functions they serve, but obviously the fraud portion is the portion that's taken over the bulk of things in the big companies or they wouldn't have so spectacularly blown things up.
It's not that the fraud portion is the bulk of the companies... It's that everything is so connected that a problem in one group can affect all of the other groups. When the mortgage sector takes a dive*, it affects the credit curves, which affect the bond markets, which hit the stock markets... Everything is connected. It really doesn't take much to topple a wall street firm. The difference between "We're fine" and "We're bankrupt" can be one pervasive rumor, one typo in an earnings report, or one messed-up decimal point in a trading system. * Not an actual researched example... I don't know how it all actually flowed... Just illustrating...
wolfbinary wrote:
Have you sold many copies of your novel?
No... But I have to keep trying...
Proud to have finally moved to the A-