My Manhattan Project: How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street.
...confessed to him that I had never studied finance, and I had only taken one course in computersThis lack of formal qualifications seems common on wall street, perhaps this isn't surprising.I know I didn't want to work as a programmer for a finance company because I'd prefer to be a first class citizen in a software company even for much less money.Perhaps wall street only gets second tier engineers, scientists and mathematicians?I know of one specific case, where yet another person without formal training made it high up as a programmer at a well known large institution who's name I'll withhold.This person was very well compensated for doing the kind of horrific wheel reinventing that only smart people without formal training can do.Needless to say all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensued over that person's years at wall street.In one instance he like all other programmers was forbidden to use malloc. And everything was on the stack and of size 512 - EVERYTHING. Who made that decision? Why the financial managers obviously!And I'm thinking that a big part of wall street's downfall is all that under qualified personnel, there primarily for the money.I think very few quants and people in their positions ever had the confidence and power to stand up to the finance guys.I think if finance firms went to the trouble of hiring people who have better options they might not be in so much trouble.Then again if you're gambling with other people's money and your compensation only has upside, no downside with risk - nothing would have prevented the crash.