[qw3rty01]

This is a pretty loaded question to then say "not trying to be judgemental"...take out the bias if that's actually the case: "What kind of benefit do you believe your work provides to society?" or "How do you justify the extra resources taken away from society that may be more beneficial elsewhere, such as X?"

[andrepd]

Well I don't know how to make it less loaded x) It's just how things are, it's a work that does no useful work in any meaningful sense, but serves to make some already fabulously rich people even richer (in fact, it extracts that value from non-HFT traders, so even those are shafted here).

My point is that I'm curious regarding how the people who work in these things feel about their job. Do they think they're doing a right thing? Do they "own it" to themselves that they don't care as long as they make money? Do they not think about it too much?

[sbeller]

> (in fact, it extracts that value from non-HFT traders, so even those are shafted here).

in return HFT provides liquidity (and by that smaller spreads) to the market, I would think.

If you ever bought or sold a stock with a market order, you profited from the work the HFT is doing.

[logifail]

> it's a work that does no useful work in any meaningful sense, but serves to make some already fabulously rich people even richer

Isn't Robinhood able to offer free trading to customers solely because they sell their order flow on to, among others, HFT firms?[0]

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/13/how-robinhood-makes-money-on...

[MockObject]

The abstraction of "society", that is presumably supposed to benefit from everyone's job, is hiding the crucial details.

His job facilitates trades between people who want to trade with each other. Since they are part of society, our society benefits from his work.

Evidently it's doing more than "make some already fabulously rich people even richer", because it's paying salaries for some programmers, as well.

[wizzwizz4]

I'd argue that “how do you justify” is more loaded. “Do you feel comfortable with [objective description of the reason one might be uncomfortable with it]?” is better than how I'd ask it.