[QuadmasterXLII]

There’s a pretty narrow band of intelligences in quant: any dumber and you can’t make 400k a year playing games for children, any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs.

[graemep]

> any smarter and you start to be able to make 400k a year curing disease or building a reusable rocket or any number of other actually interesting jobs.

A co-founder of something like Jane Street must be making a great deal more than $400k/year. Its probably small change for him.

You cannot make that much money doing those "interesting jobs". You might by financing and employing the people doing them.

A smart person going into finance will definitely make a lot more money than that same person going into another field. Going into finance from an "interesting" field has made a lot people rich: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons

[jghn]

I interpreted the comment as saying someone sufficiently smart would really that maximizing income isn't the optimal path in life, and instead would apply their brains towards higher pursuits. But perhaps I'm wrong.

[graemep]

Did not read that way to me.

I do agree that maximising income is not the optimal path. I sacrificed a lot of income for time with my kids and it was definitely the right decision.

[seec]

It's pretty sad that this is something that many people consider "wrong". There is always some sort of nonsense about being able to do more with money because it gives you power or something like that.

And of course, we keep hearing "greed is good". We are very fortunate that some people could see beyond that in the past because we are resting on their financial "sacrifice". Thankfully there are still people who still think that way today, but it is always infuriating to hear people pretend some are stupid for not choosing the path that would maximize their earnings.

I think it is a sort of projection from "small minded" people who cannot see anything beyond what they would do, precisely because they are intellectually limited and thus cannot properly reason about those "issues".

[PaulHoule]

You might get paid $100M from Meta to not work on LLMs for OpenAI!

[raverbashing]

Yes, a co-founder. Not your average quant

[graemep]

I am pretty sure the average quant also makes a multiple of what the average person in something like science or engineering research.

[corimaith]

Man can we do sway with the notion that competence in one area translates to another?

Being able to identify market arbitrage has little to do with biology and rocket science, and smart people are already working on such problems with the limitations of current fields well known. Throwing "smart” people at solving cancer isn't going to magically solve cancer.

[fragmede]

What's with the anti-intellectualism? Not having people work on cancer definitely isn't going to solve it, and given the choice, we probably want smart people working on cancer vs having dumb people do it. It might take a decade for someone to go back to school and retrain to a different field, but if that's what they want to do, who are we to stop them?

[Barrin92]

it's not even about intelligence as much as it is about the background of these people. A lot of them are gifted kids coming out of academic households, prep schools and ivy league colleges and quite a few are on the spectrum.

When people were confused why Sam Bankman Fried behaved as stupidly as he did and thought this was all an act, no they genuinely are like overgrown kids who don't know what guile is, they couldn't survive in a rough neighborhood of New York let alone deal with South Sudanese arms dealers.

[dguest]

Which people curing diseases are making 400k a year? If you're talking about academic research I'd expect around 300k to be the high end.

[jghn]

It's not hard to get above 400k TC in big pharma

[laidoffamazon]

I think it is? I have an uncle who made his career in it, he only started hitting 400k+ when he hit the director and C suite level. Meanwhile I started making 400 when I was 28 and that’s considered late for SWEs - it’s less than what Jane Street pays out of college.

[FireBeyond]

> Meanwhile I started making 400 when I was 28 and that’s considered late for SWEs

Well, for FAANG and the second tier.

Meanwhile, I don't know if you've looked around lately but I see security startups that are well funded offering <200K for Senior ICs.

[lesuorac]

I don't think anything hardware related is reliably 400k out of college unless you're self-employed.

https://www.levels.fyi/companies/spacex/salaries

[QuadmasterXLII]

big unless!

[throwanem]

If we're going to talk about it in terms like these, what does it say about the evolution of this our own field since that was colonized by finance beginning around 2000?

[QuadmasterXLII]

Facebook, palantir and bitcoin, pretty dire tbh

[cyanydeez]

Any smarter and you have moral problems with social cannibalism.

There is a band, but whats termed intelligence.