Interview with Christopher Steiner, author of the new book Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World:
Q: You say that those who design algorithms are “the preeminent entrepreneurs of this generation.”
If you look at who has the biggest opportunity in society right now, who’s the most upwardly mobile and could just build something out of nothing, it’s developers. It’s people who are able to write code, not just any code—you’re average developer’s going to make a nice salary—but if that person innovates with code that “solves a problem” the opportunities are huge. This is why places like Y Combinator and all these other seed funding enterprises are booming. If you have the skills, the startup costs are basically zero. It’s your own time. This is not rocket science to use that old cliché; it’s a skill you get by putting time into the medium. It’s not something you need to learn at MIT.
Q:You title one of the later chapters of your book “Wall Street Versus Silicon Valley” Explain.
It’s incredible; people don’t realize how many software engineers Wall Street takes off the market. And in the past, when Silicon Valley companies went head to head with Wall Street firms, it was very hard to compete for the best engineers because the salary packages were so dissimilar, including the bonuses. And there was a prestige in working for a company like Goldman Sachs. So, I’ll just say, luckily for the economy some of that prestige has worn off. And I think that’s better all in all because the utility that someone with that kind of skill brings to the economy when they go to a place like Morgan is minimal--or even negative in the worst cases. Whereas if they go to a startup, they’re actually building the economy. They’re building GDP by affecting the most dynamic and growing segments of our economy. At Wall Street, they’re just moving money around.
Anytime you have so many layers of software--algorithms, really--nobody knows how one new layer will affect the other layers. That’s why good programmers and algorithm writers will create tests as they work. Google, for example, tests their algorithms a hundred million times before they ever hit the market. But at Knight, they wrote the program and sent it out. Apparently there were no tests because their algorithm just went bananas from the moment it was turned on. The danger with Wall Street, is that the whole thing’s so focused now on speed that there’s no time to write tests. This stuff literally happens every two weeks. Usually it’s not a $440 million loss, but there’s just so much risk built into the market right now that doesn’t have to be there.
Q: You say that those who design algorithms are “the preeminent entrepreneurs of this generation.”
If you look at who has the biggest opportunity in society right now, who’s the most upwardly mobile and could just build something out of nothing, it’s developers. It’s people who are able to write code, not just any code—you’re average developer’s going to make a nice salary—but if that person innovates with code that “solves a problem” the opportunities are huge. This is why places like Y Combinator and all these other seed funding enterprises are booming. If you have the skills, the startup costs are basically zero. It’s your own time. This is not rocket science to use that old cliché; it’s a skill you get by putting time into the medium. It’s not something you need to learn at MIT.
Q:You title one of the later chapters of your book “Wall Street Versus Silicon Valley” Explain.
It’s incredible; people don’t realize how many software engineers Wall Street takes off the market. And in the past, when Silicon Valley companies went head to head with Wall Street firms, it was very hard to compete for the best engineers because the salary packages were so dissimilar, including the bonuses. And there was a prestige in working for a company like Goldman Sachs. So, I’ll just say, luckily for the economy some of that prestige has worn off. And I think that’s better all in all because the utility that someone with that kind of skill brings to the economy when they go to a place like Morgan is minimal--or even negative in the worst cases. Whereas if they go to a startup, they’re actually building the economy. They’re building GDP by affecting the most dynamic and growing segments of our economy. At Wall Street, they’re just moving money around.
Anytime you have so many layers of software--algorithms, really--nobody knows how one new layer will affect the other layers. That’s why good programmers and algorithm writers will create tests as they work. Google, for example, tests their algorithms a hundred million times before they ever hit the market. But at Knight, they wrote the program and sent it out. Apparently there were no tests because their algorithm just went bananas from the moment it was turned on. The danger with Wall Street, is that the whole thing’s so focused now on speed that there’s no time to write tests. This stuff literally happens every two weeks. Usually it’s not a $440 million loss, but there’s just so much risk built into the market right now that doesn’t have to be there.
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