When scientists become hedge fund managers
ftalphaville.ft.comThe same argument can be made about other sectors that are considered hot. We're having a hard time attracting young talent into mainstream R&D engineering because dotcom and social media companies are sucking talent into faddish and ultimately doomed companies.
On the other hand, like several commenters on the FT site noted, maybe we're better off hiring whoever isn't chasing the latest trend.
It's funny because before I started here in Silicon Valley, I've periodically applied to many large companies that have traditional R&D. My experience in academic R&D at the DOE National Laboratories made me want to transition over.
IBM, Intel, and many others, simply ignored my application. I didn't go to a top ten school, or I didn't have "8 years experience in XYZ," so I was overlooked.
Right now I work at one of the biggest Internet companies in the world, but do you know how I got in here? Through an acquired startup. The people in my small area had the vision to see that I had skill, even though my resume didn't say Stanford or MIT.
My suggestion to you is that maybe the big traditional companies are not trying that hard to hire. Let's face it, it's going to be harder and harder to get grads from the top schools as long as they're getting millions in funding from VCs.
I agree, that's part of what's going on. A big company is going to have a hard time making an exception from it's salary curves to attract a top candidate.
The paper linked in the article also indicates that it isn't exclusively about talent, but that scarce capital can also be misallocated towards the financial sector during financial booms:
"Second, we note that finance requires financing. That is, financial intermediaries compete with non-financial intermediaries for financial resources. This leads us to conjecture that firms that rely more heavily on external finance will be in more direct competition with the financial intermediaries themselves for resources."
The analysis isn't so straightforward. What about scientists who use their hedge fund windfalls to fund fundamental scientific research? http://www.deshawresearch.com/