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Phil Albinus
Phil Albinus
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Grads Ogle Google Over Goldman Sachs

"Wall Street used to be cool." That was the forlorn lament from a chief technology officer at a major investment firm during a recent Tabb Forum in New York. Even though he offered this heavy sigh two weeks ago it's stayed with me ever since.

After debating the merits of new technologies like cloud computing, the topic of the CIO panel turned to the challenge of acquiring new talent. It's not pretty out there. The days of a new wave of graduates accepting their diploma and heading to Manhattan, Boston or Chicago for a high-paying career are not over - high finance is still a big lure - but it's no longer the promised land for today's grads. First, there's more competition for programmers, quants and engineers from social media, gaming and the rest of the entertainment industry. Second, Wall Street has taken a beating in its reputation. One CIO said that people now mumble that they work in lower Manhattan. Third, the annual bonuses just aren't that great for an industry known for greed and self-aggrandizement.

For a generation that was raised on the Internet, handheld devices, constant waves of information and near-instant gratification, financial firms are having a hard time attracting the much needed talent to move these firms forward. Can you blame them? It's hard to imagine that a newly minted software engineer would want to do with their quant and coding degree - work on the next iPhone or upgrade the OS and perform bug fixes on a 20 year-old FX platform.

We speak COBOL here, son.

Check out the Top Quant Schools of 2012 from Advanced Trading.

And the new regulatory environment is having a trickle down effect on the people who are being asked to keep the Wall Street in line and out of the headlines. As an executive director from a leading financial services firm told me, working on compliance initiatives are a major buzz kill. "The problem with regulation is it's the worst kind of spend for any institution because you can't make any money off of it," he told me. "It can't impact the top line and it just hurts the bottom line."

He added, "Regulations are a tough sell."

Instead, twenty-somethings want a cool challenge. Wall Street is proudly conservative when it comes to adopting new technology - no one wants to see their newly rolled-out doodad halt trading for even 10 minutes - but new gear is the lifeblood of new traders, technologists and quants. One CTO on the Tabb Forum panel had a savvy idea: To keep his younger IT workers happy he gave them a plum assignment. He had his 20-somethings create the investment bank's first iPad app. Everyone wins -- the coders get to noodle something fun and hip, clients get a shiny new toy and the firm steps into the 21st century.

This weekend I had the honor of watching my wife's nephew graduate from the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College. Newly named for a former Dartmouth grad who later charmed the world as Dr. Seuss, the class was full of bright young things accepting their diplomas and ready to take on the world. If their achievement wasn't awesome enough, more than a few of them were holding babies and toddlers of their own while the speakers went on (and on.)

I remembered telling my nephew that with all of his experience with databases, spreadsheets and algorithms that any hedge fund or Wall Street giant would be lucky to snap him up and pay him a king's ransom. He shook his head. He said he knew a few colleagues who traded in medical research for portfolio modelling but it wasn't for him. "Sure, the money is incredible but I really like what I'm doing," he told me. After watching his father pass away from cancer when he was 12 years old and helping his 11 year-old cousin - my son Matthew - navigate the world with a diagnosis of severe Autism my nephew wants to crunch numbers for the 99 percent.

Wall Street's loss is our gain. Thanks, Ryan. And best wishes to all of the 2012 graduates.

Phil Albinus is the former editor-in-chief of Advanced Trading. He has nearly two decades of journalism experience and has been covering financial technology and regulation for nine years. Before joining Advanced Trading, he served as editor of Waters, a monthly trade journal ... View Full Bio
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