Attack of the Data Miners

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The result is that techies in large numbers -- engineers who lost jobs at the superconducting supercollider, doctoral students bored with their computer-science dissertations -- are heading for Wall Street. Says Diller: "The people who study science but are not themselves weirdos -- a small subset, people who can adapt to the real world -- become aware that they can make a lot more money."

Wall Street as the real world is a concept that could raise eyebrows. But some financial experts wonder whether the quants are weakening whatever contact with reality the street may have had. Steve Barnett, an anthropologist who is a principal of Global Business Network, a think tank, says that in the pre-quant days, Wall Street was patriarchal, intuitive, much more related to the world as it was. But hard-core quants, he complains across the generation gap, "are almost idiots savants with numbers . . . There is an almost prayerful communion with the computer. They're intense and operate to a rhythm. If you ask them a question, they turn and their eyes are glazed, coming out of whatever cyberspace they are in." In this trance, he says, "they're not really in a world of other people. They think they're in a world of pure technical manipulation, like a chemist creating a molecule. It's as though there are no social consequences."

Quants, says Barnett, who has a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Chicago, tend to be bachelors (few are women) who live in apartments as messy as the room they left in grade school. Many of them drink hard after hours, mostly with fellow workers. They mate, if that's the word, mostly in one-night stands. When they air their lives out, it's with ski holidays and ecotourism, not yachting or casino crawling. With salaries for researchers that start at about $90,000 and can climb well over $500,000 for those who excel, they could afford to dress with the flash of yesterday's gunslingers. Most don't. An atypical Merrill Lynch computer jock keeps a 360-hp speedboat in Westport, Connecticut. This appears to embarrass him, and he blusters, "That's not who I am, and if you don't tell me right now that you're not going to put it in the article, I'm going to have to get serious and call our public relations people and have them call TIME."

It takes three to six months, says one quant who has made the transition, to change a shy, bookish type into a ruthless money-making machine. What's required, says this alumnus of the system, is "to lose your sense of decency. You have to be rude, brash, you have to be selfish. Also you have to start ignoring 90% of what you are told." He describes, perhaps admiringly, a vulnerable Ph.D. from Princeton University. This fellow wore $50 suits and thick glasses. He was painfully polite. Transformed, he became the quant from Hell. "He's got this personality suddenly. He could eat these guys alive," says the quant. For someone like this, academia loses reality, and from Wall Street's viewpoint, a professor with a scholarly paper is "like a two-year- old coming with something he drew."