I worked on Wall Street 2006 to 2008, and I had friends on the Street before that. I went into "tech" in 2008, saw the mini-crash and read the Sequoia ScareDoc, and now I'm watching this bubble.
Wall Street has a bad reputation, but I've seen far worse ethics and much less professionalism in technology, which is supposed to be above that garbage. On Wall Street, people know what the rules are. They're pretty clear, because the scummiest shit has generally been tried. You front-run your customer, you go to jail. You get a reputation for being unethical, it ruins your career. You defraud people, you get fired for life from the securities industry. You have to take a Series 7, so you have no excuse. Sure, the industry has some slimeballs and some slip through, but not so brazenly, and they at least are supposed to feel bad about it. In technology these days, there are so many people who don't give the square root of a shit about making good software but just want to play the angles. The vast majority of them aren't engineers, those who are tend engineers turning into junior executives by putting their ethics through a fire sale, but none of those fuckers belong here.
Google: generally professional and probably ethical macroscopically, but careerist to a fault. Bureaucratically overgrown. Full of horrid legacy systems that are built to flip-- specifically, to be "interesting" enough to merit a promotion for the original architect, who then moves on before it goes into maintenance phase and falls to pieces. That's how you get promoted at the big G. Launch and flee, every 18 to 24 months.
Startupland: I can name two major ($100M+ valuation) VC-funded companies that have committed major ethical faults in the past 6 months (one wasn't published and won't be, one developed last week and might be in the next 3 weeks). Both of these startups have some of the best, nicest, and most interesting engineers I've ever met... but are run by scumbag executives that would have fit in better with 1980s private equity people than with the (more decent, much more boring) typical Wall Street quant. I've never met a VC and I'm sure they're not all bad, but my theory is that the scumbaggery in so many VC-funded startups has to come from the top. I assume they fund people who are like them, and that would make sense, given that VCs are mostly MBAs, and something like 60 percent of B-school students at top schools cheat in their coursework.
Why do I bring this up? Because it's fucking nuts that some unprofessional, vindictive jerk like this guy was just acquired for $200 million. The world is seriously on tilt here. What are we even doing?