You'd think a reasonable math person--or any halfway competent programmer--would not throw in a call to math.random in the definition of their monoid! (Or, really, deep inside any normal code at all.) He deserved to be fired just for that :P.

Anyhow, if we're playing at parables, chances are Harry took advantage of the job market and his knowledge and went to work for a trading shop or hedge fund, making more money than any developer at the old company (150,000, really?) and not being hated for knowing stuff. And hopefully using a nicer language like Haskell or OCaml.

Also, if Dick's a "systems" programmer, chances are his code would actually be written in C, longer than the monoid Scala code and harder to read. It would be fast though.