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Comment by zak_mc_kracken | Hacker News Reader

> What motivated you to leave academia to join Morgan Stanley?

$$$

Don't get me wrong, nothing wrong with that, he's earned it. But the whole spiel about wanting to get back to solving real world problems... Come on, now. How about Google? NASA? Tesla? Plenty of real world problems to solve there tackling difficult problems.

But Morgan Stanley? Decade old technology spending most of your time interfacing twenty year old languages to mainframes. Nothing that will make your heart pound there.

But the money... oh yeah, the money. No argument there.

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I think you greatly underestimate the programming challenges available in large investment banks, from "We ingest literally thousands of separate sources, many of them time-series, at the rate of gigabytes per second." to "How does one manage a programming team of ten thousand people split between six countries?" to "Where do we strike the balance between the-most-fault-tolerant-computer-is-one-that-is-powered-off and a-bug-in-our-application-can-bring-down-the-firm?" to "We have an open-ended research brief which is attempting to answer the question 'Are any 2+ parts of the world's most complicated black-box system correlated with each other in a way that nobody knows yet?' to which any answer in the affirmative is instantly verifiable by the presence of the river of money falling into our bank account that it implies."

Plus some of Wall Street's hijinks are positively Googlesque. It's a place where "I wonder if we can do image recognition on spy satellite photos to count cars in parking lots to get an estimate of traffic to a retailer before they publish their quarterlies" was met with "OH HECK YES WE CAN DO THAT."

Morgan Stanley is not an investment bank. It is a bank holding company ever since it took bailout money from the Fed.

http://www.morganstanley.com/about-us-articles/6933.html

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/goldman-morgan-to-bec...

And so it has come full circle:

>The corporation, formed by J.P. Morgan & Co. partners Henry S. Morgan (grandson of J.P. Morgan), Harold Stanley and others, came into existence on September 16, 1935, in response to the Glass-Steagall Act that required the splitting of commercial and investment banking businesses. [0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgan_Stanley

But these are only tangentially related to the real-world in the sense that a over-a-century-old monopolist family & corporation has constructed systems to enrich themselves and requires maintenance on those systems to continue to extract ever more currency from their customers (or non-customers, aka 'market', as it may be).

Most people's conception of real-world problems would be more along the lines of making sure every human being has enough food to survive and thrive, has access to all the world's knowledge and educational materials, or is safe from violence.

But sure, I guess slightly more accurate estimates of retailer quarterlies (which are actually being kept track of in totality) and 'black-box' tinkering is somebody's real-world.

That wasn't Patrick's point at all. You're conflating "real problems" with "problems that have a measurable impact on a moral concern of mine." This is the wrong way to look at Stroustrup's claim, and by extension, Patrick's comment.

Morgan Stanley has plenty of "real problems" in that they have plenty of challenging and exciting technical problems that rival those you would see at a top tech company. It isn't fair to dismiss someone's reasons for joining a top Wall St firm as purely financial, because it has many technical challenges to offer very skilled engineers.

Couple this with the fact that, let's face it, most people at AmaGooBookSoft simply aren't "changing the world" in the moral revolutionist sense of the term, and that most of the top tech companies have so much technical debt that many of their engineering teams are focused on maintaining old CRUD apps.

I can perfectly understand Stroustrup's decision here. You'll almost always be sorely disappointed if you join a company for its glamorous reputation. On the other hand, it's objectively verifiable that some companies have truly challenging technical problems, and others don't.

First, you've changed the terminology. Bjarne said "real-world problems", not just "real problems". Second, ensuring everyone has access to food is not a "moral concern", but an actual, real-world problem. As in, the "world" has not been able to solve it or accomplish it.

I have no doubt MS has "real problems", but they are primarily "Morgan Stanley problems" of the type I described in my first post.

Third, I made no claims or comparisons to "AmaGooBookSoft". From what I can tell, they aren't too much into solving most of the problems I described, although Google and perhaps some others have made good progress towards expanding access to knowledge and educational materials.

Fourth, I didn't "dismiss someone's reasons"; only confronted them directly, which is pretty much the opposite of 'dismiss'.

> the programming challenges available in large investment banks

Agreed - they have some interesting technical challenges.

> "I wonder if we can do image recognition on spy satellite photos to count cars in parking lots to get an estimate of traffic to a retailer before they publish their quarterlies"

That, however, feels, at first glance, a bit zero-sum. Is that investment making the world better in some way?

Not that I think anything should get in the way of them doing stuff like that, but it feels a bit hollow in the grand scheme of things.

Better evaluation and pricing of equity leads to better allocation of capital, which leads to value creation, which is not zero sum.

Now, if the the better-pricers manage to capture all the value they create, that is another question. But even then, they'll have to spend it sometime. A yacht builder is paid, and so on.

This is an asinine comment.

He also wanted to move to New York to be closer to his children and grandchildren[1]. The big tech-using companies in NY happen to be finance. But I guess by your logic wanting to be closer to his family is just BS. He just wanted the money.

[1] http://www.stroustrup.com/bio.html

Not at all, I actually find that reason much more believable than the one he gives (joining Morgan Stanley to solve real world problems).

High frequency trading is a real problem and a challenge

Right but even if so, that's a lame complaint. Are you completely honest in your life? I suggest watching Liar Liar again as research material.

Nice strawman, but I'll take a swing anyway.

Of course not, I say stupid things now and then, like everybody else. And I think it's perfectly fair for people to call me when I do.

I think Stroustrup's statement on his bio of the Morgan Stanley page is disingenuous, so I just call it.

I think you dismiss far too cavalierly the possibility of smart people being genuinely interested in the technical challenges facing Morgan Stanley.

You'd be surprised at how technically challenging/appealing financials can be. Ulrich Drepper also left Red Hat to work at Goldman Sachs ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/ulrichdrepper ). The algorithmic challenges, hardware optimization challenges etc in financials are nothing to scoff. Yeah, and the money is good as well. The work is not as 'sexy' as google, nasa, tesla but it is just as appealing to people who are interested in doing work that is supposed to provide high performance and high reliability.

Are all these jobs in NYC? Do these finance companies have offices working on these issues in SV?

I wouldn't know, since I don't work in NY. In fact, I don't work in the US. I live and work in Singapore and yes, all the big financials are here, some of them /also/ have their IT departments and yes they do the sort of work I spoke of here.

Now, I know my reply is only slightly related to your question, but I just saw this opportunity and took the effort to write all of this is to ^remind^ people that the world is not all about SV, or US, or startups, or IT, or technology ...

If there is someone who puts premium on execution speed it's probably Wall Street. I get the impression that that is one of the things Stroustrup really cares about also.

In my opinion the fact that Wall Street is not functioning optimally (with all that insider trading, front-running and just downright crazy gambling with other people's money) is very much a real world problem. It is also an important problem, because one of the functions of equity/futures markets is allocation of resources in the economy at the global level. And it is very important that the allocation is done right (that is, resources go to Tesla/electric cars/airplanes/etc and not to build yet another palace to some oil-lord, etc).

disclaimer: I'm currently in finance, but I'm primarily an engineer/researcher and finance is just one of the many areas in which I was working over the years.

Completely agree with you Morgan Stanley is a bank not a tech firm and it falls under various fed laws which slows your pace of development like raising a ticket to login into a dev database or a dev cant push his own code into prod etc.The aim is to audit everything and be risk averse. Try getting any open source software inside the firm within 6 months I would not be surprised if he quit in an year or so.

SOX is a pain but its not quite as bad as you make it seem and MS is a heavy user of OS software(and heavy contributor back to a few projects).

I was going to write your post word for word till I saw it.

"What motivated me?" A HUGE PILE OF CASH!

But really ain't nothing wrong with that. I worked in investment banking and the loot is a good thing.

I don't agreed that Morgan Stanley's tech would be old or boring though - banks typically spend big money on their systems. There would be some really interesting challenges and I'm guessing he'd be free to do whatever he feels like with no questions asked.

Good on him I say.

I haven't worked with them in over 10 years but when I did MS was extremely progressive and leadership saw advanced technology as their way to be competitive against similar firms and as a result had a gigantic technology budget. They were quite progressive in a lot of ways and were a huge investor in distributed Linux setups over traditional mainframes for a lot of things internally.

Do you know what kind of problems he's solving there? You sound so judgmental and cynical, it's ridiculous.

After one had gained fame working for an infamously monopolistic blight on the american economy, "sold out" might be sorta relative.

>Google? NASA? Tesla?

Google seems to be pushing its own Go more. NASA is focused on space more than advancing the frontiers of programming. Tesla, maybe.

> NASA is focused on space more than advancing the frontiers of programming.

NASA does huge amounts of research into aerospace computing science. The first 'A' does stand for 'Air' after all.

Here's just the first example I plucked from the Ames website:

In this paper, a framework is proposed to enable a flight control system with optimal control allocation to incorporate real-time structural load feedback and structural load constraints.

$190 million of their budget for 2015 ( $885 million ) was allocated for pure science research and another $50 million for aerospace.

You are forgetting these banks are involved in high frequency trading. Those are some large engineering challenges.

There's probably not much of a pay differential between Google and a big bank for people of his background.

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