Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology • Hacker News Board

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#11

Post by baddox » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 4:56 AM UTC

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #6

> 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…

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

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#12

Post by huac » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:00 AM UTC

mk44 wrote: post #3

This is surprising to me. I can't exactly point to why...

I would guess it's very important to MS to hire top technical talent. Having a big name on staff (doesn't get that much bigger than the C++ designer) helps do that - it's a competitive advantage for MS over traditional tech companies and over other banks.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#13

Post by IndianAstronaut » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:01 AM UTC

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #6

> 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…

>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.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#14

Post by devnonymous » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:06 AM UTC

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #6

> 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…

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.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#15

Post by hoodoof » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:07 AM UTC

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #6

> 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…

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.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#16

Post by jonalmeida » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:08 AM UTC

I met some ambassadors from Morgan Stanley who were wearing a shirt which had a list of check boxes that went something like this:

[ ] Had a holiday recently

[ ] ???

[x] Met inventor of C++

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#17

Post by bch » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:08 AM UTC

What would he _do_ there in that capacity? I think of him as a technically brilliant engineer -- a "Managing Director, Morgan Stanley" and Bjarne Stroustrup just don't sound compatible (to me) on the surface... at least he's getting paid, though.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#18

Post by agwa » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:08 AM UTC

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #6

> 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…

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

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#19

Post by csmajorfive » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:09 AM UTC

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #6

> 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…

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

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#20

Post by patio11 » Thu, Mar 26, 2015, 5:09 AM UTC

zak_mc_kracken wrote: post #6

> 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…

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."