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Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

morganstanley.com

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Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#31

Post by sanswork »

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 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.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#32

Post by maxlybbert »

> Come on, now. How about Google? NASA? Tesla? Plenty of real world problems to solve there tackling difficult problems.

Well, as a professor, he did get some code into some JPL projects ( http://stroustrup.com/mbd09.pdf , http://stroustrup.com/sec09.pdf , http://stroustrup.com/autonomics09.pdf , http://stroustrup.com/fdc_jcse.pdf , http://stroustrup.com/autonomics2008.pdf and http://stroustrup.com/isorc2008.pdf ). (Some information about MDS and goal oriented software can be found on JPL's website, http://mds.jpl.nasa.gov/public/ ).

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#33

Post by sanre6 »

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…

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.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#34

Post by ChuckMcM »

Ok, is it just me that thought it telling that all the folks in the carousel at the bottom of the page are wearing suits (and ties for the men) but Bjarne has a open necked shirt on?

That said, I really resonate with this statement of his: "I wanted to get back to solving real-world problems."

I tend to be most motivated when I've got a problem to solve which can be expressed in terms of real world gains (usually in efficiency). Interesting to hear that he didn't think he could do that in academia.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#35

Post by sanswork »

bch wrote: post #17

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.

Managing Director isn't exactly as high up in the chain at MS as it sounds and he could definitely still be getting his hands dirty directly with technical decisions at that level. When I worked there I worked with one MD who was 3rd in line on the pager list and was more than comfortable logging into the servers to resolve problems if there was an issue that for some reason 1st and 2nd level weren't in a position to respond to.

Edit: I got MD/ED backwards. Ignore the above.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#36

Post by sanswork »

sanre6 wrote: post #33
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…

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).

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#38

Post by jsprogrammer »

patio11 wrote: post #20
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 an…

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.

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#39

Post by jsprogrammer »

notsony wrote: post #30
patio11 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 an…

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

Re: Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology

#40

Post by elmyraduff »

sanswork wrote: post #35
bch wrote: post #17

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.

Managing Director isn't exactly as high up in the chain at MS as it sounds and he could definitely still be getting his hands dirty directly with technical decisions at that level. When I worked there I worked with one MD who was 3rd in line on the pager list and was more than comfortable logging into the servers to resolve problems if there was an issue that for some reason 1st and 2nd level weren't in a position to…

Managing Director is the highest up in chain and it covers highest levels of management. In fact, CEO of Morgan Stanley is a Managing Director.

But of course an MD can decide to 'get his hands dirty'. It is a personal decision.

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