$$$
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.
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."
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.
http://www.morganstanley.com/about-us-articles/6933.html
http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/goldman-morgan-to-bec...
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.
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.
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.
"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.
Google seems to be pushing its own Go more. NASA is focused on space more than advancing the frontiers of programming. Tesla, maybe.
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.
I consider it bullshit.
Edit: I got MD/ED backwards. Ignore the above.
But of course an MD can decide to 'get his hands dirty'. It is a personal decision.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Morgan-Stanley-Managing-Dire...
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.
Not all the hackers have gotten that memo though.
[ ] Had a holiday recently
[ ] ???
[x] Met inventor of C++
His class is awesome for not only hearing his stories like why it's called C++ instead of ++C, but learning about all the little details in C++ today and what's to come for C++17 and on. If anyone has any questions they want me to ask him, I'd be happy to do so.
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/ ).
Guido van Rossum (Python) - Google, Dropbox
Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) - WePay, Etsy, Jelastic
Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby) - Heroku
