[patio11]

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."

[davidw]

> 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.

[ovi256]

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.

[notsony]

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...

[jsprogrammer]

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

[jsprogrammer]

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.

[dsacco]

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.

[jsprogrammer]

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'.