
Bjarne Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology - mk44
http://www.morganstanley.com/profiles/bjarne-stroustrup-managing-director-technology/
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jonalmeida
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++

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mehrzad
He still teaches a grad-level (I think?) course here at Columbia. How I envy
the students in that class.

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urs2102
It's an incredible class - I luckily got into it. It's pretty much like
watching a John Carmack keynote where he just unloads all the crazy ideas
buzzing around his head. He's a great guy - if there are any questions you
want me to ask him - I'd be happy to for you.

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urs2102
He is also a visiting professor at Columbia's computer science department and
mentioned that a big reason for coming to New York was really to be close to
his grand kids. I am currently in a course on C++ language library design at
Columbia with him - and I can comfortably say that he's one of the most humble
and down-to-earth professors in the department (IMHO).

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.

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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.

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gadders
I work in IT for an investment bank. No-one really wears ties any more, except
for interviews. A few people don't even wear suits. Some people even wear
brown shoes and pockets on the fronts of their shirts.

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billions
Nicolae Tesla died a poor man. Who are we to judge others' career choices?

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tdicola
Funny to see some of HN hating on Morgan Stanley and Wall Street. You're
biting the hand that feeds you...

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thaumaturgy
Some resourceful people have co-opted the term "hacker" to refer to people who
are very good at chasing money.

Not all the hackers have gotten that memo though.

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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/mbd09.pdf) ,
[http://stroustrup.com/sec09.pdf](http://stroustrup.com/sec09.pdf) ,
[http://stroustrup.com/autonomics09.pdf](http://stroustrup.com/autonomics09.pdf)
, [http://stroustrup.com/fdc_jcse.pdf](http://stroustrup.com/fdc_jcse.pdf) ,
[http://stroustrup.com/autonomics2008.pdf](http://stroustrup.com/autonomics2008.pdf)
and [http://stroustrup.com/isorc2008.pdf](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/](http://mds.jpl.nasa.gov/public/) ).

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adamnemecek
Hasn't he been there for some time now?

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mk44
yes, since 2014. But this wasn't widely known

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adamnemecek
ah ok. i think that i learned it within the last year from his site
([http://www.stroustrup.com/](http://www.stroustrup.com/)) which has a very
90's vibe to it so i categorized it as old news.

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zak_mc_kracken
> 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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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."

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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.

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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.

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rawnlq
Thought it would be cool to check out what some of the other language
inventors were/are doing:

Guido van Rossum (Python) - Google, Dropbox

Rasmus Lerdorf (PHP) - WePay, Etsy, Jelastic

Yukihiro Matsumoto (Ruby) - Heroku

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bch
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.

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sanswork
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.

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elmyraduff
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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sanswork
ED was higher than MD when I was there unless I'm remembering it backwards it
was over a decade ago.

We had an ED who ran a few large projects and had 2 MD's under him(and above
me).

Edit: Just did a bit of googling and it looks like I did have them backwards.
Thanks for the correction.

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mk44
This is surprising to me. I can't exactly point to why...

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huac
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.

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mk44
OP here. My original title was "The Inventor of C++, Bjarne Stroustrup Works
at Morgan Stanley", and after 20 minutes, it somehow changed "Bjarne
Stroustrup – Managing Director, Technology". WHAT'S GOING ON
HERE?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

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tlb
Titles of submissions should match the title of the article. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

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thaumaturgy
In this case though the edited title gives less information than the original
one.

