I'm curious why you think there has been a "demise of Boston". Is it really no longer a first-class "startup hub"? NYC gets more hype these days but it seems like both are great places to do a startup.
Outside biotech, it has gone from number 1 to a solid number 2 to mid-list. Seattle, Austin, Portland, NYC, and Boulder are all above it for many types of startups -- Boston has some legacy VCs, great but declining universities, and big city air travel and other infrastructure, but it is getting weaker by the day as a place to base a startup.
I don't really have time to put together statistical backing for my argument, but based on talking to a bunch of new startups in security tech, it is definitely an anti Boston trend.
Interesting, I hadn't seen his article on LMAX. For more details (and the code) check out their google code page: http://code.google.com/p/disruptor.
The disruptor pattern itself was new to me but the general principles (particularly the idea of running trading business logic in a single thread with all data in memory and no garbage collection) is very familiar.
It's a silly name for a Pattern. All the others - Command, Strategy, Visitor, etc are more-or-less meaningful. In another blog post, they say they named it after the weapon in Star Trek. They could have called it Ring, because at the end of the day it is just a ring buffer.
I work in the equities group in an investment bank. Joel's probably right about a lot of wall street jobs but certainly not all of them. I'm not even involved with the most math/CS intensive stuff but I still work on:
- Creating/consuming "real-time" data feeds with thousands of events per second
- Custom pub/sub in-memory databases
- Complex event processing on streaming data
- Homegrown data structure libraries designed for low-latency applications
Honestly, it's a lot more interesting than what I used to do at large public websites. The hours are no worse and when you include the bonus I bring home 2x as much. The cap is also insanely high, even for people who want to stay coding 90% of the time.
Sure, it's nothing like working at a startup. There's lots more meetings, you're a cog in a giant machine and no one outside of the company ever gets to see what you do. I bet working at a small hedge fund/prop shop approaches the best of both worlds.
It gets frustrating when so many otherwise knowledgeable folks write off an entire industry.
FWIW I interviewed with these guys and was very impressed. I went through a pretty brutal two-on-one interview that covered unit testing, dynamic programming, algorithmic problem solving, etc. The team seemed extremely bright and they were certainly solving interesting problems.
This was for a java role but I'd be excited to see what these guys are doing with functional programming.
Like the author I didn't have great luck with the Follow Finder... http://whoshouldifollow.com gives better results even though it seems a bit out of date. MrTweet also does a better job here.
I work at an investment bank in NYC after working for a few startups in the internet and enterprise software space.
Maybe I got lucky with the group I ended up with, but I don't wear a suit to work (and actually like dressing "business casual") and technology certainly rules the day here (large distributed systems executing millions of orders a day with sub-millisecond latencies, etc).
Sure there's more bureaucracy but it's hardly "Office Space" and I'll trade that for 2-3 times the salary any day (with no cap... there are developers here making $500k/year)
