(Full disclosure: I'm a recruiter for IT/Quant Finance companies):
If you're really interested in making money and using advanced scientific/mathematical education and experience, quant finance is definitely one way to do it. Most of the quantitative hedge funds I've worked with are pretty anti-institutional: they're trying to attract PhDs, not MBAs, so they try to run their companies like a grad school (with a seven-figure prize for a good dissertation). Stuff like this sounds like exactly what the original poster was asking for.
Unfortunately, C/C++ and (to a lesser extent) Java are the standard languages (although there's one company that uses Ocaml), so a brilliant hacker who happens to love Ruby or Haskell or something less mainstream isn't likely to get a fulfilling role. On the other hand, these companies hire Google-quality people for several times Google's usual salaries, so it's a fair tradeoff; if you can hold onto a quant position for a few years, you'll probably never have to work again.
There's a huge difference between 'free' and 'paid for by someone besides the user' -- and that difference keeps the cost of something from rationing the use, thus leading to overuse or abuse of a network and negative consequences for those who do pay.
If we want to get super-hairsplitty: It's not entirely laughable. In the sense that it's happened. Once. When Warren Buffett took over Dempster Mill in the 1960's, he fired lots of employees, but kept track of them to make sure they were better off. So yes, some people do that. It's a lot rarer at larger companies, of course.
The point I was making was that IBM doesn't have a responsibility to keep them hired -- the economy as a whole is a mechanism for ensuring that. And given that over the last hundred years, despite oodles of layoffs and redeployments, the number of jobs has stayed at about 95% of the number of people seeking them... I'd say the economy does a pretty good job.
Is their existence really based on the will of 'the people'? I know it is in a legal sense, but that's just to provide a framework for what would exist with or without corporate law: Pooling of capital and pooling of risk.
No 'make work' jobs should be encouraged, it's just a waste of economic resource, but strongly suggesting to such companies that they should look into retraining and redeploying their workers rather than just firing them en mass would be a good idea as the shock of such large events can permanently damage communities and economies.
Viewing the economy as a whole, rather than just the IBM component thereof, that's exactly what's happening; 10-13K workers are being redeployed to non-IBM jobs. I know this sounds a bit sophistic, but it's also quite accurate.
Well... if the company exists entirely and exclusively to make a profit -- as American corporations do -- anything else would breach that contract. And breaching a contract would be an ethical lapse. So, in a sense, it's just as much a priority in America; we just have a different vision of what ethical behavior for a corporation means.
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(Full disclosure: I'm a recruiter for IT/Quant Finance companies): If you're really interested in making money and using advanced scientific/mathematical education and experience, quant finance is definitely one way to do it. Most of the quantitative hedge funds I've worked with are pretty anti-institutional: they're trying to attract PhDs, not MBAs, so they try to run their companies like a grad school (with a seven-figure prize for a good dissertation). Stuff like this sounds like exactly what the original poster was asking for.
Unfortunately, C/C++ and (to a lesser extent) Java are the standard languages (although there's one company that uses Ocaml), so a brilliant hacker who happens to love Ruby or Haskell or something less mainstream isn't likely to get a fulfilling role. On the other hand, these companies hire Google-quality people for several times Google's usual salaries, so it's a fair tradeoff; if you can hold onto a quant position for a few years, you'll probably never have to work again.
There's a huge difference between 'free' and 'paid for by someone besides the user' -- and that difference keeps the cost of something from rationing the use, thus leading to overuse or abuse of a network and negative consequences for those who do pay.
If we want to get super-hairsplitty: It's not entirely laughable. In the sense that it's happened. Once. When Warren Buffett took over Dempster Mill in the 1960's, he fired lots of employees, but kept track of them to make sure they were better off. So yes, some people do that. It's a lot rarer at larger companies, of course. The point I was making was that IBM doesn't have a responsibility to keep them hired -- the economy as a whole is a mechanism for ensuring that. And given that over the last hundred years, despite oodles of layoffs and redeployments, the number of jobs has stayed at about 95% of the number of people seeking them... I'd say the economy does a pretty good job.
Is their existence really based on the will of 'the people'? I know it is in a legal sense, but that's just to provide a framework for what would exist with or without corporate law: Pooling of capital and pooling of risk.
No 'make work' jobs should be encouraged, it's just a waste of economic resource, but strongly suggesting to such companies that they should look into retraining and redeploying their workers rather than just firing them en mass would be a good idea as the shock of such large events can permanently damage communities and economies.
Viewing the economy as a whole, rather than just the IBM component thereof, that's exactly what's happening; 10-13K workers are being redeployed to non-IBM jobs. I know this sounds a bit sophistic, but it's also quite accurate.
Well... if the company exists entirely and exclusively to make a profit -- as American corporations do -- anything else would breach that contract. And breaching a contract would be an ethical lapse. So, in a sense, it's just as much a priority in America; we just have a different vision of what ethical behavior for a corporation means.
Ah, but one of the joys of the software business in general is how little capital you need. It's possible to waste money, but that only happens when you're suffering a slight concussion from VCs hurling obscene amounts of cash at you and demanding that you waste it.