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.
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.
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 http://whoshouldifollow.com gives better results even though it seems a bit out of date.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)