On May 10, 2008, at 5:30 PM, Louis Proyect wrote:
Adam was a class A prick who had the reputation for being some kind
of genius. I guess the partners at Goldman were impressed with the
fact was a triathlete, had graduated from West Point and worked on
computer support for Apollo Space Missions. Considering the fiascos
at NASA in recent years, I can't say that I am totally surprised
that Adam had to leave Goldman not long after I did.
Back when I was young and thought I was an ubergeek, I used to
occasionally depart from my research lab to interview with Wall Street
firms (which paid close to twice my pay!). Almost always, I got into
technical arguments with the resident hotshots ;-) which gave me an
excuse to justify sticking to the lower paying job! One of my
arguments was with a fellow at Goldman Sachs who must have been about
3-4 years older than me (I was 23 or 24) who explicitly stated that he
didn't think much of people from research environments. We got into a
spat about an implementation issue in a Unix shell, with me claiming a
particular behaviour that he disagreed was the case. Considering the
author of the shell was from the very organisation I worked for, I
returned to home base and emailed the relevant bit of raw source code
to the young punk ;-) with a note asking him to call me if he needed
the code explained! Oh, those were fun days! Luckily for me, I didn't
come across someone who could have exposed my own ignorance(s).
--ravi
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
