Genmai

As the cloud becomes increasingly more relevant as a reliable and scalable storage solution, this trend conjures memories of Sun's Net PC back in the 90s: http://news.cnet.com/DEMO-96-Net-PC-from-Sun-shines-at-show/...

The real challenge underlying Wadhwa's article is how to incentivise traditional engineering careers to counter the lemming run to investment banks and hedge funds that the best technical minds make these days. Because high finance careers offer lucrative compensation according to market demand for talent, perhaps the demand itself needs to be adjusted.

Another roundabout approach to counter this phenomenon is greater regulation to curb non-transparent / overly risky / exploitative instruments. Arguably, better regulation will help flatten the casino-eque boom (and bust) fortunes that we've been seeing in recent years. In turn, this may eventually translate to more moderate compensations in financial careers and may eventually reduce the outsized finance field demand for engineering talent. The rub is that government regulators are simply no match for the sharp pointy minds and enormous resources high finance firms can muster - the financial regulations of today will be easily be circumvented by the clever finance and accounting tricks of tomorrow.

Were it implementable (fantasy), the people who create and subsequently sell these fancy financial products should be paid with their own products and be required to hold them until maturity.

f.