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Serious question: If someone is smart and capable enough to work on tangible things like AI systems or self-driving cars, why should they choose the NYSE outside of pure monetary reasons or affinity for a “modern” tech stack?
You answered your own question. The only motivation is greed.
It's easy to throw shade when Bloomberg writes an article that puts the blame on "a staffer". Having worked near some of these systems, the engineering and process are actually quite good. How many companies publish their private network topology, service p99.9 in microseconds, and detailed pricing on the open web? They're in a painfully competitive global market that's ambivalent to names on buildings. In a week or…
Serious question: If someone is smart and capable enough to work on tangible things like AI systems or self-driving cars, why should they choose the NYSE outside of pure monetary reasons or affinity for a “modern” tech stack?
There are problems in Fintech that are absolutely worth solving for altruistic reasons. One that I think is very important and might even need to incorporate AI is this :
Larger financial institutions have access WAY more and WAY higher quality data surrounding stocks and options. For example, publicly available SEC filings contain extremely useful information about companies. Professional traders have access to services which provide this data accurately in programatic form (like an API). Us normal people have only the SEC filings themselves, which are enormous documents. It would be impossible to read them fast enough to ever catch up on all of them in the last say year. There are free APIs, but they are absolute dogshit and provide incomplete and inaccurate information.
If someone could democratize this and provide this info for free or cheap to the public, it would be an enormous benefit to the general public.
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Losing a ship (boat?) during peacetime is a PR disaster. Losing one during wartime can cost you the war. An inefficient one that probably won’t sink due to combat damage can stay in the fight long enough to matter.
Submarines are referred to as boats rather than ships due to naval tradition. As a former naval officer I can only say that technically losing any vessel could be the one that loses a war, just as any soldier lost could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. But if your navy is so rickety that the loss of a single vessel is enough to lose then the main deficiency was in planning rather than any specific warship l…
It could also be argued that the Romans capturing a single Carthaginian warship turned the tide for their entire empire.
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Not necessarily. If you're the type that's into finance, then sure, that might get you out of bed in the morning. I'm not into finance and kind stand the culture that surround finance. Yes, it's big and touches every single one of us, but doesn't mean I want to embrace it and go to work in it every day. If I can take that same skill set and apply it to something with a much better culture surrounding it that affects…
Will the world stop turning if people stopped working on self driving cars or AI?
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> Reading stuff like this makes my current work feel stupid by comparison. It makes our economic system seem stupid. Jesus, we're not calculating astrophysics or quantum mechanics. A made-up system should not require or depend upon this kind of speed or precision. Maybe we should chill. Reminds me of those pro StarCraft players who keep unnecessarily clicking the mouse to keep their APM (actions per minute) stat high…
Absolutely agree. but "liquid markets are important" or something. rolls eyes This is just another step in the endless journey of widening the gap between your average Joe and someone with access to high level financial services.
While we're on the subject, if your company uses technology in an capacity, read the book The Phoenix Project. https://www.amazon.com/Phoenix-Project-DevOps-Helping-Busine...
I wanted to like that book but it's a big Just-so story. tl;dr: The brave knight implemented devops and everyone lived happily ever after!
Some people need a story.
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>> They're not some special snowflake But they are. The consequence of a one-day or one-hour shutdown on their system is exponentially worse than most any other. I would expect them to have more rigorous systems, including more rigorous attention to development. Comparing the NYSE to any other business is like calling Fort Knox just like any other bank vault.
No company or organization is immune to bad business practices. Them being a securities exchange does not somehow provide immunity from developing rigorous systems which have oversights, or make bureaucracy magically go away. Likewise, the impact of an outage being more extreme does not mean the people there are infallible. Things slip through. Especially random customer requests being bounced around from team to tea…
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I worked there and I can say that this is not accurate at all. It is very much a blame culture. I've seen people fired for less severe incidents. Beyond the core technology of the Pillar engine, the place is not comparable to a modern tech company in almost any way.
I used to work for a small startup, and postmortems were truly no blame - engineers would talk about exactly what happened and wouldn't hesitate to put the blame on their mistakes. But as the company grew, the postmortems became more about blame since now you're not blaming an engineer, but an entire team so singling them out isn't personal. The postmortems were no longer a single engineer describing what happened in…
A few years back, a task to modify an index was given to a scrum team. The lead was away and the senior people could not be bothered. The junior developer stack overflowed an answer, asked for review, tested the script and let it rip. She missed that the change deleted everything if you noticed. Every environment, every data center wiped out. 10B records in each prod instance. Lessons were learned and processes fixed. She was not fired, but rather became one of the people safeguarding the keys to our prod kingdom as we fixed out broken process. I stole her away as my first report when I switched groups.
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> Cermak (referred to in the article as the "backup") is an entire datacenter Well, they are a tenent at the Cermak data center. It’s a truly massive building with huge amounts of connectivity and colo opportunities. Probably also the only 100+ year old data center building on the US register of historic places, lol (it’s a former catalog printing facility, built to hold insanely heavy printing presses on 8 or 9 real…
Yeah my point is only that it's a full DR site, not a "backup" that was left running as the article pointed out (and as a lot of commenters are insinuating).
It seems to have multiple purposes - DR, customer software testing, etc.