111–120 of 219 posts
The only thing worse than a complex codebase is a complex build system. I think CMake is an abomination. “Hey go learn this new language to compile this other language!”
The only thing worse than a complex build system is a simple build system that can't build what you need to build. :(
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Grass is always greener my friend. Many jobs in finance are updating 20 year old Java code, or figuring out new ways to load data in and out of Excel files for custom reporting.
OP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques. I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit
Processes reading and writing directly to FPGA/NIC ring buffers.
Shunning TCP in favour of UDP based protocols that are easy to optimize for your particular usecas in userspace.
Removing cores from the Linux scheduler entirely and pinning processes to those cores.
This stuff isn't even novel, it's been standard practice for a couple of decades.
Whenever I see posts from Janestreet blog I laugh inside thinking how working on the financial industry at Jane is probably more fun and rewarding than some 90% of the jobs in the so-called tech industry.
I still rank it above making people click on ads though.
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Mother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.
Some fraction of young minds, not all. I was happy to work at a small aerospace company with extreme concentration of brightest minds. Only because they loved the domain, and didn't mind a salary cut. What a joy and relief it was for me after FAANG!
Yes, so it means GP is right! Modern capitalism in tech is about rewarding the two aforementioned tasks.
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OP should've been more specific. HFT firms, not any other finance companies, probably have a lot more exciting work due to the nature of reducing latency using all sorts of novel techniques. I wonder if they disable all the fancy exploit mitigation protection in linux kernel just for a tiny performance hit
Mother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.
So the story here is that over the last twenty years they stole the lunch from the traditional market makers like eg banks.
Of course, they got rich in the process. But they started from relatively modest means, compared to the companies they took on.
Michael Lewis's 'Flash Boys' is an hilarious account of this process. Well, it's involuntarily hilarious, because to tell his story, Lewis needs to cast Goldman Sachs (!) and other big banks as the victim. See the rebuttal 'Flash Boys: Not so fast' by Peter Kovac for more insight.
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Mother capitalism deems that our brightest young minds best serve humanity in two tasks. Keeping the public passively scrolling, and moving money at speed to make wealthy people more wealthy.
Absolutely. The moral aspect is certainly questionable. Although, I wouldn't say "all brightest minds" are going to neglect their moral concerns for getting rich
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The ideas embodied in modern target-oriented CMake are worthwhile. It's all hobbled by a dreadful script language but that could be improved with sufficient motivation.
I think what annoys me about it the most is that for every good idea in there there's one piece of tedious crap you have to work around, one actively bad misfeature that doesn't work properly, and one terrible aspect of the awful scripting language. (And two minor annoyances that people determined to hate CMake will never shut up about. But then, if you're determined to hate something, there are worse things than CMa…
Sounds like the perfect match for C++.
I wonder if anyone has used Jane Street's open source OCaml libraries and tools for somewhat serious projects. I took a brief look at these things, and my impression is that their stuff isn't "ready" for anyone outside Jane Street, even though they put a lot of effort in building the ecosystem and open source their code.
Whenever I see posts from Janestreet blog I laugh inside thinking how working on the financial industry at Jane is probably more fun and rewarding than some 90% of the jobs in the so-called tech industry.