Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline • Hacker News Board

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#31

Post by raldi » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 2:00 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #25

bbgtoreuters wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same BBG where the huge hairball of C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran makes up the crustry codebase? Where the interview process is still shitty pointer and char array questions? Where they implement their own borked version of the STL? Does anyone internally follow Lakos's books there? (if so or if not, why?)

My interview at BB involved zero shitty pointer and character array questions. It was challenging but included virtually no trivia whatsoever. And that was in 2004.

My interview in 2003 was mostly legit, though one senior manager's 30-minute segment was all BS of exactly this nature. (His initials were GJ and in the four and a half years I worked there, I discovered he was the closest real-world embodiment of the Dilbert pointy-haired boss I've ever encountered)

The most memorable part was:

GJ: Name three examples of defensive programming.

Me: I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the term; could you define it?

GJ: You know, defensive programming.

Me: I've not heard the term, but maybe I know it by a different name; could you describe it?

GJ: No, let's move on.

Later, I looked it up. He just meant things like `if (p == NULL) return False;`. I knew the concept well, and could've spoken about it intelligently and effortlessly, except I had never heard that particular name for it.

Oh, I just remembered another exchange between us:

GJ: What's the difference between a segmentation fault and a bus error?

Me: [perfect explanation]

GJ, seeming disappointed that he hadn't stumped me: Oh, someone already asked you this, huh?

Me: No, I know this, because once when I was in college--

GJ: Come on, you looked this up before, didn't you?

I wasn't sure how to respond -- I mean, yes, technically I did look it up, once upon a time. How the hell else would I know, derivation from basic axioms?

Anyway, I got the job, but I wouldn't be surprised if this other person was interviewed by the same guy and it left a bad taste in their mouth, too. As a senior manager, he probably interviewed 500 candidates a year.

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#32

Post by benstein » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 2:11 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #25

bbgtoreuters wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same BBG where the huge hairball of C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran makes up the crustry codebase? Where the interview process is still shitty pointer and char array questions? Where they implement their own borked version of the STL? Does anyone internally follow Lakos's books there? (if so or if not, why?)

My interview at BB involved zero shitty pointer and character array questions. It was challenging but included virtually no trivia whatsoever. And that was in 2004.

My favorite BBG anecdote was when I was on the hiring side. I rated a candidate "hire at top priority" but he was rejected by another manager.

When I asked why, the manager told me it was because the candidate wrote "xml" on his resume and not "XML" and that any knowledgable programmer would know to capitalize it correctly so he clearly didn't know his stuff.

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#33

Post by vdnkh » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 2:13 PM UTC

kenan_warren wrote: post #28

tptacek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interview at BB involved zero shitty pointer and character array questions. It was challenging but included virtually no trivia whatsoever. And that was in 2004.

I agree, the interviews I did with them recently didn't involve pointer/char array questions. Most of the questions were a lot more interesting compared to interviews I had with other companies at the time. Disclosure: I start at BBG in June.

Do you remember any questions? I'm going to be applying there soon and I'd like to know.

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#34

Post by raldi » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 2:13 PM UTC

apaprocki wrote: post #17

7sigma wrote: post #4

Former bloomberg employee here. While the bloomberg service usually runs very well, its built mostley on spaghetti code that has been copy pasta'ed since the 80s and 90s. It might have improved since I worked there, but there were some serious deficiencies in development methodology.

I don't know when you worked there, but that is not how things are run. Source: I work there.

Hi Andrew!

What I remember from my time there (2003-2007) was how quickly everyone was able to ship code despite (or perhaps because of) no global style guide, unit test mandates, or even rules about copy-pasting code. Each team was able to do things the way they thought best, thanks to an incredibly resilient, flexible production infrastructure that could tolerate, isolate, route around, and quickly repair any newly-introduced bug.

The code path (Bloomberg four-letter function, to those familiar with the service) running through the bug could nearly instantly, and if I'm not mistaken, in a totally automated way, be flipped over to a hot backup instance running the previous week's code, and a patch or rollback could be released to the live code almost as soon as it was written.

Most tech companies see the problems caused by coding too fast and respond by doing things to slow people down. Bloomberg cured the ills of excess programming velocity by turning the speed up even further. Like Facebook's "Move fast and break things", but with an extra, "...and then move even faster to fix them", and in a way that (mostly) insulated customers from being exposed to the breakage.

The fact that it's front-page news when there's a hiccup shows that it's a man-bites-dog event. You'd be in trouble if it wasn't major news when there was a service incident.

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#35

Post by raldi » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 2:27 PM UTC

benstein wrote: post #32

tptacek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interview at BB involved zero shitty pointer and character array questions. It was challenging but included virtually no trivia whatsoever. And that was in 2004.

My favorite BBG anecdote was when I was on the hiring side. I rated a candidate "hire at top priority" but he was rejected by another manager. When I asked why, the manager told me it was because the candidate wrote "xml" on his resume and not "XML" and that any knowledgable programmer would know to capitalize it correctly so he clearly didn't know his stuff.

This only happened because he wrote his resume in Emacs or vi. A real programmer would have used MS-Word and it would have autocorrected.

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#36

Post by apaprocki » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 2:32 PM UTC

chrisbennet wrote: post #27

quadhome wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloomberg has just paid a lot for their experience of what mistakes to not make in the future. Walking them out the door would be a fantastic waste of money.

That's the way a smart business would think. I wonder how smart Bloomberg is? It's not uncommon for the goals of employees ]assign blame, cover ass, grab more power, short term profit] to be misaligned with the long term goals of the business.

There is a lot of assumption going on (that a human messed up). Even if that was the case I've never known it to be a place that would have knee jerk reactions like that. The company is more interested in saying "failures will happen, how do we prevent them from becoming major issues?".

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#37

Post by bbgtoreuters » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 2:45 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #31

tptacek wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My interview at BB involved zero shitty pointer and character array questions. It was challenging but included virtually no trivia whatsoever. And that was in 2004.

My interview in 2003 was mostly legit, though one senior manager's 30-minute segment was all BS of exactly this nature. (His initials were GJ and in the four and a half years I worked there, I discovered he was the closest real-world embodiment of the Dilbert pointy-haired boss I've ever encountered) The most memorable part was: GJ: Name three examples of defensive programming. Me: I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with th…

Not GJ, but yes, a senior manager who asked similar questions. The getting angry at the answer bit is interesting - I gave an answer to one question that was obviously even better than the canned answer he was expecting, he actively ground his teeth a moment or two, like he was being shown up in front of the junior colleague, and at first refused to discuss the question until I pressed the point.

I have friends still working at BBG, so I get to hear the current interview stories, and it seems things have not really improved.

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#38

Post by throwawaykf05 » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 2:49 PM UTC

apaprocki wrote: post #17

7sigma wrote: post #4

Former bloomberg employee here. While the bloomberg service usually runs very well, its built mostley on spaghetti code that has been copy pasta'ed since the 80s and 90s. It might have improved since I worked there, but there were some serious deficiencies in development methodology.

I don't know when you worked there, but that is not how things are run. Source: I work there.

It probably depends on what group you work with. I interviewed there a few years ago following a who's hiring post by you (thanks!), and the interviewers seemed to know what they were doing. Didn't work out for me, but it was the group owning the feed, IIRC.

However, since then I've interviewed many candidates from Bloomberg, and while they were all very smart, their description of the work they did indicated systems that were at varying levels of WTF. In their defense this was most likely due to legacy reasons.

Also, it's funny how Bloomberg candidates inevitably use multicast in their system design interviews, which throws most "web company" interviewers off balance :-)

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#39

Post by throwawaykf05 » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 3:10 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #25

bbgtoreuters wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the same BBG where the huge hairball of C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran makes up the crustry codebase? Where the interview process is still shitty pointer and char array questions? Where they implement their own borked version of the STL? Does anyone internally follow Lakos's books there? (if so or if not, why?)

My interview at BB involved zero shitty pointer and character array questions. It was challenging but included virtually no trivia whatsoever. And that was in 2004.

Let's all chime in with Bloomberg interview experiences! My experience included two timed online tests full of "shitty pointer and array" (and C++ constructor initialization order and C undefined behavior and...) questions and two phone screens of the same before they brought me onsite.

The onsite interviews were 10% system design, 10% more "shitty C++" questions, 20% actual coding, 20% analytical puzzles ("you have two eggs and a skyscraper...") and 40% grilling on networks, such as enumerating all the error codes that socket system calls can return. While I've written tons of low level networking code, I didn't have the depth of networking experience they sought. (And I didn't do well on the analytical puzzles.) It was an interesting challenge though, and my only complaint was the job description didn't indicate what they really wanted.

Re: Finance world in the dark as Bloomberg terminals go offline

#40

Post by digler990 » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 4:15 PM UTC

apaprocki wrote: post #17

7sigma wrote: post #4

Former bloomberg employee here. While the bloomberg service usually runs very well, its built mostley on spaghetti code that has been copy pasta'ed since the 80s and 90s. It might have improved since I worked there, but there were some serious deficiencies in development methodology.

I don't know when you worked there, but that is not how things are run. Source: I work there.

as recently as 2013 there were still libraries that had Fortran dependencies.