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

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

#41

Post by scrumper » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 5:31 PM UTC

jhull wrote: post #10

Is there an alternative to Bloomberg? I haven't ever heard of traders using anything else.

Bloomberg's stickiness is primarily about the IM network. Everyone is on it. Familiarity is a close second, but nobody likes paying the fees and an alternative would be welcomed, particularly by clients burned by the chat log snooping scandal.

There was some press quite recently about an industry-backed initiative to develop an alternative IM platform (which is a necessary first step to displacing terminals), but nothing much has been said since.

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

#42

Post by PhantomGremlin » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 6:19 PM UTC

FYI another discussion going on. Parent link there is to an NY Times article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9393884

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

#43

Post by cpach » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 7:11 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.

Haha, that’s incredible :)

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

#44

Post by S4M » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 7:14 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.

I didn't know a programmer is expected to have "XML" (or "xml" on his cv). It's something that you can pick up very quickly if you don't know it.

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

#45

Post by tomp » Fri, Apr 17, 2015, 8:04 PM UTC

raldi wrote: post #34

apaprocki wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's very interesting, and definitely an infrastructure many companies should strive for and could learn from.

I'm wondering, however, not how problems were handled, but how were they detected - code throwing exceptions is the easy case, the real problem is code running almost correctly, but with slightly wrong outputs. I imagine there could be many different "sensibility" checks implemented, (e.g. no negative prices, no huge jumps price jumps), but in general it appears to be a very interesting and complex problem.

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

#46

Post by chrisbennet » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 11:54 AM UTC

apaprocki wrote: post #36

chrisbennet wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?".

That sounds like a smart company.