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I've spent 99% of my career working on things that would be of no interest to an investment bank: One of the many interesting conversations I've had over the l

by patio11 11y ago

I've spent 99% of my career working on things that would be of no interest to an investment bank: One of the many interesting conversations I've had over the last few months is with a guy who leads a team of X00 developers out of one bank's 1X,000 developers, which does minimally GUIs, graphics, GPUs (for rendering and simulation), mobile platforms, and content creation tools. His #1 problem right now is that you are representative of many, many developers who don't know that his sort of group exists. I think he'd describe his job as "We're the thin edge of the wedge hitting the really hard problems so that our customers in the bank can focus development on the really valuable problems." (I don't know if I'm cleared to talk about them until contract negotiation wraps. Sorry, not trying to be coy here. Take it on faith that many of the big guys run shops which have those needs and more besides.)

bostik 11y ago
> GPUs (for rendering and simulation) I'd like to provide a data point for this, btw. There are exchanges for sports gambling (we run one), and some of the most succesful betting syndicates run clusters of hundreds or even low thousands multi-GPU servers to crunch the incoming data on their real-time simulations. The results of this type of crunching are feeds, signaling and strategy shifts for their market makers. I have no doubt investment banks, who operate on an order of magnitude more data, would have something similar. Even if majority of it was used for backtesting.
pavlov 11y ago
Huh, that's interesting. I certainly wouldn't have guessed that. Now that I think about it, I have no idea what investment banks are really like as work environments. The caricature in my mind is a rigid hierarchy populated by career-minded sycophants who judge people based on the college they attended; bosses that would be played by Alec Baldwin in fiction; software stacks sold by Oracle salesmen on golf courses; senior architects who manage via UML drawings; workdays that extend to 9pm just because; and for a touch of fun, brokers who throw half-eaten lobsters at each other on Friday nights. In all, the kind of place that would have absolutely no interest in hiring me and where I would never imagine working... Maybe my prejudices would need a reality check.
- lucozade 11y ago
  I think you're describing investment bankers circa 1995. Tech in investment banks is full of, well, developers. I'm currently working on stuff that has X0,000 cores, X00 GPUs (compute though not rendering), web UI, large data aggregation and visualisation (around 1bn data points moving in near real time). I don't do fpga work but I sit near some chaps that do. In fairness, I haven't done any CAD or audio at a bank. However, I did design sonar absorbing materials prior to working in finance and there's a surprising amount of similarity in the engineering I did then and the statistical sims we do now. Oh, and lobster night is Tuesday night.
- rmc 11y ago
  > workdays that extend to 9pm Isn't that a problem in Silicon Valley too?
scott_karana 11y ago
> His #1 problem right now is that you are representative of many, many developers who don't know that his sort of group exists. If that's the case, why are you having to post about it on HN? Why isn't he out here proselytizing? It sounds like an interesting field. Needs some better marketing. :-)
- kasey_junk 11y ago
  Because hacker news is a tiny community in the larger tech world & insular besides? Also Patrick has shown skill at marketing to the folks he wants to market to, so why not outsource it?

by patio11 11y ago

bostik 11y ago

> GPUs (for rendering and simulation) I'd like to provide a data point for this, btw. There are exchanges for sports gambling (we run one), and some of the most succesful betting syndicates run clusters of hundreds or even low thousands multi-GPU servers to crunch the incoming data on their real-time simulations. The results of this type of crunching are feeds, signaling and strategy shifts for their market makers. I have no doubt investment banks, who operate on an order of magnitude more data, would have something similar. Even if majority of it was used for backtesting.

pavlov 11y ago

Huh, that's interesting. I certainly wouldn't have guessed that. Now that I think about it, I have no idea what investment banks are really like as work environments. The caricature in my mind is a rigid hierarchy populated by career-minded sycophants who judge people based on the college they attended; bosses that would be played by Alec Baldwin in fiction; software stacks sold by Oracle salesmen on golf courses; senior architects who manage via UML drawings; workdays that extend to 9pm just because; and for a touch of fun, brokers who throw half-eaten lobsters at each other on Friday nights. In all, the kind of place that would have absolutely no interest in hiring me and where I would never imagine working... Maybe my prejudices would need a reality check.

lucozade 11y ago
I think you're describing investment bankers circa 1995. Tech in investment banks is full of, well, developers. I'm currently working on stuff that has X0,000 cores, X00 GPUs (compute though not rendering), web UI, large data aggregation and visualisation (around 1bn data points moving in near real time). I don't do fpga work but I sit near some chaps that do. In fairness, I haven't done any CAD or audio at a bank. However, I did design sonar absorbing materials prior to working in finance and there's a surprising amount of similarity in the engineering I did then and the statistical sims we do now. Oh, and lobster night is Tuesday night.
rmc 11y ago
> workdays that extend to 9pm Isn't that a problem in Silicon Valley too?

scott_karana 11y ago

> His #1 problem right now is that you are representative of many, many developers who don't know that his sort of group exists. If that's the case, why are you having to post about it on HN? Why isn't he out here proselytizing? It sounds like an interesting field. Needs some better marketing. :-)

kasey_junk 11y ago
Because hacker news is a tiny community in the larger tech world & insular besides? Also Patrick has shown skill at marketing to the folks he wants to market to, so why not outsource it?