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I realize that the consensus is that lots of companies do this kinda thing. I don't know if it's 99% - but the percentage is pretty high. However what's neglec

I realize that the consensus is that lots of companies do this kinda thing. I don't know if it's 99% - but the percentage is pretty high. However what's neglected to mention is the risk associated with a catastrophic software error. If you are say instagram and you lose your uploaded image of what you ate for lunch, that is undesirable and inconvenient. The consequences of that risk should it come to fruition is relatively low. On the other hand if you employee software developers that are literally the lifeblood of your business for automatic trading, you'd think that a company like that would understand the consequences of treating this "cost-center" as a critical asset rather than just a commodity. Unfortunately you would be wrong. Nearly every developer I have ever met that has worked for a trading firm has told me that the general attitude towards nearly all it's employees that are not generating revenue as a disposable commodity. It's not just developers but also research, governance, secretarial, customer service, etc. This is a bit of a broad brush but generally the principles and traders of those aforementioned firms are arrogant and greedy and cut corners whenever possible. In this case you'd think these people would be rational enough to know that cutting corners on your IT staff could be catastrophic. This is where you would be wrong. Most of the small/mid sized financial firms that I have had friends who worked there have told me they generally treat their staff like garbage and routinely push people out who want decent raises/bonuses, etc. These people are generally greedy and also egocentric and egomaniacal, and they believe all their employees are leaching from their yearly bonus directly. This story is not a surprise to me in the least. What's shocking is no one in the finance industry has learned anything. Instead of looking at this story as a warning, most of the finance people hear this story and laugh at how stupid everyone else is and that this would never happen to them personally because they're so much smarter than everyone else.

user5994461 8y ago
>>> Instead of looking at this story as a warning, most of the finance people hear this story and laugh at how stupid everyone else is and that this would never happen to them personally because they're so much smarter than everyone else. What if we're smarter than everyone else? When I was in big bank, we had mandatory source control, lint, unit tests, code coverage, code review, automated deployment, etc... pretty good tools actually. Not everybody is stuck in the stone age. Even in a small trading company before that, we had most of the tooling although not as polished. Very small company with a billion dollars a month in executed trade. One could say amateur scale.
- padseeker 8y ago
  Big bank is not the same as a small/mid sized trading firm. Banks have regulations they need to meet, and typically do things by the book. I'm not an expert here. Part of what I said is based on the 6 different people I've met who have worked in the industry. I'm just saying if you have $400+ million to lose and you rely on the IT infrastructure allows you to make that money then you can spend a few million on top notch people and processes to prevent this kind of thing. I worked at a relatively large media company, and every deployment has a go/no-go meeting where knowledgable professionals asked probing questions, you defended your decisions. I've love to know what they did in Knight Capital. The idea of re-using an existing variable for code that was out of use strikes me as a terrible idea.

user5994461 8y ago

>>> Instead of looking at this story as a warning, most of the finance people hear this story and laugh at how stupid everyone else is and that this would never happen to them personally because they're so much smarter than everyone else. What if we're smarter than everyone else? When I was in big bank, we had mandatory source control, lint, unit tests, code coverage, code review, automated deployment, etc... pretty good tools actually. Not everybody is stuck in the stone age. Even in a small trading company before that, we had most of the tooling although not as polished. Very small company with a billion dollars a month in executed trade. One could say amateur scale.

padseeker 8y ago
Big bank is not the same as a small/mid sized trading firm. Banks have regulations they need to meet, and typically do things by the book. I'm not an expert here. Part of what I said is based on the 6 different people I've met who have worked in the industry. I'm just saying if you have $400+ million to lose and you rely on the IT infrastructure allows you to make that money then you can spend a few million on top notch people and processes to prevent this kind of thing. I worked at a relatively large media company, and every deployment has a go/no-go meeting where knowledgable professionals asked probing questions, you defended your decisions. I've love to know what they did in Knight Capital. The idea of re-using an existing variable for code that was out of use strikes me as a terrible idea.