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>>> 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
by 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 agoBig 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.