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So I once interviewed at Bloomberg for a frontend engineer role that I believe would have involved working with the BB terminal UI. During the interview, I was

So I once interviewed at Bloomberg for a frontend engineer role that I believe would have involved working with the BB terminal UI. During the interview, I was told that the modern UI development was done in JavaScript using a proprietary framework. Found that interesting to say the least. I got rejected because I couldn't do some fancy binary tree algorithm trick, but I walked out of the interview thinking I didn't want the job anyways as I am not fond of proprietary frameworks (short of working at a FAANG level company anyways... I would consider BB highly prestigious, but still not at that level...)

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago
Bloomberg did a milkround at my university about 10 years ago - showing off their new terminal. I noticed it looked like it was running on Windows with their terminal GUI implemented using standard Win32 hWnds and GDI painting (you can tell by how text and shapes are rendered - and how it couldn’t seem to smoothly animate above 30fps) - and the built-in newsviewer was playing a video using the Windows Media Player ActiveX control. So if they have switched to Electron - at least that will hopefully deliver a better UX - it’s not like users are meant to run other programs on those things (I think?) so they don’t care about Chromium’s memory usage.
- apaprocki 6y ago
  We very much do care about Chromium's memory usage. Chrome RAM memes exist for a reason :)
- decafninja 6y ago
  I don't think it was Electron or even anything based on Chromium - I could be wrong, my memory is fuzzy. But I think they said it was a custom implementation that predated Electron. Don't quote me on that though. Obviously someone that actually works there would know best. Another financial firm I interviewed at - Tradeweb, also had something similar. Custom implementation, not Electron, but in their case, yes Chromium.

DaiPlusPlus 6y ago

Bloomberg did a milkround at my university about 10 years ago - showing off their new terminal. I noticed it looked like it was running on Windows with their terminal GUI implemented using standard Win32 hWnds and GDI painting (you can tell by how text and shapes are rendered - and how it couldn’t seem to smoothly animate above 30fps) - and the built-in newsviewer was playing a video using the Windows Media Player ActiveX control. So if they have switched to Electron - at least that will hopefully deliver a better UX - it’s not like users are meant to run other programs on those things (I think?) so they don’t care about Chromium’s memory usage.

apaprocki 6y ago
We very much do care about Chromium's memory usage. Chrome RAM memes exist for a reason :)
decafninja 6y ago
I don't think it was Electron or even anything based on Chromium - I could be wrong, my memory is fuzzy. But I think they said it was a custom implementation that predated Electron. Don't quote me on that though. Obviously someone that actually works there would know best. Another financial firm I interviewed at - Tradeweb, also had something similar. Custom implementation, not Electron, but in their case, yes Chromium.