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avg salary of a bloomberg user is lower than some people might think because there are a lot of support staff who have bloomberg. As for the UI: I wish more th

by mhh__ 2y ago

avg salary of a bloomberg user is lower than some people might think because there are a lot of support staff who have bloomberg. As for the UI: I wish more things were like bloomberg, but bloomberg itself can be slightly hobbled by wanting to lay everything out as a table all the time when a custom chart designed by a creative domain-expert would be almost as useful.

defrost 2y ago
There's two clear points to be made: * Why change to something that's "almost as useful" .. that's a downgrade. * Pretty is often the enemy of Consistent. On that second point, it doesn't have to be .. but it can take a great deal more effort to have data presentation that's both creative and consistent and dense. The domain goals here are rapid navigation of dense infomation across tens of thousands of companies, timespans, portfolios, groupings, comparisons, etc. With a good interface the user quickly finds the desired scope and view and automatically eye tracks to the wanted figures. It's not an interface for pretty board room presentations (although in an organisation that promotes based on merit in the ditches most senior staff would be familiar with a Bloomberg Board) - it's a daily driver for engine room. I'm not defending this specific interface, just highlighting what is common to many similar domain tools.
- mhh__ 2y ago
  > Why change to something that's "almost as useful" .. that's a downgrade. To clarify: There would be two modes, for example, when looking at the prices of options you might want to see the shape of the smile (e.g. equivalent to the markets view of a certain probability distribution), but when trading a specific option you want to know everything about it down to exact prices. it's not about pretty-ness, indeed some of these charts can be completely incomprehensible, but rather density. Our UIs should be more than just Excel-but-not-in-Excel!
throwaway2037 2y ago
> there are a lot of support staff who have bloomberg. Much less than people think. It costs about 25K USD per year per terminal. There might be one shared terminal in a whole middle or back office.

by mhh__ 2y ago

defrost 2y ago

There's two clear points to be made: * Why change to something that's "almost as useful" .. that's a downgrade. * Pretty is often the enemy of Consistent. On that second point, it doesn't have to be .. but it can take a great deal more effort to have data presentation that's both creative and consistent and dense. The domain goals here are rapid navigation of dense infomation across tens of thousands of companies, timespans, portfolios, groupings, comparisons, etc. With a good interface the user quickly finds the desired scope and view and automatically eye tracks to the wanted figures. It's not an interface for pretty board room presentations (although in an organisation that promotes based on merit in the ditches most senior staff would be familiar with a Bloomberg Board) - it's a daily driver for engine room. I'm not defending this specific interface, just highlighting what is common to many similar domain tools.

mhh__ 2y ago
> Why change to something that's "almost as useful" .. that's a downgrade. To clarify: There would be two modes, for example, when looking at the prices of options you might want to see the shape of the smile (e.g. equivalent to the markets view of a certain probability distribution), but when trading a specific option you want to know everything about it down to exact prices. it's not about pretty-ness, indeed some of these charts can be completely incomprehensible, but rather density. Our UIs should be more than just Excel-but-not-in-Excel!

throwaway2037 2y ago

> there are a lot of support staff who have bloomberg. Much less than people think. It costs about 25K USD per year per terminal. There might be one shared terminal in a whole middle or back office.