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Good place to work, if being a maintenance programmer for a monopoly with a massive enterprise-quality codebase is your thing. It's _very_ different from worki

by soup10 14y ago

Good place to work, if being a maintenance programmer for a monopoly with a massive enterprise-quality codebase is your thing. It's _very_ different from working at a start-up, but probably one of the better places to work in the finance world.

watmough 14y ago
I can't say it strongly enough, but the ability to be one of the diminishing few with a high ability to understand, debug and fix, large Visual C++ codebases, will likely provide you with a long career. Not all of it is going to be rewritten in .NET, and every year, more of the C++ guys die or retire, and more people quit for .NET, or something easier. Maintenance may be a dirty word in some circles, but for me it's more like an endless confusing puzzle, and stream of opportunities to make things better.
tptacek 14y ago
I can't speak to the whole of Bloomberg, but Infrastructure R&D is very different from Bloomberg at large. Bloomberg does indeed employ an army of people to write and rewrite financial/enterprise line-of-business applications on their terminal platform. This role isn't that. The difference here is akin to the difference between being an ASP.NET web developer at an insurance firm (boring job) and being on the Windows kernel team (not boring job). One thing you'd really want to understand about Bloomberg: unlike most companies in finance, regardless of how much OCaml or Haskell they're allegedly using, Bloomberg is a technology firm. Enterprise/line-of-business development jobs have a bad reputation in large part because they are hosted by companies that aren't about technology. That's not BB. Yes, BB deals in quotes and market data where Google deals in web pages... but the distinctions start to end not far past that. Andrew can do a better job talking up the role than I can; I just know a couple people who work in his group, have heard the war stories, and it's really pretty awesome.

by soup10 14y ago

watmough 14y ago

I can't say it strongly enough, but the ability to be one of the diminishing few with a high ability to understand, debug and fix, large Visual C++ codebases, will likely provide you with a long career. Not all of it is going to be rewritten in .NET, and every year, more of the C++ guys die or retire, and more people quit for .NET, or something easier. Maintenance may be a dirty word in some circles, but for me it's more like an endless confusing puzzle, and stream of opportunities to make things better.

tptacek 14y ago

I can't speak to the whole of Bloomberg, but Infrastructure R&D is very different from Bloomberg at large. Bloomberg does indeed employ an army of people to write and rewrite financial/enterprise line-of-business applications on their terminal platform. This role isn't that. The difference here is akin to the difference between being an ASP.NET web developer at an insurance firm (boring job) and being on the Windows kernel team (not boring job). One thing you'd really want to understand about Bloomberg: unlike most companies in finance, regardless of how much OCaml or Haskell they're allegedly using, Bloomberg is a technology firm. Enterprise/line-of-business development jobs have a bad reputation in large part because they are hosted by companies that aren't about technology. That's not BB. Yes, BB deals in quotes and market data where Google deals in web pages... but the distinctions start to end not far past that. Andrew can do a better job talking up the role than I can; I just know a couple people who work in his group, have heard the war stories, and it's really pretty awesome.