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I was working at one of the rival HFT's mentioned in the article when all this went down. I had some thoughts. -It's never ok to take proprietary code with yo
by nohuck13 13y ago
I was working at one of the rival HFT's mentioned in the article when all this went down. I had some thoughts.
-It's never ok to take proprietary code with you after quitting. I don't know anybody that would have thought that was OK, especially with the amount of money people were making off this IP in 2008. Of course that's true in any industry, but especially in trading.
-That said, you can't just walk out the door of Goldman on Friday and be trading on Monday, even if you had their entire codebase. The infrastructure needed to be a world-class HFT player at Goldman scale is insanely complicated and prohibitively expensive to all but the most well-funded folks these days. You're going to need colo space and power at tens of trading venues, low-latency WAN infrastructure to ship production quotes and data around the world, expensive exchange gateway connectivity, quant research platforms and a giant compute cluster, significant devops and monitoring infrastructure to run and monitor it all, and smart people evolve the stategies, models, and code as it decays while you're setting all this stuff up.
- appdeveloper 13y agoI agree- it's not okay to take proprietary code. But criminal charges and an 8 year sentence? Totally disproportionate.
- nohuck13 13y agoOh, agreed. I was surprised at the attitude that taking code might be a commonplace thing. Didn't mean to defend the punishment.
- perlpimp 13y agoThat is some advertisement for Goldman, work for us and you will be fine, quit and we will sic FBI, Police or whoever we can find to persecute you, take your money destroy your family and ... .. man this sounds like some mafia.
- kaonashi 13y agoWhat does it mean exactly to 'take proprietary code'? You mean he had a copy on his laptop so he could work from home? Isn't that what most of us do?
- craigching 13y agoWas it a personal laptop or a GS owned laptop? I don't want to defend GS and I think the criminal charges are overboard (and I don't understand how they think it's ok, hopefully it hurts their ability to recruit), but generally when you work for a company it is NOT ok to put company assets on personal machines. Every company has its own policy, but I would bet GS wasn't cool with putting their code on personal machines.
- phyalow 13y agonohuck13 - Can you email me on the address in my profile? I have a couple of questions regarding the industry. Thanks :P
- pdog 13y agoRegarding your second point, the code for the strats would be immensely and immediately more useful than the trading platform. You wouldn't need much infrastructure to build a profitable strategy to trade against it.