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> Didn't get the job. You dodged a bullet. I worked for CIQ from 2003-2007, it was not such a great time. (I recently reminisced a bit here: http://mcfunley.co
by mcfunley 13y ago
> Didn't get the job.
You dodged a bullet. I worked for CIQ from 2003-2007, it was not such a great time. (I recently reminisced a bit here: http://mcfunley.com/manual-delivery http://mcfunley.com/manual-delivery)
At one point I was offered a job with Bloomberg that I didn't wind up taking. In my last interview with a director, he described an experience he had rewriting quite a bit of the Bloomberg terminal as a modern (for the time anyway) Windows app as some kind of skunkworks project. He said he was nearly fired for this. His superiors explained to him very slowly that although the terminal looks like obvious insanity to a tech person, it's embedded in the culture in finance. People like it in part because it's insane. It's hard to attack this with modern methods.
One other giant stinking reason it's really hard to innovate here is data. All of these companies are vertically integrated. CIQ, for example, is (or was back then, anyway) a tiny shim of a crappy tech company in New York and thousands and thousands of people doing data collection in India. The data is the product. Initially CIQ was just the website, and they bought their data from competitors. As they became successful their competitors shut them down and they had to scramble to replicate datasets by themselves.
- EGreg 13y agoI tried to implement a back button for Bloomberg while I was there. I came up with a few hacky prototypes before giving up, and never showed it to anyone. The software just wasn't designed for this.
- xmonkee 13y agoCould you give me a range of how much a dev can expect to earn at bloomberg? I'm curious because currently I'm a client (front office finance) but by next year I hope to get a tech degree and job. I'm just bracing myself for what kind of pay cut i'll need to take.
- EGreg 13y agoYes, and in fact if you look at the job boards you can get a picture. I am going to speak from what I saw two years ago. If you teach devs in their classes you can get a starting salary of around $150k. That's a tough team to get into, since it's one particular team. If you are a developer in general you get around $80-120K starting. I got $95K straight out of a master's program. Like any other company, a lot of it has to do with their commission to the recruiter that they pay. If you can somehow apply without a recruiter and have them really like you, you can probably get a larger salary. If you stay for years then over time you'll be making more, probably around $200-300K. Unless you're really instrumental to the company, then you'll be making $500k probably. Still not as much as a trader or quant getting multi million dollar bonuses to stick around. But definitely good. Their company is a meritocracy, and if you want to keep one thing in mind, it is this: the more good work you do and the more indispensable your work is, the more you will be able to ask for in a couple years. Making yourself really indispensable is the trick there, and it's very possible. Actually my advice to you is this: if this is a whole year away, look around and see what companies you like and form connections with hiring managers WITHIN that company, rather than external recruiters. How? I don't know, get to know employees and then have them put in a good word. They get a commission actually for introducing you, but it's nowhere near what a recruiter would get.
- xmonkee 13y agoThanks, man. This helps.
- memossy 13y agoBloomberg now has a back and forward button, as well as a drop down to go between recent commands/pages