>> though we are in the financial sector
> That explains it. I'm working in finance at the moment too, it's where you find the worst developers/management/products.
I second that opinion. There's a lack of depth of knowledge on the IT/Coding side, and people think it's just another little cog that they need to get their deals done.
So you get things like
- Complex derivatives calculated on Excel. You wonder why people make millions on this? It's because you never really know what the heck you're calculating.
- Missed deadlines that should be cron jobs. I remember a guy coming into the office, down a good few hundred grand because he'd forgotten to exercise options that had a dividend on them. I mean that's just stupid, if you had a proper system it would tell you, and the calendar would be synced with Bloomberg.
- Ridiculous budgets. A friend at a major bank is on a $27M project that is essentially a calculator that adds two numbers together. Other people are attempting to break into HFT with zero competent coders, no network other than what can be leased cheaply, and no systems engineers.
- Balls of spaghetti of unimaginable proportions. One c++ guy at a big bank told me he takes 7 hours to compile. He's writing execution code, which you'd think would be relatively snappy.
>- Balls of spaghetti of unimaginable proportions. One c++ guy at a big bank told me he takes 7 hours to compile. He's writing execution code, which you'd think would be relatively snappy.
How long should it take? The last time I did anything of note in c++ was on a computer of 2000's vintage and 7 hour builds were pretty common.
If you're taking seven hours to build, you have too few computers per programmer. Compiling C++ parallelizes well, and computers are dirt cheap compared to the cost of employing people.
I second that opinion. There's a lack of depth of knowledge on the IT/Coding side, and people think it's just another little cog that they need to get their deals done.
So you get things like
- Complex derivatives calculated on Excel. You wonder why people make millions on this? It's because you never really know what the heck you're calculating.
- Missed deadlines that should be cron jobs. I remember a guy coming into the office, down a good few hundred grand because he'd forgotten to exercise options that had a dividend on them. I mean that's just stupid, if you had a proper system it would tell you, and the calendar would be synced with Bloomberg.
- Ridiculous budgets. A friend at a major bank is on a $27M project that is essentially a calculator that adds two numbers together. Other people are attempting to break into HFT with zero competent coders, no network other than what can be leased cheaply, and no systems engineers.
- Balls of spaghetti of unimaginable proportions. One c++ guy at a big bank told me he takes 7 hours to compile. He's writing execution code, which you'd think would be relatively snappy.