Decades of crusty code - C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran, home brewed versions of the STL, nih syndrome across the tooling. Actually surprised outages not more common. Still, given their interview process is basically parlour trick questions about pointers and char arrays, it is quite telling!
Bloomberg started out as a network system independent of the Internet. Michael Bloomberg was a network engineer. I'm not sure they ever really switched to proper TCP/IP. This company sure looks like a dinosaur these days. However its hard to imagine a company being able to replace even a chunk of their infrastructure. They are tightly integrated into all institutions and there is no other service which offers a complete coverage of all the world's financial assets.
The issue was probably something like a broadcast storm because of defective fault detection on some redundant network kit. That won't stop people blaming it on the fact that the stack isn't built on the latest hipster frameworks.
It's human nature to want to label things. IIRC a while ago I was watching one of those "house hunter" type shows and a husband on there was really annoying. I found a discussion online and people were calling him a "hipster douche". So, perhaps hipster by itself isn't so bad. :)
Back a long time ago the applicable pejorative was "yuppie". I haven't heard that one recently. I suspect that many people reading here would have to look it up in Wikipedia.
Edit: BTW at the time I was partial to calling people "yuppie scum". Sigh. It's so hard to keep up with the changing putdowns! :)
Using the term 'hipster' to refer to the newest and shiniest web framework always felt like a bit of a misnomer to me. A solid portion of hipsterdom is rooted in recycling of the obscure and of the vintage (vinyl, the popularity of the lumber sexual look, etc). It seems like the 'hipster' thing to do would be to write a web framework in PL/I or cobol or something.
Yes I think to replace them someone needs to create a marketplace for different aspects of Bloomberg and you buy access to specific services and data as you need it.
Would be an amazing business that, supposing you could get buy in from a load of other firms.
Really don't see an ala carte solution being worth it for most firms unless they're really trying to cut down on cost. Integrating and maintaining separate services alone is going to require additional developers. Cost associated with that coupled with quality of service and reliability (outside of this situation) of Bloomberg's current offering makes it a very tough sale. Also, guys who have been using terminals for years are really not going to want to switch.
interesting view - what makes Bloomberg brilliant (aside from the support) is that i have, for example, an array of my portfolios that i can access from every function. So if you could create a service that took all of the information that was relevant to you (portfolios, news feeds, models etc) and normalize it to make it interoperable with a whole host of 3rd party systems, you could be on to something!
It's crusty old code because it works and it's tried and true. If you have a backend that works, why mess with it?
Sure, C++/C/Fortran/some home grown template library is what it's built on. What would they gain by rewriting it some node framework of the week or whatever other shiny distraction? If they did do that and that caused downtime, there would be the same naysayers here complaining about that instead.
I swear I should start a consultancy in the control of software complexity because I am seeing this sort of thing everywhere, and the downages and security issues will only continue (or get worse, as we continue to rely more on software)
Only 700mb? Maybe back in the perkin elmer days, these days they're up to 4gb, constrained only by the various linkers, file size and address spaces available...
This is the same BBG where the huge hairball of C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran makes up the crustry codebase? Where the interview process is still shitty pointer and char array questions? Where they implement their own borked version of the STL? Does anyone internally follow Lakos's books there? (if so or if not, why?)
My interview at BB involved zero shitty pointer and character array questions. It was challenging but included virtually no trivia whatsoever. And that was in 2004.
My interview in 2003 was mostly legit, though one senior manager's 30-minute segment was all BS of exactly this nature. (His initials were GJ and in the four and a half years I worked there, I discovered he was the closest real-world embodiment of the Dilbert pointy-haired boss I've ever encountered)
The most memorable part was:
GJ: Name three examples of defensive programming.
Me: I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the term; could you define it?
GJ: You know, defensive programming.
Me: I've not heard the term, but maybe I know it by a different name; could you describe it?
GJ: No, let's move on.
Later, I looked it up. He just meant things like `if (p == NULL) return False;`. I knew the concept well, and could've spoken about it intelligently and effortlessly, except I had never heard that particular name for it.
Oh, I just remembered another exchange between us:
GJ: What's the difference between a segmentation fault and a bus error?
Me: [perfect explanation]
GJ, seeming disappointed that he hadn't stumped me: Oh, someone already asked you this, huh?
Me: No, I know this, because once when I was in college--
GJ: Come on, you looked this up before, didn't you?
I wasn't sure how to respond -- I mean, yes, technically I did look it up, once upon a time. How the hell else would I know, derivation from basic axioms?
Anyway, I got the job, but I wouldn't be surprised if this other person was interviewed by the same guy and it left a bad taste in their mouth, too. As a senior manager, he probably
interviewed 500 candidates a year.
Not GJ, but yes, a senior manager who asked similar questions. The getting angry at the answer bit is interesting - I gave an answer to one question that was obviously even better than the canned answer he was expecting, he actively ground his teeth a moment or two, like he was being shown up in front of the junior colleague, and at first refused to discuss the question until I pressed the point.
I have friends still working at BBG, so I get to hear the current interview stories, and it seems things have not really improved.
My favorite BBG anecdote was when I was on the hiring side. I rated a candidate "hire at top priority" but he was rejected by another manager.
When I asked why, the manager told me it was because the candidate wrote "xml" on his resume and not "XML" and that any knowledgable programmer would know to capitalize it correctly so he clearly didn't know his stuff.
Let's all chime in with Bloomberg interview experiences! My experience included two timed online tests full of "shitty pointer and array" (and C++ constructor initialization order and C undefined behavior and...) questions and two phone screens of the same before they brought me onsite.
The onsite interviews were 10% system design, 10% more "shitty C++" questions, 20% actual coding, 20% analytical puzzles ("you have two eggs and a skyscraper...") and 40% grilling on networks, such as enumerating all the error codes that socket system calls can return. While I've written tons of low level networking code, I didn't have the depth of networking experience they sought. (And I didn't do well on the analytical puzzles.) It was an interesting challenge though, and my only complaint was the job description didn't indicate what they really wanted.
I agree, the interviews I did with them recently didn't involve pointer/char array questions. Most of the questions were a lot more interesting compared to interviews I had with other companies at the time.
My interview at BB actually was 90% about pointers and character arrays, 10% about the keyword static in C. I got the job worked a great 3-4 years there. Also, that was 13 (!) years ago.
