Wow, my brother works on Quartz. But I think that half of BofA does. Higgins and Kirat formed their own company to bring the Quartz/Athena paradigm to the masses.
I have been following your blog since it first came out, Michael. Congrats on your successes. Coincidentally, I also wrote up my 2020 recap today for my CTO-as-a-Service, and posted it on my website (ctoasaservice.org). It was a really strange year. You would have thought that everything would have shut down tight after the lockdown in mid-March, but quite the opposite.
For both of us, we left good-paying jobs in order to persue something that we felt strongly about, hoping to make some sort of dent in the word. Success to your future endeavors!
I just offer myself. I do everything (except coding) for my clients. Right now, many clients come from word-of-mouth. If a client of mine is happy with my work, they tend to recommend me to others in their incubator/accelerator space.
But I came here to congratulate Michael, not to discuss my own work. Happy to take this conversation to an email thread.
In 2011, I was heading development at Citadel's Investment Bank (Citadel being a large hedge fund), after finishing a stint as Citigroup Investment Bank's Chief Architect. I used Google Finance to track my personal portfolio, and I had always wondered about using the scale of Google to make Google Finance a competitor to Bloomberg and Reuters.
Someone reached out to me and asked me to interview for the position of "CTO of Google Finance", and I jumped at the chance. First interview was with Phillip Brittain, who was the new Head of Product of GF, having come from Bloomberg. The interview went great ... a complete meeting of the minds as far as where we wanted to take GF. Then I was invited in for the normal in-person Google interview process. I did well enough on my second round to be asked back to do the whole-day set of interviews. The interviews were really fascinated ... a lot of system design questions. But when I described some of the solutions in terms in terms of some of the platforms that financial companies use (ie: Tibco EMS for messaging), I was told by the interviewers to not bring them into my domain.
Funny enough, ove rthe two days of interviews, not a single person asked me a question about Google Finance or what my vision was for GF.
After several weeks, I heard that I did not have enough support of the Hiring Commitee to be hired. I was a bit puzzled, because I though that I knocked the interviews out of the park, but I went back to my job at Citadel and stayed there until they dissolved the investment bank a few months later.
Google never hired anyone for that position. Several years later, a Googler that I knew confided to me that I did not get the job mostly for the reason that Google had quietly decided to sunset GF ... or, at least, reduce its capabilities. No desire for a Bloomberg killer. What a shame. I still think of what I could have done with GF given the scale of Google.
After getting my Masters degree in the early 80s, I went to NYU for my Ph.D. with the intent purpose of working on SETL with Jack Schwartz. Unfortunately, by that time, Jack had moved on from SETL and onto the world of Robotics. Robert Dewar was too busy building Realia COBOL and was not taking on any additional Ph.D. students. So I floundered around NYU for a year before deciding to do my own commercial software, which was probably the best decision I ever made. Especially after seeing a lot of Ph.D. students at NYU who had been there for 10 years.
I wrote one of the first word processors for Unix, and showed it at the first UnixExpo in the Javits Center in 1984. When the company that was marketing it went out of business, I ported the word processor to the IBM PC, and it became a very popular shareware word processor (New York Word). The income from New York Word was sufficient enough that I quit my day job and formed a software company devoted to making various productivity tools.
I am a bit late to this discussion, as Sarah Butcher (the author of the article) just informed me about this thread. This is Marc Adler, the person that was talked about in this article. It's great to see the discussion around Hackerank-type coding tests and the hiring process. There are probably some clarifications that need to accompany the article.
First, when I was interviewed for the article, there was no mention of the word "ageism". As something in this thread surmised, it was probably inserted into the title for a bit of "shock value". The article was supposed to be about the correlation of Hackrank tests and the hiring of experienced people who have been coding successfully for a number of years on "real-world" problems. Many of you in this thread fall into that category.
Second, I have about 30 years of experience in the industry. I started out in the mid-1980s as a Windows developer at Goldman Sachs, writing equities trading systems, went on to form my own software company (which I had for ten years and concentrated on programming tools), and then continued as a developer/architect for more Wall Street companies. Among some of my roles were Chief Architect of Citigroup's equities division, and Chief Architect of MetLife (a global insurance company). I am currently CA at another big company that is not on Wall Street. All of this time, I have been coding. Recently, I developed an Uber clone in Scala/Akka/Play.
I am not completely against Hackerank-type tests for hiring junior devs or devs right out of college. But what I am against is the use of these coding tests to hire people who have 10, 20, or even 30 years of experience. When was the last time that you used dynamic programming algorithms in your job? When was the last time that you seriously thought about Big O? In my experience, a lot of apps use linked lists and hash tables. If you want a nice sorting algorithm, there is one that comes with one of Microsoft's C# assemblies. What is more critical is knowing how to find information and how to apply it in your day to day job. And that's the kind of developer I want to hire ... one who is resourceful and productive.
About me: Financial Services veteran, built all sort of systems over my 25 years. Most recent project was a .NET-based microservices framework, built from the ground up. I can be a solo contributor, or I can run an entire IT organization. I have built trading systems for companies like Morgan Stanley, Citadel and Citigroup, and real-time analytics systems for companies like Citigroup and BP's Energy Trading operation.
I just had an article publiched in Wilmott Magazine about the Microservice work that I did, so feel free to check it out here:
Knowing John's work at various investment banks, I would venture to guess that Spreadserve will be a top-notch product. Scaling Excel is something that has been needed for a long time. How many times have we, in IT, gotten complaints from traders and quants about Excel crashing with a large number of calcs?
I have users who are running into problems with slow performance and crashes when doing larges recalcs with 32-bit Excel on their desktops. Can SpreadServe help?
Yes: enterprise server class monitoring and logging mean you have a much better chance of nailing the root cause with detailed logging and crash dumps. The scriptability of the SpreadServe environment gives you a better change of reproducing issues. However, SpreadServe can't control the internal implementation details of the 3rd party XLLs it loads. It does provide detailed logging on the behaviour of those XLLs though.
