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Goldman Suspends 4 Senior Tech Specialists After Trading Glitch
First time accepted submitter sbjornda writes "A glitch in an internal system led to erroneous trades on some funds whose listings begin with the letters H through L. Goldman Sachs has put four Senior Technology Specialists on administrative leave as a result. From the article: 'The system, called a "trading axis," monitors the Wall Street bank's inventory to determine whether it should be a more aggressive buyer or seller in the market. But a technical error misinterpreted non-binding indications of interest, or IOIs, as firm bids and offers, leading to some trades that were vastly out of line with where market prices were, Reuters reported previously, citing a source familiar with the matter.'"
Some high profile companies/people fucked up and lost money, so the market shut down.
Why didn't it shut down when I lost money in the stock market? Oh right, $1500 isn't enough for me to matter.
I'm sure I'm wrong on this. Someone correct me!
The disgusting criminals at the top sacrificing a few pawns.
Jobs becoming exponentially more complex and exponentially more time-critical, with exponentially-rising penalties for human error, all for the benefit of the exponentially-more lazy money club.
I wonder how they could cancel their mistrades that fast while crunching out those huge numbers of HFT orders every second...
I'm surprised to hear new about 'suspects (my word)' so soon after the glitch occurred. It makes me wonder how a company, with the technical expertise to find the supposed root cause of the problem in a recent software update so quickly, failed to catch the error prior to the software being installed ?!?
Just another example of "blame the IT guy".
If it breaks, you don't fire the trader, the lawyer, CEO, VP, whoever. If you lose a billion dollars you don't jail Jon Corzine. If you gamble people's money, you get a golden parachute.
But if you're an IT guy, everything better be perfect, otherwise you'll get fired (lucky) or sent to jail (unlucky).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Wreck a few trades: Suspension! Wreck the global economy: Free federal loans and an even greater share of aggregate wealth!
Losing money for Goldman is a federal crime, punishable by a 10 year sentence with no trial.
Do these guys have contracts or something? Most of us are at-will hires. We don't get administrative leave, we get fired. Could also be that they have specialized knowledge and they are going to give them cash when they leave in exchange for transferring knowledge. The only time I have heard of 'administrative leave' is with government/union people. With at-will employment, you can be fired just because management feels like it.
As much as we love to bash big banking for looking at anyone not a pyschopath trader as a cost center, they need top talent.
Basically other slashdotters who work on these systems are on demands to change whole algorithms of the system within the hour by the traders whim with no QA, GET IT OUT FAST, but whoa if has a bug! You can't negotiate with these kinds of people who in their opinion generate real money and view themselves as supperior.
But they are not stupid and realize such great demands require a 6 figure salary, plus a bonus, plus being selective on a contract that the programmer will find more favorable. If they all said $12/hr take it or leave it and fire at will they will get crappy talent that could sink them fast. So the programmers here know the drill and the lack of job security so they negotiate it in a contract.
If you are in a job where your employer treats you like this then you are not valuable. Not to mean to insult as we all started out this way until we had to prove ourselves and or get a skill that made us more rare. Go find another employer who values your skills more if you have the experience by now or go do something about your skillset? Capitalism 101, both buyers and sellers will always take advantage of a weakness. If there are 10 folks begigng your job then your employer can do whatever the fuck he wants. If there are 10 jobs and you are the only one qualified, then you exploit the employers by walking if they do not offer you 6 figure salary, bonuses, own office etc.
http://saveie6.com/
Administrative leave is a temporary leave from a job assignment, with pay and benefits intact. Generally, the term is reserved for employees of non-business institutions such as schools, police, and hospitals.
this is an investment firm, with at-will employment. While im certain the glitch was of great concern to "investor confidence" this just feels like an absurd move to stifle any possibility of a negative market reaction, imaginary or concrete. If i were the IT guy being awarded this transition in employment, it would be difficult not to offer an ultimatum. That if, as its implied by the administrative leave, you in fact value me so much as a team member and employee, perhaps you should judge me by my past works and not by your board of directors insipid demand for job reassignment routinely applied to a police officer after she kills a suspect.
id also be more inclined to check across the street and see if any other investment firms might care to hire a coder.
Good people go to bed earlier.
If you've read the Vanity Fair articles you know that the problem is not the IT, it's the senior management at Goldman that patches together spaghetti code and STEALS OPEN SOURCE CODE by slicing off the headers from the code they stole.
Nothing good ever came from Goldman.
Ever.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
If you lose a billion dollars you don't jail Jon Corzine.
John Corzine was a special case. He was a close political ally of President Obama.
"Former New Jersey governor and U.S. Sen. Jon Corzine, whom President Obama once hailed as an “honorable man” and one of his “best partners” in the White House, has been subpoenaed to testify before Congress about his role in the collapse of the investment firm MF Global."
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/12/jon-corzine-obama-partner-and-campaign-financier-subpoenaed-on-mf-global-collapse/
The programmers are pointing to the specs and saying it did what it was supposed to.
The analysts are pointing to the business requirements and user acceptance tests and saying that it did what asked us for.
The business is pointing to IT and saying it was a computer glitch.
Sound about right?
Still, most of GS bad trades have been DK'ed. You see, for Goldman Sachs this is 'Heads we win, tails we win' kind of market. They're above the law in every respect. I'm curious what will happen to those tech folks. Will Goldman jail them in retaliation like they did with Aleynikov ? As much as they can call puppet US government to overturn their bad trades, they also can call govt to jail anyone they wish ...
for not have a redundant system to test on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Suspending the techs for a Mistake is kinda stupid.
Financial Systems are all about speed. To get that sort of speed,you need to drop as many checks as possible.
You don't check to see if the String sent is an int, you just process and hope for the best. You may be creating a bunch of duplicate records and messes, but you don't have time to check, it goes it and it goes out as fast as possible.
The reason why OS's and programs are so bloated today compared to 20 years ago, is because we have the power for the most part to put checks in the system. Most languages now have a Try and Catch exceptions, so we don't need to blow up when something goes wrong. We have robust classes that process information much more carefully. That is why your Windows 3.1 BSOD when you looked at it the wrong way, and your never seen a Windows 7 BSOD unless you were really doing something stupid. Or your Xwindows session in Linux use to cause lockups where you needed to telnet in from an other system to fix it, vs now where that rarely ever happens. More solid code comes at a cost of performance.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
If enough little guys get together they can be stopped by the big boys too. (Article is on how some 401(k) members were banned from trading, in their own 401(k), based on newsletter information.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
The disgusting criminals at the top sacrificing a few pawns.
Are they pawns or are they the developers responsible for the bug? Given the extremely high salaries devs working for wall street receive, didn't you think that there was a catch. i.e. if there is a bug that causes significant embarrassment or a significant loss of money you get fired.
If so the proceeding would seem fair. You want to name your price then your performance better be damn near flawless.
If you're a CEO and you get fired, they'll often pay you more to go away than most people will make in their entire lifetime. For example, Mattel had a loser CEO who managed to make their stock worth half of what it had been. His punishment? Well, he got fired. And paid $25million.
This whole idea that the C-level guys are somehow "earning" those massive benefits by being superhuman beings needs to die, be decapitated, have a stake driven through it, burned and scattered to the winds.
A good worker is valuable, no question. But there's an old management aphorism about what you're supposed to do to irreplaceable people. The reason they get away with it has less to do with the scarcity of their talents than it does with the fact that they have one of the tightest unions around.
Do you think that the product designers specified that trades beginning with the letter H to L should be buggy?
c++;
Frankly, I'm disappointed having read so many comments in this thread and not one talks about the most important for a geek site like slashdot: How do manage to get a bug like this?
Nothing is very special with HIJKL that makes them stick out or warrant exceptional handling.
c++;
It's tough to get a job as a teacher unless you got your education certification while you were getting your undergrad degree. As you point out there are some programs that make some VERY LIMITED exceptions.
When I received my MS CS I was told that California has an exception to the education certification requirement for people with an Master's. Of course I never looked into it so I can't say if this is 100% accurate.
But even with those, you're always treated as a second-class teacher if you don't have certification. And it's hard to advance your career, get raises, or even keep your job until you get it.
Yes and no. A few teacher of the year awards can change that.
I read an article about a government program where retiring military officers were somehow fast tracked into teaching positions. A retiring Army Colonel became a HS math teacher and as you describe the existing teachers were angry. One exceptionally ignorant teacher literally asked the retired Colonel what he could possibly know about teaching teenagers. The retired Colonel politely explained that he has been teaching and leading teenagers for over 20 years. After a few years at the school, where he received a few awards, most of the teaching staff became converts and accepted him. The few who didn't made arguments that seemed more political than teaching related.
So is the the IT outsourced or just the reporting?
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Dude . . . it's Goldman Sachs.
A CEO of large corporation is a professional entertainer. And just like a professional athlete, rock star, or top-billing Hollywood star, they get paid absurd amounts (actually, about the same as those) because people compete to hire them. Hollywood stars are probably the best comparison: few people can do the job, but still plenty more than there are jobs. But stars have followings, and their names bring credibility that helps projects get funding.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The article doesn't have any names. Did they make Drepper go?
:wq
http://coderific.com/employers/68
Casteism
When your reduction can induce a offer trend, they'll closed the industry down to examine. The industry wasn't closed down because GS missing cash, but because something was obviously consistently incorrect, and they desired to determine what it was before enabling more deals. Once they discovered out what it was, they could have introduced everything returning up, as it was just a bad criteria used by only one investor. They're above the law in every regard. I'm interested what will occur to those tech. The experts are directing to the company specifications and customer approval assessments and saying that it did what requested us for. Cheap Hajj Packages | Cheap flights To Dar es salaam