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Comment by xyst | Hacker News Reader

Having worked in some Fortune 500 financial firms and low rent “fintech” upstarts, I am not surprised this happened. Decades of bandaid fixes, years of rotating out different consultants/contractors, and software rot. Plus years of emphasizing mid level management over software quality.

As other have mentioned, I don’t think “automation of deployment” would have prevented this company’s inevitable downfall. If it wasn’t this one incident in 2014, then it would have been another incident later on.

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It's an entire industry built on adrenaline, bravado, and let's be honest: testosterone. How could their IT discipline be described as anything other than "YOLO"?

Trading is mostly based on a book that, like the waterfall model, was meant to be a cautionary tale on how not to do things. Liars' Poker had the exact opposite effect of Silent Spring. Imagine if Rachel Carson's book came out and people decided that a career in pesticides was more glamorous than being a doctor or a laywer, we made movies glorifying spraying pesticides everywhere and on everything, and telling anyone who thought you were crazy that they're a jealous loser and to fuck off.

The thing I was surprised about is that they survived!

After all that they still got a $400 million cash bailout!

They were probably worth much more than $400M before the failure so it was a good investment opportunity. They would have been a money printing machine aside from this one major fuckup.

Their IP (proprietary trading algos) etc were probably worth a lot at the time.

These days probably not so. I wouldn't imagine there are any market makers left in NYSE and NASDAQ who aren't deploying FPGAs to gain a speed edge.

It wasn't a bailout, it was investment money.

Bailout could imply government throwing a lifeguard

> It wasn't a bailout, it was investment money.

Almost all bailouts are investments, whether it's a government or private bailout.

The investments are questionable sometimes, but they're still investments.

The nuance is a) what happens to existing equity stakeholders and b) does the bailout have to be repaid.

If the answer is nothing and no, then it’s a bailout philosophically. If the existing investors get diluted then they’re in part paying for the new capital injection.

It wasn’t a bail out, it was an opportunity for investors to get great terms on equity at a crucial juncture for the company.

A government bail out isn't the exclusive use of the phrase "bail out", it was both a bail out and an opportunity for investors to get great terms on equity.

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