I worked 80 hour weeks to deliver a platform for a hedge fund,then they fired me
efinancialcareers.com
efinancialcareers.com
Six months after launch when all problems are solved - absolutely, you can fire engineer. 48 hours after launch? absolutely not.
You need one or two more release to iron out the bugs, right?
...and this is a trading platform. The market changes, you need program changes for unforseen market changes.
I have also been in a job where once the project reached a certian point I was fired. They gave me a song and dance about building a tech culture and sustainable development.
It was all lies. They knew when they were going to fire me the day they hired me. Once their demo worked, everything went off the rails. There was no real business plan just hype and bullshit. No wonder they had no idea what to do next.
Sometimes it's a blessing in disguise when you get shit canned at these jobs but you can't pay the bills with moral victories
In large enough company, outside of engineering department end product quality or even business long term sustainability is often no one's concern.
If only this is more understood. I've been on both ends and as the newcomer you rarely get any ramp up time and management assume you'd know what you're doing in 5 minutes.
These high speed trading platforms do a ton of transactions in 48 hours. They assume nothing material will change in 6 months vs 48 hours; and anyways if it breaks why keep paying the dude who built it so flimsy?
Not my way of doing things of all, to be clear, just my interpretation of the “we are a team not a family” implementation. https://www.fastcompany.com/3056662/she-created-netflixs-cul...
that's fine, but netflix pays for this privilege by high salary from the get go.
If you worked for a startup, i assume the salary isn't going to be as high. Instead, you'd expect to be paid in equity.
So by firing someone as soon as they're done (meaning their future equity vesting is lost now), they lose a lot of what would've been theirs had the company's long term potential been great as a result of their work.
Lots of companies and people treat software as physical goods (where it's done it's done) and that everyone is easily replaceable. I've seen many managers not consider uniqueness or the situation but simply we have an engineer with x years of experience so a similar 1 will work just the same.
Thats the thing. Hedge funds are not managed by people in their right minds
I'm sure there are chuds in the HF industry just like any other sector but by and large most people working in those firms are some of the most capable society has to offer.
In this case it sounds like a "junior quant" who built an application in "months of hard work" while working 12hrs x 7days, and using technologies they learned on the fly. Sounds like me in my 20s, but I wasn't as indispensable as I thought I was. In any case, that's not as hard to replace as the sysadmin who's been there for 10 years.
From a different perspective, it's kind of like paying a contractor or offshore. You don't usually keep them on board after the deliverable, you hand it over to the in-house team to maintain it.
That relationship is much better defined to both parties. It sounds like this person was surprised.
On the one hand I would definitely expect zero empathy from a hedge fund. They should pay big bucks (pounds in this case), but if they consider an employee no longer useful it is an instant goodbye.
But firing a key engineer of a successful production system that they plan to operate -- no way!! Neither 48 hours after going live, nor 6 (or 12, 18 or 24) months later. Trading strategies always get refined, changed and tuned and an oops in that process can be very expensive. A hedge fund would fight to keep the key engineer who built the system.
One case where this is possible is if a bigger fund wants to snuff out a new entrant (for example because the smaller fund is messing up the larger fund's strategy). Then the owners get $$ and everyone else gets the boot. My 2c.
The answer seems pretty obvious from the author. They had promised him a cut of the profits and now they don’t have to.
After relying on someone to use their talents to get things done quicker.
Internal politics could also be at play, now that a foundation is built other self interested parties or departments could be angling in to maintain whatever they’re after
I think it is too easy for an outsider to treat software the same.
The product, being a v0.1 release implemented in C, was of course plagued with data corruption and poor performance. It read /etc/password from disk on every file access. An uninitialized int caused indirect inode corruption every ~millionth write. And so on.
Because of the poor product quality, they lost multiple opportunities, including a bid for early Facebook photo storage. The company never had more than 250 customers and ended up being sold to a Valley stalwart. The CEO and VP Eng were paid out handsomely, of course; preferred converted stock tranches or whatever. My options from 4 years of employment ended up worth $500.
If it's any consolation, Igneous died and the execs didn't make out like bandits this time.
It sounds like the poor reviews for the ICs was warranted, wouldn’t you say?
How many crunches have you survived that resulted in a high-quality initial product? If there is enough time to get things right, it wouldn't be a crunch, by definition.
Story shows too much competence for Springpath or Whiptail.
Storage is particularly rife with stuff like this for some reason.
Rare to see a product completely canceled and removed from the market as soon as customers started reporting minor things like total data loss due to corruption..
How did people who "read /etc/password from disk on every file access." get hired by Google?
Or perhaps the right question is for which roles, because with that level of DS&A they shouldn't have passed Google's DS&A whiteboard interview.
I was in support and only had two good resources for tracking this kind of stuff down, a burnt out but kind SCSI specialist and a brilliant, massively overworked Russian kernel dev on visa. They both lasted an extra year. Bless them both for answering my pestering questions, I learned a lot.
Good times, but all this was about a year too late to make a difference, then the Great Recession hit and it was done.
Do you honestly think all 27k devs are 10x certified geniuses?
It's the prevalence of scenarios like this that makes me hate the MBA caste with a pasison
This is just standard profit over people capitalism.
This is the U.K. - technology is seen by businesspeople as dirty and bad, as are the people who work with it. Maintenance is unheard of, sustainability is a dirty word.
For instance, I know of a large U.K. medical data processor who wanted ISO270001 compliance, so they got in a contractor to write an ISMS, had it audited, and then immediately fired the contractor upon successful pass of the audit.
What happens next year? Who cares! I’ll be in Marbella with my bag of swag by then. Someone else can figure it out.
Or they might've decided they didn't want that employee for some reason, maybe even dudebro culture fit mismatch when he showed up looking fatigued, and were "sux2bu" about how they got rid of the person, firing fast. Or that project got scrapped. Or some other person had a look at the code and decided they didn't like it (or didn't like the partner whose pet project it was). Etc.
A factor to keep in mind is that many, many shops nowadays really don't know how to build software that works sufficiently well, or they have low standards for what "sufficiently" means. For example, a few years ago, if your experience was only when the top priority was the appearance of growth, and then the next funding rounds and then exit, and there were all sorts of memes about moving fast and breaking things, etc., and you have no idea how to build systems that work, even if you wanted to... you might well think that developers are disposable and interchangeable commodities. (Someone else here noted the practice of a startup using offshoring contractors for key tech early on, which I think is strong evidence of this kind of thinking.)
Perhaps there was a backstory of sorts we're not aware of. But there is absolutely nothing surprising about companies firing people right after handing over huge and/or critical projects. They do it all the time, for both good reasons and bad. Managers in finance are known to be especially "bold" in making decisions like these.
It sounds like they are in the UK. You can't just fire someone out of the blue like that in the UK (assuming they are a FTE), unless they have done something obviously "bad" (proper misconduct etc). If they don't need you anymore there is a defined redundancy process.
If they were not a FTE and were in fact on a temporary contract, then this is totally normal and expected, and the author should have known that as a contractor. Contractors are easy-come-easy-go - that's the whole point of them, and why the pay is higher than FTEs.
Ah yes, the absolute preposterous idea that nobody, especially not companies, would ever make an irrational choice.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it was ExodusPoint, but I’m not sure how one could make that connection from the article.
ExodusPoint had an OMS 3 years ago, so the part in the story about starting trading makes me suspect it’s either an OMS for a new asset class, or a replacement of an earlier system.
Unless the OP joined a portfolio team, and the OMS he’s talking about was to connect that teams strategy to the internal firm wide OMS. I did that for my pod, and I can see a Portfolio Manager making a decision like this.
Most likely it was a quant in a pod. OMS could be loosely defined here as well or obscured to not dox themself too much. However EVE trade sounds very specific, I don't know what this means, EVE online trading?
While I don't know the specifics about financial software, the job market also is pretty good internationally, so finding something new, as a freelancer or not, shouldn't be too hard.
Many CEOs are just playing a video game and don't care if they lose because they have extra lives.
I suspect the fund's trading strategy was less than great so they had to cut expenses ASAP. I can't imagine why they would get rid of the person who would have to maintain the code, if they didn't need to do it. There is no such thing as a no need for maintenance code. If I was the CEO, I would have been terrified if the code was running without someone to make sure it was running correctly.
The people who run most businesses would be perfectly happy delivering nothing at all and bringing in a profit. That's why businesses in the western economic system all end up turning purely into investment funds if left unchecked.
All profit, no product.
To be fair, to the degree that your statement is true, then I think most people who are employed by businesses would be perfectly happy delivering nothing at all and bringing home a paycheck.
Hallelujah brother - well said.
This is by (capitalist) design.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value
And it's been profoundly destructive.
No, that’s just another lie you’ve been made to believe. Corporations exist to serve the public good. The freedom they have been granted by the laws passed by nations is to facilitate that end. All it takes to change the rights of corporations is a change in law (not a Constitutional change as it would to change the rights of people).
I don't know how the work culture is there but that seems completely insane.
I've said it many times and I'll say it again. The first thing I tell anyone that enters the work force: Do not play the hero. You don't have to save the world. You will only be rewarded with more work. Put that passion and energy into something you created and own and control.
If it's your own startup then sure, otherwise "hell no". ;)
OTOH, the hedge fund will probably fail to profit from the project soon enough: A. they fired their most productive engineer in a changing competitive business B. they run a v0.9 with many bugs without the author-maintainer C. hate the saying but they seem penny-wise pound-foolish.
OTOH, it smells like there was also a quiet conflict between OP and their manager, and OP was unaware of that.
Nobody actually pays for software development in the U.K. - just the taxpayer.
A small resort I worked for had a guy that had been there from the very beginning. He knew where every single water line was on the entire resort. A map was never made of those water lines.
When a new general manager was hired years later, he wanted to fire the guy who always showed up late for work, and was considered lazy. The owner of the of the resort said, “you can’t fire him, he’s the only one that knows where all the water lines are”.
Job security boys,job security.
For example, when you hire a plumber to fix something, do you pay him what he deserves, or do you pay him the amount agreed upon in advance?
Its the same idea from the opposite direction.
I think a better fix is to just not give to a company what you would regret giving. Don't put in 80 hours a week for months unless you have good reason to think it's going to be worth it and do it with the full knowledge that you might be gambling on the company's generosity.
> Don't put in 80 hours a week for months unless you have good reason to think it's going to be worth it and do it with the full knowledge that you might be gambling on the company's generosity.
I agree. I'm also not 100% convinced the original story is even true.
People fired day before launch after 2 year build out etc.
It’s always more of a clash of personalities than anything else.
>I could have simply worked 40 hours a week. Had I done so, it is likely I would still be employed, still building the platform today.
>but have I snookered myself and made myself unemployable for working too effectively during my last role?
Was this really effective working.
Overtime, working weekends and no vacation isn't effective working just squeezing work time into a tight schedule.
That's the road to burn out.
No? maybe youre looking in the wrong places though, and possibly tho unlikely they blackballed you but that would only apply within the finance world
> I think I have applied to every hedge fund and investment bank in London
I fear the future where i MUST work for a bank/hedge fund to make enough money to satisfy myself and my family.
Based on situations I've seen before, I'm guessing this "bonus" was probably actually attached to some legalese that required signing that exempted the company from any wrongful termination legal action, etc. etc.
Oh and I hope OP didn't get the time to pick all bugs for the ex company so maybe that's on his contracting list too.
On the other hand. I had places that people didn't like me because I did things too well and they looked bad because of that.
When it goes badly, you also don’t need to use it as a point of honor. It’s not. It just means you let your employer exploit you.
Doing it because you want to is a little different. I often do. But you have to understand that the only thing you’ll get out of it is mild intellectual gratification, and sometimes not even that.
By definition, all labor on which another profits is a case of exploitation, regardless of length in time.
Now, while the agreement may be exploitive that doesn’t mean it isn’t mutually beneficial or that the situation be zero sum, at least viewed at a small scale. It’s perfectly possible to be exploited by someone and still end up in a better situation regardless. The level and terms of exploitation are what matters.
As a member of the labor force you ideally want to minimize that exploitation and be charging as close to your value add as the market will bear. In an idealized situation, you pull more than the market rate in some way shape or form (higher pay, less work, etc.) because in a capitalistic system you should be doing your due diligence to help the labor market optimize the way the employer market is optimizing.
compensation = (value produced) - (cost to employ the person) - (opportunity cost) - (risk)
Only in a non-capitalist society. You are naively missing company profit as the reward for company risk: capitalism 101.
In an imaginary world you have built a business that brings in $x. You now employ $people to run the business and you leave the business in their capable hands. The amount of value produced by $people is $x. No capitalist owner would then share the total of $x out to the $people according to the value each person is producing in the business. Whether $x is profits or revenue, most capitalist businesses won't be kept alive for $0 profit.
Apple makes a revenue of 2.4 million per employee. When someone (a new employee) joins an existing business like Apple, should they be paid around 2.4 million less costs? https://www.statista.com/statistics/217489/revenue-per-emplo...
I wrote:
compensation = (value produced) - (cost to employ the person) - (opportunity cost) - (risk)
> Apple makes a revenue of 2.4 million per employee.
Revenue is not profit. And did you factor in the value of stock options as compensation? Total employee compensation is a lot more than salary.
> When someone
The value produced by a particular "someone" surely varies wildly among Apple employees.
0: I took risk to mean the risk of employing someone - your definition is totally unclear (I admit I'm an engineer not an economist). Please point me to a good reference that defines your equation.
1: Risk is not profit.
2: Profit is only related to risk in some perfect (edit) economist model of markets. Or if you use a tautological definition between the risk and the profit. In the practical world, risk and profits often diverge. Businesses cannot have perfect knowledge so opportunities always exist.
3: you are also ignoring the bigger issue: why would a capitalist company pay more for an employee than they have to? An employee usually can't even know how much their work is worth - they don't have access to the financial records - (edit) a company uses that information asymmetry to their advantage. If two fungible employees bid their required salary for a job, the company will pay as little as possible and choose the cheaper person. Where does that fit into your equation?
> The value produced by a particular "someone" surely varies wildly among Apple employees.
Obviously. This margin is too small to write a detailed example to fit your needs! Argue the point.
Edit: at least say whether you think "value produced" is revenue produced or profit produced. Kind of an important difference between the two and it isn't clear what you mean at all. When you do that, I'll try and construct a marginal employee argument edit2: I was trying to point the Apple example towards an argument based on marginal value - I should have been clearer, sorry.
1+2. the higher the risk a business takes, the more profit it needs to justify the risk
3. Note how I said if the business underpaid the employee, the employee can leave and get a better offer elsewhere. That's how markets work. That's what drives compensation up to fit the equation. Or the employees can quit and start a competitor. Unusually profitable businesses draw competitors like flies to honey. Every businessman is looking for a high margin business to get in to.
Let's put it another way. If you started a business that made $100 per widget, and the employee that made the widget cost you $10, that would be a great business. Until your competitors caught wind of it and enticed away your employee for $20. You entice him back for $30. Until it reaches equilibrium that matches the equation.
In the real world, there are asymmetries, and that shows because in the real world we have businesses making profits in excess of their risks.
If I have a business that makes $100 per widget but it depends on a secret that only I know, how does the competitor learn my secret? Where does that secret knowledge fit into your equation?
And clearly your argument is flawed since most employees are not paid anywhere near the value they produce. Your examples are based on an idealistic perfect market - which we clearly don't have a perfect equilibrium.
Also I added marked (edits) to previous comment before I realised you had already answered
> how does the competitor learn my secret?
The more valuable the secret is, the more effort competitors will expend to learn it. The reason we have a patent system is competitors are pretty good at finding out secrets.
The only trade secret I know of that has lasted a long time is Coca-Cola's formula. And yet Pepsi competes successfully with them anyway.
Do you have an example of a trade secret that is enabling unusually high profit margins with poorly paid employees?
> in the real world we have businesses making profits in excess of their risks
A lot of risks do not seem so risky in hindsight. Like Musk's creation of Tesla and SpaceX. I bet risk will look very different to you if you're faced with risking your own money on a venture.
> clearly your argument is flawed since most employees are not paid anywhere near the value they produce
No evidence presented for that.
Firstly, the types of your variables don't match. Risk and $/year can't be added together. And adding per employee variables to a per company variable (risk) is yet another typing/dimension issue.
Secondly, adding "opportunity cost" is meaningless. Adding a dependency on the next best employment choice makes no sense. Also an opportunity cost only exists in a non-equilibrium market - I can't see why you argue for equilibrium while having opportunity cost. Why would an employer care what the opportunity cost was - and you can't argue that it is an equilibrium due to employees demand - because there isn't an equilibrium (see your previous wage example).
Finally, if there is a marginal change in revenue, your equation says that is reflected in employee wages. Imagine a low-risk company where profits are fairly static (say close to risk-free rate of return). If revenues go up, your assumption is that employees are perfectly fungible between businesses and that employees will demand higher wages to capture the revenues (assuming transaction costs are zero so no spread). But employees don't know their value, so there is a distribution of bids. If employees are perfectly fungible then a business will buy the employee that underbids, and the business will make an "excess" profit.
> No evidence presented for that.
That's a diversion. Anecdotally I've experienced it many times as an employee and as a business owner.
The real world has too many counter-examples of disequilibrium - and you are trying to make micro-economic arguments that depend on perfect market equilibrium.
> But employees don't know their value
Your assumption that employees are stupid and ignorant is false.
> Anecdotally
I.e. you don't really have the data.
> that depend on perfect market equilibrium
Nope. I said that market forces push it in that direction.
Assumptions. I know it. I'm saying that it makes zero sense to put it in your equation as you have. Your equation appears to be per employee (but you are not talking about the employee opportunity cost). You are adding in the business opportunity cost of money to your equation - a per business cost not a per employee cost. Again you are mixing implicit types which makes your equation meaningless.
> Your assumption that employees are stupid and ignorant
You are making the assumption. I never said that and I certainly don't think it.
In the context of this thread, the original claim put forth is that being "used" for 80 hours is in fact exploitative; by one calculation, this amounts to 100% of your waking time in a standard 5 day work week, assuming a typical 8 hour daily sleep period. On the other hand, being used for a 40 hour work week is not exploitative; you still have 50% of your time remaining for non-work life. The math here is used for illustrative purposes, but a reasonable interpretation of "full" would tend towards 100%, not 50%.
Workers are truly exploited in some cases. To label a 40 hour work week as exploitation, in most cases, is simply hyperbole that diminishes the real suffering and ethical issues of actual worker exploitation.
And if I don't choose it, I can just choose to not pay bills/rent when I'm fired. What a simple solution.
You are right, as described in the article, it will not protect you from being fired. But choosing not to work overtime may directly cause the firing.
You’re also not limited to one job. Even people in economically disadvantaged positions can usually get another one if needed.
In other words, it’s precisely this fear that employers are counting on. Speaking from experience, once you face it, it tends to evaporate.
In a market where labor is scarce, clocking out at <= 40 hours might be no problem, because you're not readily replaced.
But when the balance shifts and your skills are in less demand, the screws are turned, and management is going to start asking questions about who is providing the best value. To a corporation, employees are just fungible cogs, ready to be replaced if they aren't delivering.
Unless you really are a 10x developer (and by definition we all sure aren't) your head could be on the chopping block. If you're a 1x developer, an easy way to get more done than another 1x developer is to put in 1.5x the hours that they do.
I used to get frustrated at work, thought I could recreate one of our systems in a better way, maybe I could have, but ultimately it was just a CRUD app, and making slight improvements to CRUD apps is not my dream. Running my own CRUD app, maybe, but not for someone else. (Nor were they asking me to recreate that system.)
My real dream is something more like "figure out how to bring strong AI to the gaming industry to create more interesting single-player strategy games", but that's hard, much easier to chase some tangent on someone else's CRUD app.
I hear what you are saying but it’s a tough line to hold down in some companies.
"Every day, I got to build really cool stuff, all while learning a new language which was unfamiliar to me"
Someone who tries to compensate for a lack of skill / experience by working extra hard, like 80 hour weeks, might be a bad fit for a startup and especially for high-risk software like in finance.
> Firstly, I was told repeatedly that the faster the firm was able to start trading, the faster I would start earning bonuses from the firm's PnL, assuming that the strategies indeed were profitable. (It is my understanding that they are highly profitable.)
Is why I never plan my finances around bonuses. Way too easy to get screwed this way.
Suits with an algorithm will eventually drive it into the ground in the long run.
"fuck you, pay me" [1]
Only time I would put in those marathons is for myself (from idea to hacking together an mvp over the weekend), or maybe I am learning something new.
It’s like skipping life because all one does is work. Thats basically 12 hour workdays with sat and sunday 10 hour each.
Lets pray you were exaggerating a bit. :)
Always put what you want in the contract, because that's what you're going to get. Don't feel bad, everybody learns that the hard way.
Personally, I don't think it's that bad. I did it in 2020, and thought it was (mostly) easy. A few weeks of wrestling with the borrow checker until I finally "got it". I now work in Rust full-time.
Most companies I've applied at don't respond, the < 5% that do respond with a rejection, they send the rejection email during the weekends which makes me wonder if they have people in other countries reviewing resumes.
I'm not a spring chicken either, I've been doing tech since 1999. Started as a linux / unix admin which became devops between then and 2016. I was doing security work but didn't have a security title until 2016. A lot of DevOps includes security, just it's never called out. I've been in dedicated security roles since 2016, making it all the way to lead security engineer and leading a team of 2 other people. Still I can barely get an interview and when I do get an interview, it ends with "We like you but we're going with another candidate or we don't feel your senior enough. Let me briefly highlight some of the gold nuggets I remember from my recent interviews.
* I did a 30 minute interview for a security architect position at a media company. It was me and another guy talking over a network diagram and the questions that need to be asked. I got all but one, which was about the hardware (Network DVR) becoming sentient and threatening physical damage.
* Did 5 hrs of interviewing for a Senior Security Engineer (detection) only to be put paired with a python developer in the end and asked to write code well beyond what the position called for. I can script and I never claimed to be a developer. But let me show you this thing called Copilot and ChatGPT, or if I need something advanced, I'll ask someone who knows more than me to help out.
* Another interview for a security architect at the local water company. They asked why I want to be a security architect, I respond with, "I'm into making sure security is baked into platforms as it's being designed, it's more optimal that way over shoeing in security as an after thought.". Hiring manager replies with "We've been around for over 100 years, we don't design anything new."
* I interviewed at a major password management company (the biggest) and was talking about their recent breach. In the aftermath they claimed to be encrypting all fields going forward, interview confirmed they lied and are not doing it now. I complained about vendors lying as they lied to me during a vendor review at my previous job. HR let me know later that they "liked me but decided to go with another candidate", probably one that doesn't care.
* I've had two jobs basically ghost me, say they wanted to create a new job position that fits all of my skills then go radio silent.
* A place that rhymes with dox had me interview with someone who thought a WAF can stop malware / ransomware from spreading on a internal network. I didn't know if this was a test to see if I corrected him or not, and if I corrected him will that blow my chances. The recruiter brushed me off and didn't respond for over a month after the interview.
* A few other interviews have turned into dick measuring contests on who knows the most irrelevant crap.
I've applied at jobs that I check every single box on their job posting and they don't even give me the time of day for a conversation before receiving a rejection. I'm getting tired and frustrated with the screwed up practices we've allowed to grow in our industry.
Ever?
The word "Employ" means "to Use"
to expect anything more is just fantasy
Fool you once
Never trust finance people, they are the scum of this planet. They only respect leverage.
Anyway, I have no much of sympathy for quants. So, poetic justice maybe.
True.
But in capitalism greed is a fetish
Survival of the fittest and the most powerful.
Completely laid back cultures advance very slowly.
Getting fired sounds pretty good, no?
UBS had similar? Perhaps.
Try searching for these.
I think the coder was arrested but it didn’t go much further than that… I don’t think it has happened again since the early 2010.