Bloomberg has new recruits go through 3 months of training, where they teach you basic computer science and C and C++, all the concepts underpinning their crazy codebase on the back end. Throughout this whole time, I kept remarking how outdated the Bloomberg front end seemed to be, how reminscent of DOS. One thing I kept mentioning the most is how I wish Bloomberg would take a page from web browsers of the time and introduce Autosuggest as you type.
Anyway long story short, I got lucky. I got placed on exactly the team I wanted - the one responsible for the main Bloomberg front end. Most people were working on a backend function, and I got to work on user facing stuff that all our users dealt with. And lo and behold, exactly the project I kept talking about came down the pike, and I was placed on it.
As a junior programmer it was very rewarding - I wound up building about 3 different modes for reacting to various keyboard/mouse combinations. I kept campaigning for the one that was closest to desktop browsers but they went with another one. I remember them specifically asking me to take away any newfangled transition fx, making it all match the rest of the DOS-like look.
I had a counterpart in another team, working on the backend and sending me the actual data to display. This guy was with the company for a couple years already and probably did way more awesome work than me. My biggest challenge was wrestling with the legacy codebase on the front end. We kept going back and forth under major time pressure - Bloomberg is quite agile - to iron out all the kinks and edge cases. In the end the feature was slowly turned on for internal employees and then our clients.
I gotta say, it felt awesome to have the opportunity to make such a big difference at a company straight out of grad school. To this day I imagine I saved Bloomberg millions of dollars in Help Desk calls (there's a dedicated button on the terminal) where people would just call to ask what they should type.
And yet, after all that, it's just a line on my resume and a story I can tell in interviews. You don't know for sure if I didn't make it up. Don't get me wrong, I am proud to have made a difference and I'm glad to have had such an opportunity. But having my own businsss means I can build on my work year after year, and show that I did it. The value I create can increase over time, and I have the option of hiring others to help me bring it to fruition. Having hundreds of thousands of people use the products that I designed for them, and knowing I can continue innovating on top of this and build more of my dreams year after year definitely makes me even more excited.