
Ex-Programmer at Goldman Found Guilty of Stealing Trading Code - J3L2404
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/11/business/11trader.html?_r=1&src=twr
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dmpatierno
_Mr. Aleynikov wanted to be able to work from New Jersey, where he lived, and
eventually agreed to work out of New York City if Teza paid an additional $200
a month for his parking, Mr. Malyshev said._

Pretty ridiculous arguing over a 0.2% salary increase.

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danielamitay
Actually it isn't. If you work 40hrs/wk, 50wks/year, that 0.2% salary increase
is 4hrs worth. That isn't even including the cumulative benefits of subsequent
years.

Spending 1hr negotiating 4hrs of income? It makes sense, no matter how much
you make. Regardless, a 10% increase is composed of a number of 0.2%
increases.

~~~
jpwagner
you forgot to factor in the negative implied equity of being "that guy who
fought over a 0.2% pay increase." 10% is fifty of those. You'd never be hired
again!

~~~
danielamitay
Very true, but when you're dealing with a financial firm that deals with
margins, good employers should see that as a sign of being thorough.

~~~
dmpatierno
Perhaps it's just a difference in business culture, but I would feel like a
major asshole negotiating such benefits as a software developer.

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svx
Additional background information from a few days ago:
[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870415630457600...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704156304576003692446280836.html)

Pretty amazed that he was able to negotiate a $600-700k job offer up to over a
million.

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smokinn
Your link only shows a tiny excerpt for me.

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danielamitay
It's the Wall Street Journal. That's all they give to non-subscribers.

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lamnk
Google the article's title.

If you are referred from Google, WSJ will show you full content.

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maigret
Now that's some very useful hack! Thanks!

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rubyrescue
if i recall this involved some Erlang source.

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lukasb
I thought Goldman had a proprietary language called slang?

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hvs
That is correct: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3392636/slang-goldman-
sac...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3392636/slang-goldman-sachs-
proprietary-programming-language)

~~~
pasbesoin
One of their employees wrote a bit about it, some time ago, and that's been
linked here at least once -- some months ago. He said Slang stands for
"securities language". I don't recall too much, except that it didn't sound
inherently all that "fancy"; rather, it was a matter of making the underlying
systems architecture fast and pervasive.

Edit: I should clarify that I don't know, or even particularly think, that
what Aleynikov was dealing with had that much, if anything, to do with Slang.
(Based on my very vague impressions from a few news articles and blog
entries.)

~~~
salemh
Ex-Employee: [http://adgrok.com/why-founding-a-three-person-startup-
with-z...](http://adgrok.com/why-founding-a-three-person-startup-with-zero-
revenue-is-better-than-working-for-goldman-sachs)

"At the risk of getting sued, let me throw you geeks a bone and part the
Goldman veil a bit. The Goldman Sachs risk system is called SecDB (securities
database), and everything at Goldman that matters is run out of it. The GUI
itself looks like a settings screen from DOS 3.0, but no one cares about UI
cosmetics on the Street. The language itself was called SLANG (securities
language) and was a Python/Perl like thing, with OOP and the ORM layer baked
in. Database replication was near-instant, and pushing to production was two
keystrokes. You pushed, and London and Tokyo saw the change as fast as your
neighbor on the desk did (and yes, if you fucked things up, you got 4AM phone
calls from some British dude telling you to fix it). Regtests ran nightly, and
no one could trade a model without thorough testing (that might sound like
standard practice, but you have no idea how primitive the development culture
is on the Street). The whole thing was so good, I didn’t even know what an ORM
really was until I started using Rails and had to wrestle with ActiveRecord.
The codebase was roughly 15MM lines when I left, and growing. I suspect my
retinas are still scarred by the weird color blue SecDB was by default. "

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MarkPNeyer
I interviewed with this guy a while back. Good thing I didn't take the
position ;)

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mkramlich
funny personal timing: i woke up to an email trying to recruit me for Goldman
Sachs, then come here and see this story.

