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.)
"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. "
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.
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.
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!
20 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 64.2 ms ] threadPretty amazed that he was able to negotiate a $600-700k job offer up to over a million.
If you are referred from Google, WSJ will show you full content.
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.)
"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. "
Pretty ridiculous arguing over a 0.2% salary increase.
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.