Computer Problem Causes False Stock Quotes
I spent nearly two years working for a company that made the software that, at the time, was responsible for over 75% of all the trades that took place on NASDAQ. My bosses attitude towards quality assurance and testing would have been laughable, if it wasn’t the fact that they could have cost people millions of dollars, and the fact that when I was working there we were losing market share hand over fist to a company that made a product that was faster, easier to use, and didn’t crash all the time.
I’m torn between hoping this failure wasn’t the fault of any of my friends still working there, and hoping that the people in charge will some day get what’s coming to them.
Most of our customers were “market makers”, which is a large step up from stock broker in the heirarchy. A lot of our customers, and three of the people in our company, were at work in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001. One person from our company got out. The other two didn’t. One of the people who died was somebody whom I was scheduled to have a conference call later that day when she got back from WTC. I think about Julie a lot when 9/11 comes up in conversation.
No, it wasn’t Rochester’s fault at least. UMA’s actually very stable these days. Which is, of course, why they’re trying to kill it off and force the new, unreliable Windows version they purchased on the customers.
Funny you mention Julie. I was just looking at the Bugzilla database a few months ago while evaluating an upgrade to the latest version. Her name was still in there. Someone had changed her description to ‘We’ll miss you.’.
Did I forget to mention I’m currently tasked with fixing a bug in the above mentioned Windows version that causes erroneous quotes? 🙂