Some one is bound to mention PG's submarine article, <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html</a> so it might as well be me.<p>I mean yesterday we had an article about how Goldman was making its SecDB available to high networth individuals and today we've got another article about how UBS is targeting the same group.<p>UBS hasn't traditionally been held in the same tier as Goldamn Sachs etc as far as trading and quant jobs go, but one area they do excel in is a more traditional banking are, Wealth management for high worth individuals.<p>This is the area of the bank the article is talking about.<p>They are trying to be for high worth people, what Wealthfront or Betterment is for middle class people in that they are trying to bring money strategies that previously were the area of hedge funds to high net worth individuals.
The problem is that physicists and mathematicians write the worst code I have ever seen in my entire life, and I've been programming for 30+ years. To those people, everything is a single threaded, algorithmic problem, even when it is crystal clear to a formally trained programmer that using a well thought out data structure is the correct thing to do[1][2].<p>For example, they managed to break my Vertica database from delivering instant results (something it is explicitly designed for in "big data" scenarios) to running 18+ hours for a single SQL query.<p>[1] Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust.<p><a href="http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2878263" rel="nofollow">http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2878...</a><p>[2] Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.<p><a href="http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2878145" rel="nofollow">http://catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch01s06.html#id2878...</a>