How my first job on Wall Street as a programmer trained me to get shit done

Photo credit: ROAR Mag

Many moons ago, I was a bright-eyed programmer in his first job. I worked at a major bulge-bracket investment bank. I was an “Analyst/ Developer” working for a Derivatives trading desk, building and maintaining software.

While the specifics of what I learnt about Derivatives, Risk, etc. are enough to warrant a series of posts of their own — I am writing today about what I have carried over from there in terms of communication.

My erstwhile employer was an amazing place, with brilliant people and a great sense of humor. This was coupled well with a seriousness of purpose, a low fault-tolerance and a sense of urgency, given our team was supporting a trading desk. I’ll describe our culture for messaging, email and phone, timings, and how it drove productivity and a get-shit-done attitude.

Messaging

We had a tool that we used internally called YAMS — this stood for Yet Another Messaging System. I was told that there was AMS, MS and other incarnations before, but YAMS stuck around, and I hear it’s used even today. YAMS was the pre-cursor to the Slack of today, with many concepts carrying over. It didn’t have the slickness of Slack, but we weren’t solving for slickness anyway, and this was 2001.

YAMS had rooms that you could join — there were rooms for each function, business, location, etc. For example, we had one for Commodities Technologists, Commodities Strategists (Quants), Commodities Traders, Commodities Sales-people, etc. And there were others, not necessarily business oriented (ala Random in Slack) like one for all Strategists, one for just London Strategists, one for all Technologists. The urban legend went that back in the day, the gatekeeper of some of these made you promise that you would agree not be offended, and not to share what you saw in these rooms.

The functional ones were used for business, and we had automated feeds posting statuses, vacation days for the team, people asking for support, and general business discussions. In the more technical ones, bugs were reported, discussed and resolved, and ideas were sought for difficult problems. Think a combination of Stack Overflow, Reddit and Cron.

After growing up on YAMS, Slack seems to take the torch forward really well. It creates the same atmosphere of transparency, easy discussion, quick responses and resolutions, and some tomfoolery.

We had some protocols that we stuck to and there was a list of commonly used YAMS terms and abbreviations that you were introduced to as part of your induction, and you learnt to use them. Some of these, if used well, create just the right amount of naming and shaming, to keep people on their toes, and not just throw every query to Slack, without doing any research themselves. I’ll reproduce them here as best as I can, and would request my old comrades to suggest more in comments. I’ll keep updating the post as they come by.

• owy — oops wrong yams
• read only yams? — this has been mentioned in the discussion before. Why did you not read before posting?
• Queen Vic Dead? — reporting old news, are we?
• ytmbyts — you tell me buddy, you’re the strategist
• imho — In my humble opinion
• imo — in my opinion
• wdyt — what do you think?

The crown jewel was a list that was maintained called “Strat Hall Of Fame Quotes” and there were some true gems in there. While many were business sensitive, or would be embarrassing to some, I will reproduce one from memory

What is the best owy

Email

Phone

Timings