How Michael Osinski Helped Build The Bomb That Blew Up Wall Street
A quick excerpt from here ( http://nymag.com/news/business/55687/ ). Worth the read.
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My first assignment was to write a “machine-to-machine interrupt handler.” That was not exactly sexy in the world of finance, or in any world, and I won’t bore you by trying to explain. It was plumbing. As was all the programming, which, on the firm’s hierarchy, ranked somewhere above the secretarial pool but well below, literally and figuratively, the trading floor. I didn’t mind. To me, it was good, well-paying work. My manager, a former mathematics professor named Leszek Gesiak, an immigrant from Poland, became a friend. Neither one of us was on track, but we both enjoyed the challenges and pace of the job. We lunched at either Yip’s, a Chinese culinary cul-de-sac, or on Front Street, in the seaport, where you could get fresh fish cafeteria style across the street from the market. It was a different New York, still picking itself up from the seventies. Drug dealers loitered at the door of the brokerages, and taxis often smelled of pot from their previous occupants. Just a few years before, Michael Bloomberg had been fired from Salomon. He had the crazy idea that the data was as valuable as the firm’s capital.
