As you can read from
Stephen's blog post on the subject, he's coming to join the
OpenGamma team in the beginning of March.
On JSR-310
Just to reiterate what he said in his post, one of his first duties at OpenGamma will be to get
JSR-310 to at least reference draft status. When we started building our platform we made a very early bet that JSR-310 would be the ultimate future of dates and times in Java. That decision has brought a lot of power on working with dates and times for us (for example, we haven't had to build our own system on top of
java.util.Date that every financial firm I've ever worked for has done), but we think that with a strong, concerted effort we (as a community) still have a chance to get JSR-310 as the defacto
and dejure future of dates and times in Java.
Stephen mentioned earlier on the mailing list that a lack of time outside work has contributed to the slow-down of JSR-310. We're giving him time and resources during the working day, and waiving ownership of the code that he produces.
We're not hiring him
just to work on JSR-310, but it seems obvious to me: financial software probably depends more than other software on having strong tools for working with the multiplicity of date and time rules that proliferate in finance. If giving Stephen the time he needs to finish off JSR-310 gives us those tools in a standardized way that the whole community can benefit from, that's far better than building Yet Another Proprietary Date/Time System.
On Non-Financial Hiring
When I mentioned in passing to a few people that Stephen was joining the team, they were quite surprised, because they thought from my
original blog post on OpenGamma hiring that we were only looking for financial industry professionals. That was true at the time I posted it, but it's not true today.
If you take a look at the current
OpenGamma Jobs page, you'll see that we put far more prominence on pure programming skill these days than financial industry expertise. Sure, if we have a choice between two candidates, identical
in every way and one comes from the financial industry and one doesn't, we'll choose the one from the financial industry. But
people are unique. We
never see two candidates that are identical in every other respect.
And that's why we're eager to hire people who
don't come from finance. We're building software that's complicated enough that we need the best across the entire software development industry. Unlike a common attitude I encountered by recruiters when I first moved to the UK, we're not under some assumption that the only people who are any good are the ones working at a Tier-1 bank or a hedge fund.
We made an offer to Stephen because he's a fantastic software developer and architect that we think will make an immediate and long-term impact on our success. We're
thrilled that he's decided to join us.
We're Still Hiring
So if you were on the fence before, or you thought that we only wanted someone with N years of experience at some bank somewhere,
think again. We want the best, no matter what their background.
Email us your CV.
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