I could buy that they competently made the best of a bad situation. But I have a hard time believing that getting into the situation was the result of perfect competence.
My time writing trading software was never on the automated end of things, so I'm only modestly qualified to comment. But if I were doing the post-mortem on this one, the first thing I'd look for is middle management time pressure forcing a large release without adequate testing. And my standard for "adequate testing" would be pretty high.
If you're going to release something that can take down the company, it's worth making sure it works. In this case, they lost circa 400x the lifetime median income of a US worker. It's hard to imagine the upside that would have justified that kind of risk.
> In this case, they lost circa 400x the lifetime median income of a US worker.
Why is that relevant?
> It's hard to imagine the upside that would have justified that kind of risk.
Actually, it's easy to imagine such an upside. Consider 800x the lifetime median income of a US worker.
Solyndra lost far more of the US taxpayer's money. Are you really suggesting that Solyndra shouldn't have been considered because the amount of money was too large?
How about CA's high speed rail project? Are you really saying that it's a bad idea just because of the amount of money involved?
I'm not claiming that Solyndra or high-speed rail are good investments, I'm just them to demonstrate that the $500M at risk isn't a show stopper. You must consider the return.
There are lots of bets that are that large or larger. For example, every time a company sells for >$400M ....
My time writing trading software was never on the automated end of things, so I'm only modestly qualified to comment. But if I were doing the post-mortem on this one, the first thing I'd look for is middle management time pressure forcing a large release without adequate testing. And my standard for "adequate testing" would be pretty high.
If you're going to release something that can take down the company, it's worth making sure it works. In this case, they lost circa 400x the lifetime median income of a US worker. It's hard to imagine the upside that would have justified that kind of risk.