Leaving Bloomberg for AOL

15 Jun 2010

A little bit of history

When I left University, I was offered an opportunity at Jellyfish Online Marketing; and what an opportunity it was. I honestly do not believe I could have kicked off my career in IT at any better organisation. Learning, working, having fun – that company had the whole package for a university leaver.

I stayed for 4 years, working my way up from Developer, to Senior Developer, to Lead Developer eventually; Scrum mastering a team of very skilled developers (who I still miss like mad, both professionally and socially)

At the beginning of March (only 3 months ago) I accepted, and started a role at Bloomberg, as a Senior Developer. More specifically, I was to be working in a team, recently integrated into Bloomberg, called BNEF (Bloomberg New Energy Finance). This was a small open-source web team, working on this new site, and bringing it in line with the Bloomberg standards, and way of life.

For those of you who do not know, Bloomberg are the worlds largest independent news organisation, owned by the Mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg. They focus on providing news and investment information to stocks and shares traders, and well as investors. Their core revenue stream comes from a single product, called The Terminal.

This is an organisation known world-wide for having an excellent IT infrastructure, based around their core product, The Terminal. This is a news system, designed for stock/shares traders, and thus far has cost over $100′s of million to make in total (over the past 20 odd years). In the UK alone, there are over 300 developers working on it every single day.

The future

A few weeks ago I was approached by a recruiter regarding a Senior Web Technologist/Software Engineer role for a large, well known company. Upon seeing the spec of the job, I entered a rather difficult interview process! Over the course of a few days, I had not 1, not 2, not 3, not 4, but 5 interviews with various members of staff at AOL.

AOL recently broke away from Time Warner, the media company which they merged with a few years ago. Since then, they have repositioned themselves, changing their core business, and creating more revenue streams.

It’s therefore with great excitement that I will be starting at AOL in just over 2 days time, in a hugely important team for the business, working on some very large scale products – I am truly excited!