Our Culture

• Degree(s):B.A. in Computer Science
• Location:New York
• Job title:Analyst
• Group:BlackRock Solutions

My role at BlackRock is to design and develop software solutions for Aladdin, BlackRock’s trading and risk management system that is used to manage in excess of $6 trillion in assets. We are responsible for complementing Aladdin with web-based portfolio management and risk reporting tools, built in both Java and Perl.

A Unique Set of Challenges

Each application that I develop offers a unique set of challenges that demand robust and creative solutions. I work on a team of eight people, all of whom have varying strengths and skills. This affords me the opportunity to have a significant impact on the products that we develop, even as a junior member of the team.

The Power and Value of Teamwork

The people at BlackRock are genuinely nice and welcoming. They are eager to answer questions, have tremendous levels of expertise across all areas of the business and all resolutely believe in the power and value of working as a team. If in the course of developing financial applications you begin to garner an interest in finance, BlackRock has a variety of different paths that you could pursue. From the perspective of a software developer, there are few other places I could work that would offer such a unique opportunity.

8:30 a.m. – Arrive. Arrive at the office and sort through my emails. Attend to any urgent requests or pressing problems that come up.

8:45 a.m. – Work on bugs. Begin working on the bugs and/or enhancements that have been assigned to me for our next software release. For example, I was recently asked to profile the CPU utilization of our application, identify performance hot spots, and consider ways to optimize our code and improve its speed. Using the tool JProfiler, I was able to locate the most time consuming pieces of logic in our application, and was able to uncover some critical redundancies and inefficiencies. After making enhancements to reduce or eliminate these bottlenecks, I was able to improve the performance of our application by as much as 45%.

9:30 a.m. – CNN. Read a story or two on CNN.com.

9:40 a.m. – Programming. Back to those bugs.

3:00 p.m.– Meetings. Once each week, my team will meet for 30-60 minutes. The topic of the meeting depends on which stage of the release cycle we are in. If the meeting is held in the early part of the cycle, we will review the items to be included for the next release. These typically include a pretty even mixture of existing bugs and new enhancements. If we are making key changes to user interfaces, we will discuss them and decide the most intuitive way to make alterations.

If we are in the middle phase of a release cycle, we will discuss our progress and note any significant obstacles that we have encountered during development. If I or any other developer is struggling to find a solution to this problem, potential resolutions will be discussed amongst the team.

In the final stages of the release cycle, the focus is on testing. We will make note of any bugs that have been uncovered, and will verify that these problems can be attended to quickly enough so as to not disrupt our release schedule.

In addition to these weekly team meetings, every so often the developers on my team will meet with a team responsible for the oversight and delivery of the products that we develop. We will demonstrate any key interface changes we have made, and will use their feedback to make final improvements.

6:30 p.m./ 7:00 p.m. – While my work day can last longer, it will typically end around this time.