Posted by editor | Filed under Construction
the Steve Rule Memorial Recreation Room (temporary)
22 Monday Sep 2014
22 Monday Sep 2014
15 Monday Sep 2014
Posted 140 New Montgomery
inFrom San Francisco Business Times:
Bloomberg looks to raise Bay Area tech profile
Sep 15, 2014
Patrick Hoge, Reporter – San Francisco Business Times
Bloomberg L.P. is largely known as a news provider in the Bay Area, but it started as a technology pioneer serving financial firms with timely data delivered by its trademark terminals.
Zach Haehn wants to update Bloomberg’s image in the local tech world as he seeks to hire up to 100 people to work in the company’s new research and development office in San Francisco, which is scheduled to begin construction soon and open early next year.
“A lot of people think that we’re just a media company in the tech space out here. We need to change that,” said Haehn, who recently moved to Bloomberg’s Pier 3 offices from New York City as company founder Michael Bloomberg announced the new R&D initiative.
Some 3,500 technologists work for Bloomberg, supporting one of the world’s largest private networks, providing communications, data, analytics and news services as well as trading platforms to players in the global financial markets. That’s about 1,000 more than work on the media side of the business.
It’s important to Bloomberg to raise its Bay Area tech profile because while New York City has a great deal of technical talent with expertise in financial systems for trading and portfolio management and the like, the Bay Area has more varied expertise, particularly in the area of data science and analytics, which could help Bloomberg make its vast stores of information more widely useful and accessible.
“It’s about staying close to technology as it evolves. If you’re not here, you’re not part of that conversation at all,” he said.
For much of its history, Bloomberg has developed proprietary technology in-house, and the company wants to share more with the outside world, Haehn said.
“We have been a little too prescriptive about which technologies people can use to interact with our system,” he said.
To that end, Bloomberg is building a 20,000 square foot “developer hub” on two floors of 140 New Montgomery Street, the stylishly remodeled Art Deco highrise that is also headquarters for Yelp, the crowd-sourced local business review service.
A significant portion of the space will be devoted to events, and Bloomberg is planning to sponsor hackathons and other tech community functions to get the word out about its goals. Already, the company is sponsoring open source project work in areas like data science.
So far, Haehn has hired only a few people. He acknowledged that the competition for technical talent in the Bay Area is extraordinarily fierce, but said optimistically that the challenging problems Bloomberg is trying to tackle around security, data availability and speed of delivery will prove attractive to potential employees.
As to compensation, Bloomberg may not be able to offer stock options like a startup, but its reward system of bonuses is clear and reliable, Haehn said.
Regarding work routines, Haehn expects his Bay Area team will be just as diligent as people are in the notoriously fast-paced New York region, but that they will look more relaxed.
“People here have perfected the art of looking like they’re not busy,” he said. “In New York, people feel like they’re obligated to look busy.”