Digression, Computers and Training

If you are reading this blog for stock tips or particular insights into what goes on on a daily basis at work, then you are probably mistaken. While I won't deny that there may be occasional moments where I talk about things that go on at work, most of the time, it will just be those little moments and thoughts that I find memorable. Though if you're clever, you may be able to figure out what the environment is like at work, and maybe even some of the culture. Also, I won't be posting what exactly it is that I do here either. It's not like there isn't enough competition anyway.

And now that the digression is done and over with...

A few days ago, I went to a Bloomberg Terminal training seminar at the local Bloomberg office in the Deloitte Building here in Chicago. Though I have indeed wasted hours in worse ways, there was certainly nothing particularly interesting or educational about the seminar. Granted, it was the first in the series but regardless, what was taught there could have been taught by a fellow coworker in just ten or fifteen minutes.

I might add at this point that I am particularly bitter about this class since it took place during trading hours and I had to leave my desk to take something that a fellow coworker had already denounced as useless. After the pronouncement, I was inclined to just skip it as well, but at the urging of the boss, I went to it. His reasoning was that I would go to determine whether or not it was truly useless and thus determine whether future trainees at the company would be sent to the training. What my opinion was at the end of it was probably quite clear.

In any case, the point that I am trying to get at here is that the best way to learn about some new piece of technology is to play with it yourself. So long as the technology is reasonably robust and comprehensible, it isn't too difficult to explore just by seeing what works and what does what. Not only is that true for something like a Bloomberg terminal, but it's also true for most programming languages. The easiest way to learn is not by doing classes, since you end up learning how to do things which are mostly useless, but just by jumping in headfirst without knowing anything and tinkering with it until it does what you want it to do. Though I can't say that what goes for me goes for the rest of the world, that is the way that I learned VBA, which is probably one of the most important languages for anything related to finance.