Inside Bloomberg’s internal IT pathways

If two roads diverged in the woods, Bloomberg would direct its IT professionals to take the one paved by their colleagues.

Bloomberg is known for its famous terminal, which provides real-time market data, news, and analysis, along with order management. Bloomberg engineers who work on the terminal and other company software also contribute to open-source projects and programming languages.

Part of the company’s engineering success could be linked to its reliance on “paved paths,” or established procedures that have been stress-tested by engineering teams over the years.

Paved paths. Bloomberg’s paved paths include best practices for both internal tools and third-party software. If the latter doesn’t meet the company’s standards, they will often build the equivalent internally.

In an email, Ray Sauers, senior software engineer and a technical trainer at Bloomberg, told IT Brew that a paved path is a recommended and maintained sequence of solutions that are laid out to “reliably guide” users to the intended destination. Paved paths are actualized as tools and documentation for a developer’s workflow, and aim to meet necessary internal requirements and best practices.

Within the company, there are dedicated teams responsible for assessing third-party software for potential threats to security or stability; their paths exist within repositories for deployed applications that are available on employee devices with pre-installed tools. Additionally, Sauers said, there are paths for other technologies like web-based applications.

Rob Palmer, an engineering manager at Bloomberg who works on the app experience team responsible for both web and terminal infrastructure, sat down with IT Brew to discuss how these paved paths work for each software ecosystem and application platform.

“[Paved paths are] a real thing when it comes to dashboards and asset tracking,” Palmer said. “You can see for a given project to what degree it is compliant with the defined…path. There’ll be a dashboard with deployment visibility, can we see which environments, which populations a piece of software is deployed to, and is it using the automation for pushing that pushing that out at each stage?”

Matt Wozniski, a senior software engineer and member of the organization’s Python infrastructure team, said that the paved paths don’t prevent employees from doing things, but rather empower individual application teams to make better choices for their products.

“As far as the infrastructure team goes, our goal is much more to give people paved path solutions that they can easily leverage to make it easier to do the right thing than the wrong thing,” Wozniski said.

Change. Barney Feingold, team lead at Bloomberg for recent college graduate developer training, said that while the paved paths have helped Bloomberg maintain stability, engineers coming into the organization have brought “tremendous change.”

“The reality is, we also allow engineers to join us, to bring ideas from where they come from, whether it’s recently at a university or some of these folks who are more veteran in the industry,” Feingold said. “The reason why this is successful for us over decades is because of the open culture we have around engineering.”

Lessons. While IT professionals and their departments could have a strong preference for certain tools or software, others may have no clear preference other than to deliver on business objectives. In either scenario, a tool like paved paths can help IT teams move more efficiently.

A version of this strategy appears to have worked for Bloomberg. Palmer said the company looks to “make it easy” for professionals to fall into the “pit of success” with battle-tested, well-trodden routes.