Adam Torres and Derek Ferguson discuss software development.
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Show Notes:
Fitch Group, Inc. is a leading provider of insights, data and analytics. In this episode, Adam Torres and Derek Ferguson, CSO at Fitch Group, explore software development and Fitch Group.
About Derek Ferguson
Experienced Chief Software Officer (CSO) with a demonstrated history of working in the information services industry. Skilled in Negotiation, IT Strategy, Regulatory Requirements, Management, and Technology Solutions. Strong information technology professional with a Computer Science degree.
About Fitch Group
Fitch Group is a global leader in financial information services with operations in more than 30 countries. Wholly owned by Hearst, Fitch Group is comprised of: Fitch Ratings, a global leader in credit ratings and research and Fitch Solutions, a leading provider of data, research and analytics. With dual headquarters in London and New York, Fitch Group is owned by Hearst.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today’s guest is Derek Ferguson, and he’s a CSO over at Fitch. Derek, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much for having me. All right. So Fitch group is a leading provider of insights, data, and analytics. And today our overall angle and topic elevating software development. So we’ll talk about some AI, DevOps transforming tech and really what Fitch is up to. But Derek, just to get us kicked off here how’d you get into this business?
Like, , how did you get into the role of CSO? Where’d that all start for you? So my I guess I should say I grew up in the 80s, in the era of balloon board systems and dial up modems. So I was, You got mail! Fascinated. Yes, you got it! Fascinated by that sort of stuff as as a kid. And went and I actually started university as a music composition major, but one of my composition majors made the observation that I took a very methodical approach to pretty much everything I did.
And I took that as a sign that my background and growing up with programming from the age of 10 was really sort of oozing out despite my best efforts to to go in a creative direction. So. Switched to computer science graduated, my first job was with a company that was one of the first in the world to do commercial DSL access.
So, just right into internet based topics and high tech right from the start. And then based on that, wrote a number of books about software and programming. Based on that, spoke at some conferences, and then one day Got a call from our recruiter who said Bear Stearns wants to talk to you.
And I was so much in a technology head and not in a business head at that point in time. I, my, comment to him was who’s Bear Stearns. Yeah, I was just going to say, you probably didn’t even know what it was. You’re like, I believe that I was waiting for you to say, go ahead. Zero, idea. But, you know, I wound up working there for three years, and of course, in 2008, they were acquired by JPMorgan Chase, where I worked for a further 11 years working on their trading systems, equities, and options, the, the consumer facing side, which is actually super interesting to me, because at Bear Stearns, I had done Institutional trading.
So consumer facing trading was, was a whole new area for me. But five years ago today, in fact, I trained with the Fitch group and haven’t looked back since then. Wow. So as you’ve gone through and you, I mean, in your career, obviously you started really early on and found what , , your niche was, we’ll say How did you know, like, that this was going to be for you?
And the reason I asked this question, I’ll just kind of preface it briefly is because sometimes people that are, you know, that listen to podcasts like this or otherwise, they’ve been on a certain path and we’re a mission matters as the name alludes, right? , we’re always interested in delving into people’s missions and seeing how they do what they do and why they do it, how did you know that this was going to be the path that you took?
You know, I’ve always wanted to see what comes next. I’ve always been very interested in the future and I guess I’m naturally an optimist. So I like to see and be a part of affecting change using technology that’s going to make things better. I I remember as a kid, you know, with the Atari 2600, when I was a kid, everyone, all of, all of my peers, I talked to say, Oh, we didn’t realize how bad the graphics were.
Well, I realized how bad the graphics were, of course, I didn’t realize the graphics were poor. They realized that modems were too slow. I just, I always wanted something better. So. It was, it was actually pretty, pretty clear to me as soon as I started digging into technology and realized it. I had an aptitude for it, but this is, this is exactly where I wanted to be.
So, when it comes to, I guess the topic of the day would be definitely correct me if I’m off, but AI, right? Like, everybody’s talking about AI. What’s AI going to do next? And, you know, what, what does that look like? Having, I mean, your hindsight and, and just your, your pedigree, like, what, what are your thoughts on it?
Like, what on the topic? Probably not surprisingly, I’m optimistic on this topic also. You know, I think when, when you look at every major technology evolution that’s happened over the past 70 years, particularly in software engineering, the, there were folks when Assembly came into play, who said, wait, now, you know, now that now that folks don’t need to physically flip switches on a computer and code in binary, everyone can do it.
Well, of course, you know, we know that that was not the case. Assembler didn’t make it possible for everyone to code. And then when C came in, people said the same thing, but out of C, we actually wound up getting Consumer software for the first time, because before that, it was all military applications and aerospace and all that sort of stuff.
No one really thought about consumer applications until C, and that caused this huge increase in in the market for software, and then Java came in. And it, I think the estimates I saw was an increased software productivity by what, 300 percent or something like that. And folks said, well, if you know, if you’ve got 300 percent productivity, you’re not going to need as many developers anymore.
But of course, that’s exactly the opposite to what happened because no one had ever thought about web apps and mobile apps and all the different sort of apps we have now. So I think. This, this introduction of AI and the empowering of so many more people to have a hand in the process. I won’t even say long term, I will say medium term.
What you will see is a whole lot of interesting projects getting started by non developers, but there will come a point where developers are going to have to step in and support. All of those and make the more fine grain changes. And as a result, I think once again, we’re going to see the market for software engineers grow.
Another another order of magnitude would be my prediction. So I get bigger, right? Like for me, the pie gets bigger. Exactly. Very well said. It’s what is it? A rising tide raises all ships. Yeah, that that’s my perspective on AI. And I feel like the other side of this is, and I, this has got to be unsettling.
Let’s say if you’re in college right now, right? Like you’re in college, you’re a year out, maybe two years out. You’ve been looking at a certain major direction and this and that. And now you’re looking at, well, what does this mean for me next? And I guess, speaking to those college kids, from my standpoint, if you thought when I went to college, I was thinking about being a, a podcaster.
Guess what? I don’t even know podcasts were around or invented back then. And I was not thinking about that. So even though you don’t. No, maybe what you’re going to be doing in 10 years, neither did I, but I feel like in many other generations, that’s been the case too, whether it was the industrial revolution or whether, I mean, all these different like generations have different like needs and wants.
And and you know, the, the marketplace evolves to serve those needs and wants of that moment in time. So I see this as kind of like a continuance it’s different because maybe the magnitude could be bigger. I don’t know, like any thoughts on that? Like just the rapidity, like how fast everything’s happening.
, it is true, and I think you already see, like, the job of prompt engineer. Oh yeah, I saw that one the other day, somebody was telling me. And it’s, it’s very true, you know, it’s, it is a skill set to know how to get what you want out of generative AI. And this is, you know, what, we’re maybe two years generously into the generative AI revolution.
And we’ve already created one. Profession out of it that never existed before. It’s really just the start. And when you talk about like the more wide scale changes of AI and all that sort of stuff, like civilizational changes from AI, they get super, super powerful. I tend to look at it with a fair degree of ambivalence because anything that’s powerful enough to cause harm is also something that’s powerful enough to do an awful lot of good, right?
He, you get to a certain point where. If you’re thinking AI is going to get to a certain level of power with any concerns you might have about it would have to be offset by things like, well, gosh, maybe it’s going to cure diseases, going to figure out environmental change. Maybe, you know, maybe those are things that are on the table, too.
So It’s always difficult and dangerous to predict the future, but from my standpoint, if we look to history and what’s happened, even with something like the Internet, where folks said, Oh, you know what, if you’re not completely on the Internet by, you know, five years from now, you’re going to be completely out of business.
Well, you know, there are organizations that use the Internet to their advantage that have done better and organizations that didn’t use it at all that have had issues. But by and large, It seems, it feels to me like everyone sort of came along for the ride. Everyone had the opportunity. I’ve heard it said, you know, your job won’t be taken by AI, but your job might be taken by somebody who knows AI.
Better than you do. That’s, , you know, if I were to give some advice to recent graduates, that would probably be what I would, what I would say, just focus on using the tools and being the best at using the tools and you’ll do all right. You’ll do well. So I want to spend some time here talking about Fitch.
So I think you said , five years to the day, at least of the recording of this, you’ve been there. , what originally attracted you to the firm and like, what do you feel makes it unique or special in terms of what’s being done in Dev and DevOps? It’s a really great balance between the freedom of a startup and the resources of an established big organization.
, I’ve worked for both extremes in my career, of course, started with a startup. And then most recently before coming to Fitch, I was with one of the biggest banking institutions that are around. And when you’re at a startup, It’s small enough that you can make decisions about what you want to do, but maybe you won’t have the resources to actually do it.
And with some of the larger organizations that are out there, you might have tons of resources, but actually getting access to do the things you want to do and that you think are the right things to do require going through, you know, triplicate committees and all that sort of stuff. What I really liked when I, looked at Fitch was.
It’s on the cutting edge and has the resources to make the changes that need to be made and to, to move quickly. It’s, a very good midpoint. I remember talking to our current head of enterprise architecture, who’s one of the folks who interviewed me about their plans to get onto the cloud.
And they were already there. I mean, it’s like, okay, well, what percentage is there? No, no, we’re there. We’ve got nothing that’s, you know, on premise right now. Whoa. You know, five years ago, I thought, oh, wow, this is, this is something I have to be a part of. So probably no surprise. It was, it was the technology that attracted me initially.
Yeah, I get that. I get that. And I think in the types of probably also, you probably have a pretty and I’m not going to push you for any particular name, or you don’t have to name drop any companies or things like that. But maybe industries, like, I feel like you probably get to work with a wide array of industries as well.
Like, can you can you comment on that at all? Is it mostly finance? Is it mostly like, and again, you don’t have to give any names of any firms or anything like that. I’m just curious in industries. Yeah. I mean, I would say finance tends to be disproportionate since we provide financial data and ratings and all that sort of stuff, but there’s a huge macro cosmic organizations, even within that space, you know, there are the folks who.
Need financial information in order to benefit their clients. There are the folks who need financial information in order to benefit themselves because they’re doing some sort of proprietary exercises. There is a a wide range of different kinds of clients just within the financial industry.
I’d say. What do you think is one of the competitive advantages to pitch that to say one of the competitors? Like, if you’re if you’re going in for a job, like, what do you think of some of the advantages? Reasons that folks should consider a career with Fitch, I would say. If you, if the idea of being on the cutting edge is appealing to you, this is, this is a great place to be.
And I won’t specifically single out any of our competitors. I’ll just say, when I have been at conferences and talked with people about where they’re at in their AI efforts, for example, or where they’re at in their cloud engineering efforts, with very few exceptions and never with any exceptions to companies of our size that I have spoken to, we are almost always A good, a good leap ahead of where everyone else is just because we have that we have that philosophy to, to, to make decisions and, and really, you know, put some thought into it.
We’ve sort of got the, I think we’ve got the intellectual resources to figure out a lot of the hardest problems as well as the, you know, the, the other kinds of resources that are needed in order to move forward. So Derek, I’m gonna fly on your wall right now. You’ve been in this, in this field for a really long time.
What excites you right now? Like, and it doesn’t have to be ai, it could be, it could be anything in tech. What excites you right now? Like, what gets you motivated and fired up about what’s next?
I think the fusion of ai. And quantum computing is a super interesting aspect, because right now you’re dealing with one level of power for building large language models. And I’m sure you’ve heard the stories about the big tech companies who are trying to build the next generation of LLMs and how they’re turning to actually standing up their own silicone factories to build their own chips.
And I think I heard one of them at least is looking to build their own nuclear reactors to provide enough power for it. It’s just, it’s like, it’s the brute force approach to solving this issue, right? But simultaneously, you’ve got all of this interesting research that’s going on in the quantum computing space, and that has a payoff horizon for at least some of the earlier stuff around, like, say, the decade mark.
If you think about the impact on creating LLMs. Of having that kind of computing power come online. You get all sorts of super interesting things that can be done with it. And that’s where you really do sort of start to get into the sort of general general artificial intelligence windows. Having said that, I love the stuff that’s out just now.
I mean, I could, I could have conversations with chat GPT just for hours on end trying different things. And I would love to see what your problems look like. Cause that guarantee minor, like baby ones. And I’m like, I’m definitely not getting the prompt engineer job. So it’s okay, but I feel like yours is trained to be a little smarter than mine after you’re after interacting with you, it’s, I.
I appreciate that. You know, hallucinations are a problem for everyone though. That’s the thing. I mean, , it’s not so much figuring out the interesting things you can ask the AIs to do as it is figuring out how can you know when they’re giving you the right information versus when they’re hallucinating.
That’s where I think the real trick lies. Great stuff. And I think that’s a great way to end it, Derek. , how to figure out when it’s hallucinating or not? No. This is true. You know, I’m not an AI, right? Oh, come on, come on. No, I had him on, he answered the phone already and I got through to you.
So he put me through to you for the record. Everybody listening thinks , I’m joking. I’m not. He put me through to you after he screened me. So that was a great use. Yes, that’s true. I love that. So, Derek, man, seriously, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate you coming on and giving us and giving us some time.
That being said, if somebody’s listening to this, and if they want to learn more about Fitch, or connect with you, , or follow you how do they do that? You’re always welcome to ping me on LinkedIn. For Fitch in general careers. fitch. group. Lots of exciting opportunities. Take a look there and, you know, join us on this exciting mission that we’re on.
Amazing. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put some links in the show notes so that you can just head right on over and and check out the site. And speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, Be sure to hit that subscribe button.
This is a daily show each and every day. I’m bringing you new content, new ideas, new episodes, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Derek, thanks again for coming on the show. Thank you very much. It’s great talking to you.