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Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

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181–190 of 361 posts

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#181
post #72

$100 an hour, so $208k a year (assuming no time off), for a guy with 30+ years working on a critical system in an industry where floor traders can make 7-8 figures, and huge bonuses are paid to "analysts". I have plumber buddies that make more than that per hour (and with a crew can make more a year). That's why a couple years ago when I had access to a zseries, and was hearing about how "desperate" the banks were I…

Yeah that was odd, already back in 2009 I was making 135K as a PHP sr developer/architect so I am not sure why six figures is such a big deal. This sort of stuff needs to be six figures where the first is at least 2 if not 3. If we are talking of an agency, it needs to bill 500 an hour and hand over half of that.

You always have to take into account location. $100k/year in NY and Arkansas are completely different beasts.

I've been online for many many years and I STILL do not understand why people miss this simple idea.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This probably should not matter to me but going to that website (even though its a super basic marketing page) and seeing it without SSL it just starts to bother me that someone who does so much bank consulting would care so little about a simple SSL cert on their own site, especially given how easy Lets Encrypt has made it. Like I said this probably should not make a difference to me because I won't be hiring any "C…

Besides the contact form perhaps, what really needs to be SSL? Specific reasons. FYI, the site is powered by Wordpress.

In this age where ISPs are injecting ads and tracking headers? And MitM attacks are used to redirect to malware (see redirects to foxacid)?

Everything needs to be SSL - it provides more than just confidentiality.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#183
There's a retail bank in London that still has its core standing order system written in pounds, shillings and pence with a translation routine sitting on top of it. It was supposed to have been rewritten as part of the millennium-bug investigations, but it never happened.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#184

First employee/architect of Kraken here. (Now does >USD$10M+/day of volume by my estimate) Accounting systems of all kinds should be generic and open source. Why do we need banks at all? It's not like this infrastructure really has any special characteristics. Most of it even has downtime and batch jobs. Fact: The bulk of banking is just recording some numbers at a stupendously simplistic resolution, with maybe 64 ch…

> Why do we need banks at all?

Mostly, regulatory capture.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#185
post #128
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Companies never think of the old guys as the ones to implement the new system - that's a job for the "enterprise experts" Exactly this is why rewrites fail. The challenge of a rewrite is not in mapping the core architecture and core use case, it's mapping all the edge cases and covering all the end user needs. You need people intimately familiar with the old system to make sure the new system does all the weird stu…

all features and edge cases should have a test. if possible also have tests for all the bugs ever found in the old system. it helps if the tests are not too coupled with the code and are well documented. a test could be making an entry where deb and cred dont match. or trying to enter an extra decimal. and if the system adds two decimals corectly.

>all features and edge casss should have a test.

Yeah, but the interesting problem is what happens next. Let's say a test case reveals that there's a flaw in the next-gen system. You fix it. It later turns out that the same flaw exists in the legacy system. What do you do?

Do you revert the fix, or leave it in place?

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#186
post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's worse is companies who 100% outsource to customized versions of a vendor's code. At least banks own the source to what they run even if they can't run it without a license. Clothing company I know sitting next to amazon pays the equivalent of about 5 fte senior amazon engineers a year in licensing the software they run every year to a vendor who charges them another 5 engineers worth to implement all of the cu…

This is accountant math with capex vs opex. I don't know how but they manage to convince companies that their saving money by spending 10 times as much.

Might still be a good decision: the corporate politics get so much harder, once you have in-house teams. And: that company would probably fail at writing in-house software---most of them do.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#187
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any of the new hires with talent quickly discover they can double their salary by doing pretty much anything else in IT and move on. Not necessary. They do not know current frameworks and tools and probably don't know the knowledge is transferable. Effectively, they need to find a company willing to train them and the one that hires by aptitude on whiteboard test only.

Yes. Very likely that they can't get a better job. As the previous comment said, they are trained from scratch having no experience in tech whatsoever and mainframe is not remarketable to a web company.

Google is willing to hire anybody who can solve a few basic algorithmic problems.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never wrote RPG code, but 50k LOC seems a pretty small project to me...

A 50k LOC program serving a critical business function without a test suite or requirements documentation can be quite a chore to replace, especially if you let it go until you have neither staff experienced in the language or with experience with the background of the specific application.

> critical business function without a test suite or requirements documentation

Even in the world of standard consumer webapps, this is a real challenge.

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#189
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

French banks are actually doing that! SG/Société Générale, a brick and mortar bank that costs a hundred dollars a year, built Boursorama, an e-bank that's free and that gives you $200 if you subscribe. Advantage: SG has too many manned agencies and can't justify preemptively mass-firing them yet – they first need the customer base to dwindle. Better IT, usage of Internet techniques at the core, and drastically simpli…

Boursorama is not a bank. It's a website to allow people to play on the financial markets ("bourse" = exchange). I think Americans would call that a sort of dealing account. Obviously, a dealing account has to hold funds and handle transfers. That's not any close to a consumer bank though.

It is now also a bank. I own one Boursorama bank and I have account credit card...

Re: Banks scramble to fix old systems as IT 'cowboys' ride into sunset

#190
post #52

Been working on accounting systems in RPG and COBOL since ~1992. I also know C/X86ASM/Pascal/Delphi/VB/Fortran. Never bothered with C++ that much; played with Java a bit but Oracle irritates my bowels so moved away from that. As mentioned in the article it's good work; but it is also not easy work. You tend to go through cycles of being pushed out to brought back under extreme emergency at any costs to get stuff work…

As a developer who recently turned thirty, I think about this a lot. I like working in startups, but its not going to fly forever. I'm already the old guy in the room. Would learning 'ancient' technology be a good career move? These systems aren't going anywhere, right? But the people who know how to maintain them are. Which means that maintaining these system, which already pays well, will pay even better in the fut…

I don't think you need to learn an "ancient technology". There is plenty of work in traditional corporations. You just need to find one that has legs so you can ride it out for the next 30 years. A steady job, 5 weeks of vacation after 15 years, benefits. If your lucky you can become a number and slowly disappear, spending more time doing your own thing. Long lunches, nap in the car, run some errands, etc.

Eventually everyone runs out of piss and vinegar. It's not so bad.

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