Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 361 posts

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

#341

Post by mseebach »

stickfigure wrote: post #316
mseebach wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$800k/year is possibly unusual, but these are unusual people. I see nothing unlikely about a highly skilled contractor with 30 years of experience, a good network and in the right location to be pulling down $800k/year.

Do you know anyone who does? "Without working too hard"? The chance that the OP is billing $800k/yr is vastly smaller than the chance that the OP used a bad figure of speech. The number of technology professionals who can sustain $400/hr billing for a full year is tiny . The number of technology professionals who are bad at communication is huge . Bayes' Theorem is relevant here.

I know someone who makes half that and who is utterly unremarkable (nice guy, competent - but unremarkable, he's just played his card very well. Not playing politics, but being a consultant, not FTE, in a lucrative niche, and possibly having a nose for ending up on good projects). So I can believe that a tiny number (which is what we're talking about, they can make this much exactly because there is only a tiny number of them) can make this much.

"Without working too hard" is quite subjective. I suspect they are quite disciplined and works quite hard, but are very rarely in the office after 5, nor working much more than 35-40 hours a week.

As to (bad) communication, $200k/yr is high but unremarkable for SV/NYC careerist professionals. The notion that someone with decades of rare, in-demand experience should somehow be capped at what a (lucky) 35 year old engineering manager makes is just silly.

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

#343

Post by hourislate »

pnathan wrote: post #339
hourislate wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Life is short, how much of it are you willing to give away. That may not resonate with you now but wait until you're in your 40's or 50's and 10-20 years has passed.

I like what I do. I like going to work. I like my company. I like coming home to my baby and tickling his feet. It's life . Being a lazy bum not accomplishing what you want to do shortchanges you and your life as well as the people paying you. My father in law has a saying: "if you don't like what you do, what are you doing?". And I agree with that.

You have a lot to learn.....You'll figure it out eventually.

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

#344

Post by toddh »

contingencies wrote: post #32

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…

Accounting isn't about the ledger, it's about the myriad of laws at every level. That takes a well funded organization to track the constant stream of changes.

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

#345

Post by therealdrag0 »

inopinatus wrote: post #51
kingnothing wrote: post #8

"Experienced COBOL programmers can earn more than $100 an hour when they get called in to patch up glitches, rewrite coding manuals or make new systems work with old." Any contract-based engineer would charge that, or more, regardless of the language. Fortune 500 companies are happy to pay $300 / hour to a consulting company for engineering time.

I just assumed that $100/hr sounds like a lot to the journalist in question and therefore "more than $100/hr" was simply their top categorisation of compensation. Bear in mind that this is something like four times the average in private industry, and fifteen times the minimum wage. My general rule for stories by journalists - even experienced ones - covering any technical industry is that their use of facts is often…

My first job out of college I worked for a large-corp building a CRUD java web-app for one of their clients who implemented large-corp's backend. They billed the client 250/hr for my time (full time for 18 months). So yeah anything close to 100/hr is leaving piles on the table.

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

#346

Post by Fuzzwah »

BillWoodger wrote: post #301
Fuzzwah wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just lost a chunk of time checking out the user who supplied the answer: http://stackoverflow.com/users/1927206/bill-woodger This one was great: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/15008999/can-anybody-tell...

Thanks for looking, I hope you didn't feel it lost in a bad way :-)

It was most definitely "lost" in a great way.

A better explaination would have been "accidently invested".

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

#347

Post by stickfigure »

mseebach wrote: post #341
stickfigure wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you know anyone who does? "Without working too hard"? The chance that the OP is billing $800k/yr is vastly smaller than the chance that the OP used a bad figure of speech. The number of technology professionals who can sustain $400/hr billing for a full year is tiny . The number of technology professionals who are bad at communication is huge . Bayes' Theorem is relevant here.

I know someone who makes half that and who is utterly unremarkable (nice guy, competent - but unremarkable, he's just played his card very well. Not playing politics, but being a consultant, not FTE, in a lucrative niche, and possibly having a nose for ending up on good projects). So I can believe that a tiny number (which is what we're talking about, they can make this much exactly because there is only a tiny numbe…

There is a steep power law in bill rates. It is not twice as hard to get $400/hr as $200/hr, but orders of magnitude harder. And my observation - as someone who bills more than these numbers sometimes - is that the higher the rate, the shorter the gig.

You have to look at this probabilistically. Contract programmers taking home $800k/yr are very rare, but folks misusing "upper six figures" to mean $180k are common. I'm not a gambler, but I would happily place bets on the meaning of the OP. This is classic Bayes' Theorem.

The fact that everyone here is jumping into this thread to justify how it could be possible probably says a lot about the psychology of HNers.

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

#348

Post by dllthomas »

braveo wrote: post #181
chx wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see a lot of that, too. But I also see a different error, of treating cost of living as multiplicative.

Once you are making noticably more than you are spending, earning 2x and spending 2x means you're keeping 2x.

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

#349

Post by mseebach »

stickfigure wrote: post #347
mseebach wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone who makes half that and who is utterly unremarkable (nice guy, competent - but unremarkable, he's just played his card very well. Not playing politics, but being a consultant, not FTE, in a lucrative niche, and possibly having a nose for ending up on good projects). So I can believe that a tiny number (which is what we're talking about, they can make this much exactly because there is only a tiny numbe…

There is a steep power law in bill rates. It is not twice as hard to get $400/hr as $200/hr, but orders of magnitude harder. And my observation - as someone who bills more than these numbers sometimes - is that the higher the rate, the shorter the gig. You have to look at this probabilistically. Contract programmers taking home $800k/yr are very rare, but folks misusing "upper six figures" to mean $180k are common. I…

And the fact that everyone else is jumping in to categorically deny that its possible says a lot about the psychology of other HNers.

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

#350

Post by collyw »

gambler wrote: post #110
sanguy wrote: 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…

> Companies never think of the old guys as the ones to implement the new system - that's a job for the "enterprise experts" So true, even for more recent stuff. It's so absurd I always wanted to make a web comic about this. Companies keep ignoring advice of their own developers, and then eventually hire some "technology expert" who is going to implement the same tech their existing staff recommend years ago. Except,…

Our company does the opposite. The tech staff recommend against buying bloated enterprise software. They buy it anyway and tell us to make it work. It takes 5 times longer then building something simple and custom and is generally not fun to work with.
Post reply on HN