51–60 of 176 posts
Even though this is from 2018, it was and still is completely applicable to every other investment bank out there. Investment banking organizational structures are set up such that bureaucracy encourages 'silos' where teams can deliver quicker if they don't depend on other teams, and performance related pay dominates the managers (managing directors) thinking. Having worked at Megabank, it ran at least one system on…
Yeh you notice it as a customer. I can't choose a password for my account; instead they assigned me a 6-digit PIN (Not kidding. A PIN). When I registered my account at a local branch I gave them my dutch phone number. Their website's transaction page wouldn't load due to a JavaScript parsing error over the dutch phone number format. I called customer support and they basically reacted as if water was burning. They wo…
To give a few examples:
- Running all services under a single Linux account, then requiring vendors to support password encryption in the startup scripts (everyone can access our production passwords!), then proceeding to store the production password in plain text in GIT and Confluence where everyone could read it.
- Everyone (including contractors) had access to the production environment through the testing environments, including unrestricted access to the production database (without requiring as much as a password). This was not deemed nearly as important as the passwords in the point above.
- I received an official warning for disclosing to AWS/GCloud that we did not have CI/CD setup but would be interested in getting one up and running at some point. This was considered to be "sensitive" information.
- Ansible deployments taking 12 hours (on a 6 server environment) because as it turns out, some random "security" settings slowed down SSH, incompetent people not really understanding what they we're doing did the rest.
- Ansible being blocked because someone in the security department read that it only required HTTPs access, turned out that they were reading the documentation for the WebUI.
- Requiring manual deployment of PR's to test environments and manual testing, the "evidence" + logs of doing this was to be documented in a Word document and attached to the PR.
- Automation and DevOps was banned because "The law does not allow us to do this"
- No rsync due to security reasons, great fun when you had to sync 200k small files :)
- PRs were kept around for months, so "senior" developers could estimate the risk. This included fixes that were hotfixed in production so that it was guaranteed to break again at the next 12 hour deployment (thus giving the same developers even more reasons to be even more "cautious" with all future PRs)
- Three different database schema's, three different database technologies, microservices, a React frontend, 50 outsourced developers for an internal CRUD application with 2000 entities, to be used by 10-20 users
- All .exes not on a whitelist were banned, so in order to run your application you just had to rename it to word.exe :)
- At one point external developers were hired, we requested a desktop for them that would allow them to "write" code. They got a locked down VM with notepad installed and nothing else
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, you got it. But I still think AI can at least make it easier
If you mean deep learning type systems, you need to train them on vast training sets of similar data so they can learn very general patterns, similarities and connections. Like giving them 10,000 pictures of dogs, so they can learn to recognise pictures of dogs. These banking systems are all massively complex one off systems, often with very different sets of functions or even definitions of the problem, and the impl…
Don't think this is atypical of many organisations that have grown their IT over a long period. When I did some work for Network Rail (here in the UK) there were some absolutely hair-raising diagrams of umpteen systems all with lines between them, doubtless many going back to BR days.
This makes me excited for what current microservices architecture systems will look like in fifty years!
Just FYI.
45 different operating systems?? I had no idea 45 different operating systems still existed that were functional
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, because the field that in one system is called "cash" is called "settled" in another; system A uses BCD for money, system B uses 32 bit unsigned ints reckoned in millicents, and system C uses a cash object which can define original currency, calculated currency value, guaranteed conversion preference, contract reference number, and precision. Understanding semantics is required, not just form.
Yes, you got it. But I still think AI can at least make it easier
Yeh you notice it as a customer. I can't choose a password for my account; instead they assigned me a 6-digit PIN (Not kidding. A PIN). When I registered my account at a local branch I gave them my dutch phone number. Their website's transaction page wouldn't load due to a JavaScript parsing error over the dutch phone number format. I called customer support and they basically reacted as if water was burning. They wo…
German speaking financial institutions are a special kind of IT hell. Perhaps it's a cultural love for rules in combination with compliance that evolves in a hellish bureaucracy, perhaps it's something in the local beer. We can only speculate but I've never worked in an environment as dysfunctional as the ones I've seen at big German companies. To give a few examples: - Running all services under a single Linux accou…
Both founders are German speaking. Good guys.
Although that was a small firm not a giant
Yeh you notice it as a customer. I can't choose a password for my account; instead they assigned me a 6-digit PIN (Not kidding. A PIN). When I registered my account at a local branch I gave them my dutch phone number. Their website's transaction page wouldn't load due to a JavaScript parsing error over the dutch phone number format. I called customer support and they basically reacted as if water was burning. They wo…
German speaking financial institutions are a special kind of IT hell. Perhaps it's a cultural love for rules in combination with compliance that evolves in a hellish bureaucracy, perhaps it's something in the local beer. We can only speculate but I've never worked in an environment as dysfunctional as the ones I've seen at big German companies. To give a few examples: - Running all services under a single Linux accou…
45 different operating systems?? I had no idea 45 different operating systems still existed that were functional