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Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

efinancialcareers.co.uk

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Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#101

Post by V__ »

tough wrote: post #99
V__ wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm just gonna link a few German articles. They seem to have reestablished their phone hotline by now, but I don't think they have changed their "move fast and break things" attitute. [1] https://www.anwalt.de/rechtstipps/erneute-probleme-bei-n26-b... [2] https://www.businessinsider.de/wirtschaft/einem-n26-kunden-w... [3] https://www.businessinsider.de/gruenderszene/business/n26-er...

Well, since we were just talking about how dysfunctional IT traditional banks are in germany, maybe in this context a -move fast and break things- attitude is appreciated?

I think the difference is, as a customer I don't care how dysfunctional their internal IT is, as long as the customer facing IT and support "works".

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#102

Post by FirmwareBurner »

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #83

Deutsche Bank was one of the first places I worked at, closer to its heyday, I absolutely loved it. But it has been in decline for years, and has a lot of management issues, and fiefdoms. One of my favorite stories to retell is my wife had a job there also and she had a medical issue from a car wreck. Her boss said the bank couldn’t function if she was doing physical therapy two hours a week, basically fired her, all…

Is getting disability for a year so easy? Afaik in Austria your GP is not enough for that. It needs to get approved by supervisors of the national insurance to get it approved to prevent cheaters with "friendly" getting fake disability claims.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#103

Post by mxschumacher »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #27
tragomaskhalos wrote: post #15

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!

maintaining web frontends will also be an infinite source of employment

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#104

Post by smcin »

bennyelv wrote: post #64
munchler wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same reaction, but I don’t think they mean “operating system” in the computer science sense. (E.g. Windows, Linux, etc.) I think they’re actually talking about 45 different systems they developed internally to run their business.

I think you’re correct - I worked there for about 5 years in the infrastructure engineering department. We had very rigorous processes around the underlying platform and keeping the operating systems and hardware up to date. They’re talking about the “banking” operating systems. Also note that Deutsche Bank (like many global financial institutions) is not really a single company, but more like 10 different companies…

> [DB is] more like 10 different companies all operating under one umbrella.

A standard part of an acquisition is integrating and migrating IT over a defined time period, so you don't keep accruing and perpetuating technical debt. Who were the CIOs at DB?

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#105

Post by nuancebydefault »

The branch of the company I used to work for got bought around 2013 by Lear corp. Our European headquarters shifted to a city near Munich. It took 6 months for us to get at laptop that was allowed to logon to the corporate network. After less then a year, suddenly our builds became very slow. After some investigations i sent some screendumps from task manager to one of our managers, showing that 90 percent of the cpu cycles was eaten by some security service scanning our running scripts each and every time they were invoked. It took several months before they bothered to fix the resource hog. Truly the most work-hampering IT I could imagine.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#106

Post by ano-ther »

arianvanp wrote: post #34

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…

They sent me a very phishing looking email.

From a domain like db-service.com, only text “there is a problem with your account, please call xxx”, with xxx a number that was nowhere to be found on their website.

Turned out to be a legit inquiry from some audit department.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#107

Post by Nextgrid »

readlikeasloth wrote: post #77
Nextgrid wrote: post #61

This is not surprising at all, and is not specific to Deutsche Bank or even banking in general. This is a property of large, bloated legacy companies in any field. IT is still seen as a cost center and a secondary concern rather than the enabler of their business. As a result, pay/resources and "political capital" (for the lack of a better word) are allocated accordingly. IT folks there aren't given the pay nor recog…

... but then you have two competing organizations: OLD versus NEW. This is how it plays out: NEW starts as your shiny, agile, start-up-ish org with all the young people with the latest ideas. A company nearby got rid of all their freelancers? Great, let´s hire all of them. Think big. Great meetings and people seem to really make progress happen. We´re getting rid of all the REST APIs and introduce Apache Kafka as a m…

Paying good salaries (2x market rate) to 300 people will still be much cheaper than paying market rates to thousands of people (which is what legacy orgs currently do) and then the problem goes away. Disguised self-employment is not the only way to run a successful engineering team.

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#108

Post by myth2018 »

These days I had big trouble to get a refund from an airline. I had their confirmation, via email, that the ticket would be reimbursed. But then, after some days, they alleged, absurdly, that I had flown the ticket and hence I wouldn't get the refund.

It turns out that they were mixing up that ticket with another one I bought, and I only managed to find that out after almost 1 month of trial and error talking with their staff, which pretty much resembled a chat-bot experience.

We put ourselves in a sort of quicksand. Technology's promises are tempting, but there are hidden costs. We didn't know that and now we're finding out what happens when complexity is not tamed. Lessons are being hopefully learned, but I'm afraid that what we currently see is just the beginning of the nightmare

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#109

Post by rft »

ahartmetz wrote: post #8

They acquired Postbank (where I have an account) some years ago. Postbank had a reputation for good IT. Now they are consolidating their online banking system... Of course, on the bad system of Deutsche Bank. It's a huge mess. I need to log into two different systems for credit card and bank account things. They mailed me account statements for the timeframe of one day once and for a few days another time. I never ge…

I have been in the process of being migrated from Postbank to Deutsche Bank since about a year now (no, not a typo). They occasionally send letters, emails, pop-ups etc. that at some weekend they will do a migration. There is always some online banking downtime for that and for some reason the CC migration seems to have broken something with my account. I just got a different CC and called it good, I need a reliable way to pay one-off things.

It has gotten that bad that the regulator is starting to get interested [1, German]. Luckily I was not hit by the more serious problems of missed payments. Really "funny" to see that nothing has changed since 2018, I would have thought this is a current article if it weren't for the year in the title...

[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/verbraucher/umstellung-...

P.S. for the Germans looking for a privacy.com alternative (not available in Germany): Revolut took less than 30min to setup from scratch to first CC payment, not affiliated or anything, just really happy with a financial service not stuck in the past

Re: Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018)

#110

Post by scanny »

andersa wrote: post #50
meibo wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just sounds like a normal day of interacting with basic German IT infrastructure. It's all the same.

My personal favorite is the website for reporting large international transactions, which can only be using during regular working hours on weekdays.

What exactly is that? Is it for moving savings from a non-eu country into Germany ?
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