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

efinancialcareers.co.uk

141–150 of 176 posts

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

#141

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…

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. There is also a large cultural component. Having lived both in The Netherlands and Germany, dealing with banks or government institutions is a stark difference. The large Dutch banks (eg. ING) are efficient, you can arrange everything online and they have…

> My wife (who is German) says that one factor is German history (nazis and the stasi), which makes people distrust any kind of central (digital) administration. So all databases are uncoupled from eachother, people prefer cash, etc.

True.

> Another thing that is really stifling in Germany is the hierarchy, there is so much formalistic bullshit around company/government/... hierarchies. I experienced this a lot when working with the university administration (I was a researcher/lecturer at a German university). No one dares to make choices that can have some impact, afraid that higher-ups, the court, or whatever will punish them for making the wrong choice. So they hide behind rules and necessary decisions are not made/postponed. Almost no one stands up to their leadership, so even they have wrong ideas, there is rarely any counterbalance.

This depends a lot on the company, and is something that you, in my experience, mostly experience at big companies, government-run companies and government agencies (this includes university administrations, even though at many faculties, things are completely fine (even many professors prefer to keep away from the university administration as far as it is possible in their job)). So, if you really don't like this, attempt to look for a smaller company as your employer and/or find a job in the private sector.

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

#142
post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should name and shame the airline

Not the same poster but as airlines have come up, this German IT dysfunction appears there too. At some point Lufthansa bought Swiss. Swiss previously had a pretty competent website. It worked fine, so of course, they ported it to the Lufthansa system. What a disaster. It regressed about 15 years overnight. Incredibly buggy, primitive ugly clunky UI. Ordering tickets was easy and never failed on the old system, on th…

Definitely agree. Lufthansa’s website and app are a complete mess.

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

#143
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.

To be honest, average American IT infrastructure is the same; the larger the business, the worse it seems to be. Large tech companies like Google are outliers.

Not just business. My dad worked for the FBI in IT for about 15 years after he retired from the military. The stories he can tell….

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

#144
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, average American IT infrastructure is the same; the larger the business, the worse it seems to be. Large tech companies like Google are outliers.

Last I heard, Google staff use Concur to handle travel... there's no escaping SAP (and similarly frustrating enterprise software) in large corporations, even FAANG ones.

Is SAP good at anything aside from locking customers in? I ask this seriously because I am an outsider on this, but I have never heard a single good thing about SAP. NOT ONE.

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

#145
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there are a whole array of "neobanks" in Australia, a few of which have been bought out by large incumbents and their IT platforms subsumed into the colossus or whatever. I can hazard a guess why this hasn't happened in Germany but I don't want to make assumptions based on stereotypes, lol.

No this definitely happened in Germany too, Solaris has been around for a long time and a whole slew of German neobanks and trading apps have been built on top of it. You can open an account with most of them by downloading the app and doing a video identification process with your id. Culturally though, older Germans mistrust then and want to use the older, established banks with physical branches.

The problem is that some of these neobanks suck too, e.g. N26 is a bit notorious for bad security (at least in the past).

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

#147
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you got it. But I still think AI can at least make it easier

IT guys are paid a lot not to be lazy. Changing data types in an interface is a boring job (didnt Office Space joke at that?) but doing this via some broken AI will probably introduce even more spaghetti. Reality is that those systems should be killed one by one and finally when there is one system, it should be upgraded to something better. What is very difficult.

20mil for the new system, 80mil + 5 years of implementing for the translation layers to communicate with the legacy systems.

> Reality is that those systems should be killed one by one and finally when there is one system

It take so long to replace each of the systems, by the time you get to the "one true solution" 40 years have passed and you are back where you started.

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

#148
post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, average American IT infrastructure is the same; the larger the business, the worse it seems to be. Large tech companies like Google are outliers.

I bank with Chase and the app is really good. Are there major US banks with crappy apps?

[deleted]

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

#149

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…

there are a whole array of "neobanks" in Australia, a few of which have been bought out by large incumbents and their IT platforms subsumed into the colossus or whatever. I can hazard a guess why this hasn't happened in Germany but I don't want to make assumptions based on stereotypes, lol.

Or they were initially started by the big banks anyway. It's funny, when we moved to Australia we opened a joint NAB account. My wife still had a Citibank account. Shortly thereafter NAB bought Citibank, now we had two NAB accounts. Then we opened a Ubank account for better interest and turns out that one is also owned by NAB. Can't escape them...

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

#150

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…

> DevOps was banned because "The law does not allow us to do this"

I want that on a shirt lol

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