Deutsche Bank's “dysfunctional” IT division (2018) • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by andersa » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:20 PM UTC

scanny wrote: post #110

andersa wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

This thingy: https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams

How they describe it: https://www.bundesbank.de/en/service/reporting-systems/exter...

Any single transaction exceeding 12500€ entering (or leaving) Germany has to be manually reported here. So for example if you're living in Germany and working remotely as a contractor for a US based company you'll probably have to report your income every month.

There are many exceptions that don't need manual reporting though, like if you're buying physical goods from overseas. I guess those are already automatically tracked through other ways.

For fun, I just tried to login at ~9:30 PM local time on a Sunday, and it said:

"Access Denied"

"You cannot access the resource you have requested at this time."

"The resource you have requested is protected by a policy restricting access to specific time periods. Your request has occured outside of those permitted time periods."

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

#122

Post by rcbdev » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:27 PM UTC

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #102

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.

Yeah, in AT you'll get referred to an Amtsarzt from the ÖGK before anything - Also pretty sure the employer is off the hook and you get the money straight from either the ÖGK (federal health insurance) or the AMS (unemployment office) for any sick / disability leave longer than 6 weeks.

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

#123

Post by jamil7 » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:29 PM UTC

lIIllIIllIIllII wrote: post #81

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…

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.

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

#124

Post by rcbdev » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:29 PM UTC

steveBK123 wrote: post #51

DrBazza wrote: post #16

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…

DB was running LotusNotes instead of Outlook well into the 2010s.

RBI did so until 2-3 years ago.

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

#125

Post by cscurmudgeon » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

lobsterthief wrote: post #84

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.

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.

Have you used Bank of America’s app? It is quite good.

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

#126

Post by MrDresden » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:33 PM UTC

Having experienced working in a legacy financial institution for half a decade, the main takeaway for me was to never work for a legacy financial institution again.

They are horrible places if you take your craft seriously.

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

#127

Post by pimeys » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

andersa wrote: post #121

scanny wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This thingy: https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams How they describe it: https://www.bundesbank.de/en/service/reporting-systems/exter... Any single transaction exceeding 12500€ entering (or leaving) Germany has to be manually reported here. So for example if you're living in Germany and working remotely as a contractor for a US based company you'll probably have to report your income every month. There are many exceptio…

For some of us, using a middle company such as Deel might be a good idea. They take some money for that, but you get a real German contract and don't have to care dealing with the local bureaucracy.

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

#128

Post by nvm0n1 » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:41 PM UTC

nexus7556 wrote: post #114

myth2018 wrote: post #108

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 th…

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 the new one there would often be just random failures halfway through the process and you'd get stuck unable to proceed.

Did NOT leave me with a good impression of German IT.

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

#129

Post by nvm0n1 » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:44 PM UTC

locallost wrote: post #93

People build, sorry architect, incredibly complex systems and then try to stop them from being complex. I for one have learned to stop worrying and love the complexity. Maybe a naive question: why is it important that a company with thousands of people in the IT department all run on the same system? I mean I understand the many theoretical benefits of it, but in reality software is there to do something, and if you…

It does lead to real customer facing problems. A jungle of different systems won't have transactionality between them at all, it's all a mess of rec scripts, so customers will see a lot of weirdness like the bank being unable to decide what their balance actually is.

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

#130

Post by rvba » Sun, Jul 23, 2023, 7:48 PM UTC

raverbashing wrote: post #35

dsr_ wrote: post #22

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

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.