131–140 of 321 posts
I used to work for BofA as a quant in their Charlotte HQ. Their cloud decision is the least surprising. You really have to see it from their pov. My boss used to say - "Charlotte is a 2-horse town. You either work for Bank of America, or you walk across the street to Wells Fargo"! Compared to these 2, the other companies are much smaller along most axes (market cap,employee count, or just sheer heft). There's an upto…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure why you find this surprising, a bank has a much more complicated problem space than Facebook. - They have a reasonably similar number of users (a fraction, but a large one). - Mistakes cost a lot, so they have to be a lot more careful. It's a lot easier to make money hacking a bank than hacking facebook. - They have to comply with all sorts of regulations. - They probably don't trust their own employees…
How do you spend that much on software and have such an abysmal usability and security story? I don't think there is anything technically difficult about the consumer software they offer, namely https://www.bankofamerica.com/ .
As for usability, probably a degree of incompetence, mixed with design-by-committee and legacy. Edit: It's worth pointing out that banks usually don't gain or lose customers based on their UX, so it's not something that the business optimizes much.
I don't think there is anything technically difficult about almost any of the consumer software facebook offers, except scale. The same applies here but exchange "scale" for "scale, reliability, security, and regulatory compliance".
I used to work for BofA as a quant in their Charlotte HQ. Their cloud decision is the least surprising. You really have to see it from their pov. My boss used to say - "Charlotte is a 2-horse town. You either work for Bank of America, or you walk across the street to Wells Fargo"! Compared to these 2, the other companies are much smaller along most axes (market cap,employee count, or just sheer heft). There's an upto…
Ok so now you said that won’t it be pretty trivial to identify you again? How many “4 digit HN” users have they really tracked down before .. 1?
> The bank, which has a $10 billion annual tech budget Am I the only one completely befuddled by this number? What the fuck are they doing with these money and 200k servers? These are facebook numbers. For a bank. What?
I could turn this around and ask, why would Facebook ever need infrastructure on par with BofA? I'm not an expert on infrastructure, but given their size, revenue, market position, number of customers etc, there's nothing baffling about these numbers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but you don’t need data center engineers, real estate specialists. Power specialists. Etc.
You can rent dedicated server or onprem ? people always go from cloud to building your own cpu in these threads, never in the middle
Colocation is probably ideal for anyone using custom hardware: like GPUs or FPGAs. If you're using "normal" CPUs, just buy dedicated instances instead.
Can anyone who has worked on Bank of America comment on if any of the things they build actually worked?
Last year they had $28 billion in net income. With that kind of money you can hire the best in the world to build literally whatever you want. They could go build a space shuttle if they felt like it - probably without much trouble.
In the unlikely situation that it didn't work, they'd pay someone else to fix it or re-do it. The least likely (albeit not unprecedented) end situation is that 'none of the things actually work'.
> The bank, which has a $10 billion annual tech budget Am I the only one completely befuddled by this number? What the fuck are they doing with these money and 200k servers? These are facebook numbers. For a bank. What?
13 exchanges x 3000+ securities x 2 quotes for each security x 23,400 seconds in the trading day (with the very very very generous assumption that quotes only change once per second)
That’s the inbound data alone, now consider all the algorithms they have to run on it, the models, the strategies, etc.
And then to each of their several hundred institutional clients, they have to give a unique and dynamic price.
Again, this is only the sell-side investment bank, not even looking at their absolutely gargantuan consumer bank business
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure why you find this surprising, a bank has a much more complicated problem space than Facebook. - They have a reasonably similar number of users (a fraction, but a large one). - Mistakes cost a lot, so they have to be a lot more careful. It's a lot easier to make money hacking a bank than hacking facebook. - They have to comply with all sorts of regulations. - They probably don't trust their own employees…
How do you spend that much on software and have such an abysmal usability and security story? I don't think there is anything technically difficult about the consumer software they offer, namely https://www.bankofamerica.com/ .
I've talked with info sec employees working in their Charlotte office, and have not been given an indication that they are slacking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had experience in Quartz (BofA cloud), and deploying is 100 times easier than AWS, everything is automated. Imagine building a cloud service where you trust all your clients, and all must share the same information if they have the correct auth, what I trying to say is that their use-case actually made it simpler, that's where the savings in software had came from.
Doesn't this mean one compromised account = all data compromised?
> The bank, which has a $10 billion annual tech budget Am I the only one completely befuddled by this number? What the fuck are they doing with these money and 200k servers? These are facebook numbers. For a bank. What?
Gluing together layer upon layer of legacy systems that are so old & opaque they are essentially black boxes nobody dares remove or replace.
oh and that small regional bank that was acquired 4 years ago? Yep...they've got an entirely separate stack of legacy systems. And that other jurisdiction with different data laws? Everything is different there too.
It's insane looking under the hood of these things. How banks manage to not lose half the money daily is a complete mystery to me.