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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)

#161

Post by jamil7 »

h4ckerle wrote: post #160
jamil7 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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). In the case of N26, the exploits that CCC found were disclosed and fixed before the presentation, this was also a while ago now, 2016-17 maybe? I'm not sure what the situation is now, though.

N26 is also infamous for being the go-to-bank for cybercriminals. That may be because they are easier to fool than your local bank branch where most financial stuff happens in Germany, but my impression is, that they don't care...

Interesting, makes sense. Deutsche Bank has a pretty bad reputation for money laundering, as does Germany in general and especially Berlin.

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

#162

Post by DanielHB »

Nextgrid wrote: post #107
readlikeasloth wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... 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.

> paying market rates to thousands of people (which is what legacy orgs currently do)

* paying contractor rates to thousands of people

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

#163

Post by lpfnrobin »

Havoc wrote: post #28

I've yet to hear (in person) a single positive story about Deutsche. No doubt there are positives out there, but always found it striking how one-sided the chatter is in finance circles.

As a former DBLabs employee, laughing at this was a positive.

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

#165

Post by bennyelv »

smcin wrote: post #104
bennyelv wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Agreed - but only where it makes commercial sense to, and each of the layers of the company's IT platform may end up with different plans for integration and end goals for it.

You probably don't want 10 different desktop hardware providers and IT support systems, but it might be a bad idea to try and unify the trading systems for slightly different looking business units unless there's some competitive advantage to be had by doing it.

There wasn't a CIO at Deutsche when I was there, it all fell under the remit of the COO who was this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann-Josef_Lamberti

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

#166

Post by lpfnrobin »

rgavuliak wrote: post #164

People say that this is just like any big IT corporation. It's not IT in Germany does a lot of things manually because it's been done like that historically and they can't fire those people due to unions.

I gave a used copy of a book so someone from HR there once. It was about industrialization. I hope they had time to read through it, if it even helped. It was a story of us and not to be overly afraid of it; takes time and adjustments was the thought when given. Always make it better.

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

#167

Post by lpfnrobin »

smcin wrote: post #104
bennyelv wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Pascal Boillat - as CIO (Information Officer - not Investment officer ;) )

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

#168

Post by xahhkakappy11 »

lopatin wrote: post #92
lobsterthief wrote: post #84

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?

The US is not anywhere near as bad as Deutsche that's for sure. I think whether or not the app is crappy depends on your perspective in the US. I've never seen one try to give me a pin instead of a password, and like you said, some of them are pretty good like Chase.

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

#169

Post by [deleted] »

dmvdoug wrote: post #144
drewda wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by rk1079 »

LaurensBER wrote: post #52
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…

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…

I have some of these too.

- technologies had to be evaluated to be allowed on the network. This process took years. Git (as a replacement for subversion) had been in evaluation for over 14 years at the time.

- network authentication mechanisms made building an http/s Webservice internally impossible without the security teams approval which takes months.

- ironically the 'rules' around 'security' were regularly broken and not audited when it was convenient for someone with the clout to make something happen.

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