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Alongside this, it's all down to risk. I have limited experience with financial systems (zero directly working with banks), but I've noticed a trend where inst

Alongside this, it's all down to risk. I have limited experience with financial systems (zero directly working with banks), but I've noticed a trend where institutions are willing to take huge gambles with the integrity and security of their systems if the risk isn't that great. For them, risk was losing money, and while you'd think that having severe downtime or awful security practices would result in losing money, I didn't meet a single manager that believed this. They were happy to cut corners wherever because it got the job done faster, and under budget, and that's what they were judged on. A mate of mine worked for a large UK-based bank, and pretty much confirmed this for me when we asked about what it was like to build web services for a huge bank. From the outside, their devs were the cream of the crop. Oxbridge educated, some ex Google or Microsoft guys, and years of experience in building huge systems, but a management culture that saw them as code monkeys, and wanted work delivered that was an inch off of negligent if it meant it was done quick. The risk to the managers was their job, but from an upper management perspective all that mattered was whether it would directly affect the bottom line in an obvious (non-tech) way. Bugs, security breaches, or poor availability didn't affect this, and were worthwhile risks.

ownagefool 8y ago
I've worked with the UK banks. From experience they're typically large outsourcing firms that contract their work out to the large consultancies that are more interested in appearance and winning bun fights than delivering quality. I just left one of these orgs about a month ago where the program CTO of the bank (title inflation) wanted to hire me direct because they believe they need to have a core competency that isn't aligned with external political agendas, but largely the other senior managers just see having their own techs as a risk because they can't outsource the blame. That and directly answering questions or questioning process upsets a lot of people because they have fiedoms. Like someone asks you for all your IP address you have on cloud and what server they're associated with. They have no ability to handle the dynamic nature of these changing but their job is to write them down so you need to fall inline sorta deal...

ownagefool 8y ago

I've worked with the UK banks. From experience they're typically large outsourcing firms that contract their work out to the large consultancies that are more interested in appearance and winning bun fights than delivering quality. I just left one of these orgs about a month ago where the program CTO of the bank (title inflation) wanted to hire me direct because they believe they need to have a core competency that isn't aligned with external political agendas, but largely the other senior managers just see having their own techs as a risk because they can't outsource the blame. That and directly answering questions or questioning process upsets a lot of people because they have fiedoms. Like someone asks you for all your IP address you have on cloud and what server they're associated with. They have no ability to handle the dynamic nature of these changing but their job is to write them down so you need to fall inline sorta deal...