7 ms·

I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their

I once worked at Chase Manhattan Bank and one of their internal networking teams had a web site for wiring requests. They didn’t want to work too hard so their UI was designed to make data entry as slow as possible, mostly by using huge multi-level drop down lists where the slightest twitch would make them collapse and you would have to start over navigating through them, repeat a dozen times for every run of cable, several runs required to make an end to end connection. It wasn’t custom programming, just taking full advantage of the browsers of the era’s inability to render the UI component for that. So I was building out a data center and needed Something like forty thousand cables run which translated into around one hundred and fifty thousand segments. I tried to give this info via a spreadsheet but they were steadfast that the web interface was the only way they could receive it. So I wrote a script to just post the data directly without going through the UI, ran it, and went home. Turns out all their web form did was e-mail the values to a half dozen people. The e-mail system was Lotus Notes (dates this) so each person got their own copy and there was a lot of overhead. The sudden influx of a million e-mail messages brought down Chase’s email system for two thirds of the country. They spent days clearing the mail queue and recovering - they had to fly in IBM techs with suitcases full of disk drives to add the storage needed. Everyone who received the wiring requests spent days deleting them with new ones arriving as quickly as they deleted the old ones. Then when things were finally normal again they asked me to resend them my spreadsheet.

kirkil1 7y ago
That's why everything should be left at "the customer is always right".
osullivj 7y ago
Wonderful story - thanks! I was at Chase Manhattan in London from 1997-2000, and remember the Lotus Notes system well. I had Win NT and Solaris desktop systems. There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I guess the lesson is that mgmt diktat in corp envs repeatedly inflicts crappy solutions on captive users. Plus ca change!
- marapuru 7y ago
  No! It cannot be that Agresso was already around at that time. I still have to work with that horrific system, even though it is webbased now. It's still a horrible experience.
  - klenwell 7y ago
    > There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I love the idea that there was a terrible timesheet system called Agresso. And that it's still around today! Some things do change with time. If this system was created today, I imagine it would be named something like quiesso or daisy.
    - wtvanhest 7y ago
      Ted - Timesheet entry database
    - gdhbcc 7y ago
      Actually I used to work for the company that makes it. It changed names some years ago and is now called "Unit4 Business World" Small world
  - yesbabyyes 7y ago
    Agresso was my first job. I got to migrate customers off of Ingres, Sybase, Informix to either Oracle or SQL Server 6.5. After some time, I got the opportunity to build their Crystal Reports integration. This was 1997-1998.
    - marapuru 7y ago
      Do you happen to know whether the back-end systems would still be the systems that you used to work on? I have a feeling it never really changed...
      - yesbabyyes 7y ago
xRahul 7y ago
That has got to be the worst system to not have any type of stop gate in the API.
- mikepurvis 7y ago
  I mean yes... but recall that the entire point of the system was that it would make data entry slow. I think that whoever set it up probably felt that the clunky form was enough of a rate limiter and nothing further was needed on the back end.
  - htfu 7y ago
    Just to make sure I get this right - to make sure their team wouldn't get overwhelmed with work (how exactly? It's not like the demand for cable wiring would be too different at the end of a year in a frictionless system) they not only decided to create busywork for other departments, but this design also blew up impacting the entire company? Do you know if there were any consequences for whoever created this monstrosity?
    - zxcvbn4038 7y ago
      No, this is every day in Chase. They are basically the McDonalds of the financial services industry - everybody works there at least once, most people move on to better things, what you have left are the ones who know they will never succeed anywhere else. We convinced one manager at Chase that the reason her application crashed so much was because there wasn't enough gigawatts to power the flex capacitors. The guy who they hired for IT security in my department was a bricklayer who ran around with a dog-eared copy of Computer Security For Dummies trying to find out where we were hiding the NFS so he could turn it off (we kept telling him we didn't use NFS and he didn't believe us, so the hunt continued). Probably the worst story was this really portly fellow who couldn't fit into the bathroom stalls, and was too lazy to walk across the floor to the bathroom that had a handicap stall he could fit in, so he would just sort of stand in front of the stall door and cut loose, and every night some poor cleaning lady had to deal with that and it didn't raise any eyebrows at all. Sounds like an NBC sitcom, but it was real, places like this really do exist, stuff like this really does happen.
AlphaWeaver 7y ago
This would be a good story for r/MaliciousCompliance!
slothtrop 7y ago
Damn funny
jedieaston 7y ago
>(dates this) Unfortunately, it doesn't. https://www.hcltechsw.com/wps/portal/products/products-home/!ut/p/z1/04_Sj9CPykssy0xPLMnMz0vMAfIjo8zi_QO8nQ0MnQ0CLMzCzA0CHf08Q8IsnQwNzM31w9EUOAa5ABV4ulsG-7obGZiY6kcRo98AB3A0IE4_HgVR-I0P149CswLVB94mBBSAvEjIkoLc0NAIg0xPAJYe1HQ!/?1dmy&urile=wcm%3apath%3a/wps/wcm/connect/hcl+software+content/products/notes/home https://www.hcltechsw.com/wps/portal/products/products-home/...
- jacobush 7y ago
  I thought IBM bought it and killed it
- auxym 7y ago
  In 2015 I was working at a place (40k-employee multinational) that still used Notes and windows xp.
riazrizvi 7y ago
Heroic! Lotus Notes was such a pile of junk. Every time I used it for the simplest task, the combative UI would cause my blood pressure to spike up. I would calm myself down by imagining the blissful life of the ex JPMorganChase IT boss who greenlighted the purchase, living off his giant kickback on some Caribbean island.
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  Press F5 to refresh, like in every software. Except it closes Lotus Notes.
- stevesimmons 7y ago
  My favourite Lotus Notes fail was circa 2008, when the menu item for "Mark message as read" was next to "Mark all as read", which from memory was not undo-able. It took just one slip of the finger to...
choiway 7y ago
Great story...thanks for sharing!
AndrewStephens 7y ago
Whole books could be written on the terribleness of Lotus Notes. For those too young to remember the 90s, LN really was as bad as everyone says, turning what should be simple (email, maybe a few custom forms) into swampy morasses of pain. When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  Notes was a double-edged sword. It could be as terrible as you've heard, but on the other had it also let non-programmers build surprisingly useful applications all by themselves. (Which is part of why it stuck around for so long -- being useful, those apps tended to get wedged into critical parts of the business process, which meant you couldn't just pull them out and throw them away.)
  - moonlighter 7y ago
    Notes was conceived in 1984 and at the time was an amazing platform which featured a secure client/server architecture, RSA encryption, data replication and offline support. Both the Notes client and the server (later renamed to Domino) needed to run on multiple platforms (Win 3.x, OS/2, Netware, NT, Alpha, RISC systems etc), and while the code was native C code on each platform, all UI of the client was implemented using an abstraction layer called NEM ("Notes Environment Manager"). Likewise, all database storage was abstracted in NSF ("Note Storage Facility"; and Notes databases to this day still have the .nsf extension). Long story short, the NEM layer was a trade-off between portability and consistency across platforms. And, Notes used F9 to refresh data, way before the Windows standard of F5 was a standard... https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistory/ls-NDHistory-pdf.pdf https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistor...
    - AHThomas 7y ago
      What he said
- pmarreck 7y ago
  > When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief Not so fast. As a web developer we still had to contend with the horror of IE5/6/7 for a few more years, and initially WITHOUT anything resembling the utility of something like JQuery!
shanemhansen 7y ago
I had to do something similar once with FRRs (firewall rule requests) as a F50. There is one official way of requesting a FRR. What that way is a matter of some debate. Theoretically you file a JIRA ticket with fqdn, ip/mask, port, protocol info. Anyways cutting a long rant short I eventually had to write a script to generate 100 SRC X 10 DST X 2 ports rules as csv pulled into a spreadsheet. After a couple days it was assigned to an engineer for implementation and of course the first thing he did was unflatten it.
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
> Then when things were finally normal again they asked me to resend them my spreadsheet. Amazing story, and I'm sure they've learned their lesson :)

kirkil1 7y ago

That's why everything should be left at "the customer is always right".

osullivj 7y ago

Wonderful story - thanks! I was at Chase Manhattan in London from 1997-2000, and remember the Lotus Notes system well. I had Win NT and Solaris desktop systems. There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I guess the lesson is that mgmt diktat in corp envs repeatedly inflicts crappy solutions on captive users. Plus ca change!

marapuru 7y ago
No! It cannot be that Agresso was already around at that time. I still have to work with that horrific system, even though it is webbased now. It's still a horrible experience.
- klenwell 7y ago
  > There was an appalling timesheet system called Agresso, the most counterintuitive Windows GUI I ever encountered. I love the idea that there was a terrible timesheet system called Agresso. And that it's still around today! Some things do change with time. If this system was created today, I imagine it would be named something like quiesso or daisy.
  - wtvanhest 7y ago
    Ted - Timesheet entry database
  - gdhbcc 7y ago
    Actually I used to work for the company that makes it. It changed names some years ago and is now called "Unit4 Business World" Small world
- yesbabyyes 7y ago
  Agresso was my first job. I got to migrate customers off of Ingres, Sybase, Informix to either Oracle or SQL Server 6.5. After some time, I got the opportunity to build their Crystal Reports integration. This was 1997-1998.
  - marapuru 7y ago
    Do you happen to know whether the back-end systems would still be the systems that you used to work on? I have a feeling it never really changed...
    - yesbabyyes 7y ago

xRahul 7y ago

That has got to be the worst system to not have any type of stop gate in the API.

mikepurvis 7y ago
I mean yes... but recall that the entire point of the system was that it would make data entry slow. I think that whoever set it up probably felt that the clunky form was enough of a rate limiter and nothing further was needed on the back end.
- htfu 7y ago
  Just to make sure I get this right - to make sure their team wouldn't get overwhelmed with work (how exactly? It's not like the demand for cable wiring would be too different at the end of a year in a frictionless system) they not only decided to create busywork for other departments, but this design also blew up impacting the entire company? Do you know if there were any consequences for whoever created this monstrosity?
  - zxcvbn4038 7y ago
    No, this is every day in Chase. They are basically the McDonalds of the financial services industry - everybody works there at least once, most people move on to better things, what you have left are the ones who know they will never succeed anywhere else. We convinced one manager at Chase that the reason her application crashed so much was because there wasn't enough gigawatts to power the flex capacitors. The guy who they hired for IT security in my department was a bricklayer who ran around with a dog-eared copy of Computer Security For Dummies trying to find out where we were hiding the NFS so he could turn it off (we kept telling him we didn't use NFS and he didn't believe us, so the hunt continued). Probably the worst story was this really portly fellow who couldn't fit into the bathroom stalls, and was too lazy to walk across the floor to the bathroom that had a handicap stall he could fit in, so he would just sort of stand in front of the stall door and cut loose, and every night some poor cleaning lady had to deal with that and it didn't raise any eyebrows at all. Sounds like an NBC sitcom, but it was real, places like this really do exist, stuff like this really does happen.

AlphaWeaver 7y ago

This would be a good story for r/MaliciousCompliance!

slothtrop 7y ago

Damn funny

jedieaston 7y ago

>(dates this) Unfortunately, it doesn't. https://www.hcltechsw.com/wps/portal/products/products-home/!ut/p/z1/04_Sj9CPykssy0xPLMnMz0vMAfIjo8zi_QO8nQ0MnQ0CLMzCzA0CHf08Q8IsnQwNzM31w9EUOAa5ABV4ulsG-7obGZiY6kcRo98AB3A0IE4_HgVR-I0P149CswLVB94mBBSAvEjIkoLc0NAIg0xPAJYe1HQ!/?1dmy&urile=wcm%3apath%3a/wps/wcm/connect/hcl+software+content/products/notes/home https://www.hcltechsw.com/wps/portal/products/products-home/...

jacobush 7y ago
I thought IBM bought it and killed it
auxym 7y ago
In 2015 I was working at a place (40k-employee multinational) that still used Notes and windows xp.

riazrizvi 7y ago

Heroic! Lotus Notes was such a pile of junk. Every time I used it for the simplest task, the combative UI would cause my blood pressure to spike up. I would calm myself down by imagining the blissful life of the ex JPMorganChase IT boss who greenlighted the purchase, living off his giant kickback on some Caribbean island.

alexis_fr 7y ago
Press F5 to refresh, like in every software. Except it closes Lotus Notes.
stevesimmons 7y ago
My favourite Lotus Notes fail was circa 2008, when the menu item for "Mark message as read" was next to "Mark all as read", which from memory was not undo-able. It took just one slip of the finger to...

choiway 7y ago

Great story...thanks for sharing!

AndrewStephens 7y ago

Whole books could be written on the terribleness of Lotus Notes. For those too young to remember the 90s, LN really was as bad as everyone says, turning what should be simple (email, maybe a few custom forms) into swampy morasses of pain. When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief.

smacktoward 7y ago
Notes was a double-edged sword. It could be as terrible as you've heard, but on the other had it also let non-programmers build surprisingly useful applications all by themselves. (Which is part of why it stuck around for so long -- being useful, those apps tended to get wedged into critical parts of the business process, which meant you couldn't just pull them out and throw them away.)
- moonlighter 7y ago
  Notes was conceived in 1984 and at the time was an amazing platform which featured a secure client/server architecture, RSA encryption, data replication and offline support. Both the Notes client and the server (later renamed to Domino) needed to run on multiple platforms (Win 3.x, OS/2, Netware, NT, Alpha, RISC systems etc), and while the code was native C code on each platform, all UI of the client was implemented using an abstraction layer called NEM ("Notes Environment Manager"). Likewise, all database storage was abstracted in NSF ("Note Storage Facility"; and Notes databases to this day still have the .nsf extension). Long story short, the NEM layer was a trade-off between portability and consistency across platforms. And, Notes used F9 to refresh data, way before the Windows standard of F5 was a standard... https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistory/ls-NDHistory-pdf.pdf https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/lotus/library/ls-NDHistor...
  - AHThomas 7y ago
    What he said
pmarreck 7y ago
> When intranet webapps came along everyone breathed a huge sigh of relief Not so fast. As a web developer we still had to contend with the horror of IE5/6/7 for a few more years, and initially WITHOUT anything resembling the utility of something like JQuery!

shanemhansen 7y ago

I had to do something similar once with FRRs (firewall rule requests) as a F50. There is one official way of requesting a FRR. What that way is a matter of some debate. Theoretically you file a JIRA ticket with fqdn, ip/mask, port, protocol info. Anyways cutting a long rant short I eventually had to write a script to generate 100 SRC X 10 DST X 2 ports rules as csv pulled into a spreadsheet. After a couple days it was assigned to an engineer for implementation and of course the first thing he did was unflatten it.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

> Then when things were finally normal again they asked me to resend them my spreadsheet. Amazing story, and I'm sure they've learned their lesson :)