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My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and

My recently favorite question to ask people: why do you need a development team at a company whose product has already been developed, is feature-complete, and everyone's fine with it? A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example.

topkai22 5y ago
“A bank doesn’t need a full time development team for example” Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. I might be misunderstanding your point, but a bank doing digital banking needs a huge IT staff, including software devs. Even if no new products are being developed (unlikely), they support changes to common industry systems, redevelop systems for retiring hardware/operating systems, support integrations with changing business partners, changes to regulatory requirements, etc. I’m sure some devs pulled late nights trying to support the PPP program for example.
- grishka 5y ago
  > Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. Right now, with all the churn that only serves to update various financial numbers in databases and is generally useless for the society at large. As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. It already works for me as it is right now. A rather popular bank in Russia is now trying its damnest to become a super-app. It's developing a voice assistant. Its mobile app has stories. A bank. Is developing a voice assistant and becoming an operating system. Where did we make the wrong turn? And maybe, just maybe, regulatory change doesn't need to happen in the first place?
  - blibble 5y ago
    > As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. I personally like features such as savings accounts (which require a treasury department), a brokerage, lending, mortgages, wire transfers, detection of fraud, and so-on a bank does far more than provide a safe place for your cash to sit
    - jagged-chisel 5y ago
      I believe the point is that all those services have existed for Quite Some Time, don’t need consumer-facing changes, and any additional consumer-facing software changes are bunk.
      - grishka 5y ago
        Yes. And they somehow existed even before computers were invented. Computers sure did help streamline the processes tho.
        jagged-chisel 5y ago
        Sure did. Did. As in already done. What else, aside from security fixes, needs to change software-wise? Edit: I realize this can be read with a pile of snark that I didn’t intend. Apologies.
        TuringNYC 5y ago
        Modern payment support; Keeping up with regulatory changes; Keeping up with regulatory report of the year; Updating risk systems to account for modern mortgage risks; Expanding integrations to other countries; Keeping up with OS changes for existing apps; Responding on court data requests
        actually_a_dog 5y ago
        Computers allowed the development of ACH, debit cards, and ATMs. They gave us the ability to bank by phone, and by web. But, I think your general point, sans snark, is correct in that I can’t think of any significant, novel banking service that’s been introduced since about the 1970s. (I count ACH as novel, because it enables you to do things you couldn’t do before. Banking at home in your pajamas isn’t any different than waiting until Monday morning and physically going to the bank.)
      - blibble 5y ago
        the point was: > A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example. all of the areas I mentioned are subject to constant change, mostly from regulators implementing the Payment Services Directive, Solvency II or MiFID II all require developers the developers working on the app/website that you interact with are always going to be a small fraction of the developers that work for a bank and if you think this isn't the case (in a very cut-throat industry), I would suggest you start a bank and put the rest of them out of business with your vastly reduced costs
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    > Where did we make the wrong turn? We force companies to grow, I guess. All of the bullcrap the banks are doing mostly serves one purpose: get you to buy more of their products at terms that are bad for you. All the complaints I have against the UX of the banking websites and apps I use can be attributed to this: they do a shitty job on purpose, because the site/app is primarily a vector to upsell you loans, credit cards and insurance. (All complaints except one: the bank I used for my business accounts when contracting decided to make an SPA with one of the trendy JavaScript frameworks. Well, they botched it. This failure doesn't even help them sell anything, it's just the usual webdev incompetence.)
    - antihero 5y ago
      Line. Must. Go. Up.
    - lupire 5y ago
      Why would a shitty app promote more sales? The only reason I use MegaBank and its obnoxious but functional app is that Local Credit Union can't afford to build a decently functional app.
      - TeMPOraL 5y ago
        > Why would a shitty app promote more sales? Because part of it being shitty is obnoxiously advertising you financial products, making it hard to perform the tasks you want with your money without being upsold something, and making it near-impossible to use your account without going through the app/webapp (or a visit to the bank, or the ATM - which is also pushing ads).
randomdata 5y ago
In my experience, bank software (customer facing) could use a development team.
- wott 5y ago
  Mine seems to use a different one each year :-/
- SilverRed 5y ago
  I recently switched to a new bank which is basically an offshoot of an existing one where they handle all of the development, and the parent company manages the legal/banking part. It's a really awesome setup really because they are constantly adding new and fun features, experimenting with what works best. Stuff like automatically rounding up every transaction and sending the remainder to your savings. The ability to instantly create and delete savings "accounts" without having to register a real account number on the phone. My favorite feature is what they call 2up where you send an invite to another member of the bank and you instantly get a shared account where you can both add and withdraw money. It also adds a second card to your phone wallet which draws from the shared account. So much less work and risk than traditional shared accounts.
maficious 5y ago
Exactly, but banks aren't a good example. Some people here mention feature plateaus and completeness of the app. Obvious question is, what should the employer then do? The software is complete, from now on there's only maintenance, which is relatively less work compared to building from scratch, so as a consequence I guess developers should be paid less then? Or like you said, fired? Obviously the manpower could be just moved to the next project, but what if we look at the worst case scenario? What comes next? Are there at all such mechanisms that could allow for, say, a team of engineers that maintains a bunch of projects in different companies. If such a team would take a maintenance of a few complete programs, the count of them would make up the difference in pay, e.g. a few mainted apps for a lower pay equal pay for building one app from scratch.
- grishka 5y ago
  What does a construction worker do when they complete a building?
  - DougWebb 5y ago
    Obviously they get started on redesigning the foundation.
    - grishka 5y ago
      And then start rebuilding it while people live already live or work inside.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    A great many people are involved in maintaining existing buildings. This isn’t just a gotcha but reveals fundamentally faulty thinking underlying your analogy.
    - actually_a_dog 5y ago
      I don’t think it does. Buildings aren’t maintained by construction crews. They’re maintained by facilities teams, and maintenance contractors, the latter of which are hired on an as-needed basis rather than on permanent retainer.
dcminter 5y ago
Regulatory change, 3rd party API changes, new financial products (often arising out of the regulatory changes) all require ongoing development. Plus I don't know about you, but my bank's website and app are a hot mess. In theory I suppose they could be feature complete, but in reality, nope. So, just visiting Earth, or are you here to stay? :) I've worked for banks and while there's certainly plenty of unwarranted churn the notion that they're done and the dev team can go home is ... hilarious. Edit: addressing your comment in an adjacent thread, a box to keep your money in (or, canonically, a sock under the mattress) does not need to offer/support: - Debit cards - Credit bureaus. Yes, even if it's just a deposit account and no, this isn't optional. - Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations - Anti Money Laundering (AML) checks That's before you get into other account types, offering credit, currency conversions and the zillion other things that sock doesn't have to do.
SilverRed 5y ago
Spotify has a lot to work on. Integrations with new devices is a big one. They recently added support for streaming songs directly on the Apple Watch but are still yet to support saving them locally to play offline if you don't have your phone. New required features like this are constantly popping up. As well as other infinitely big tasks like optimizing all of their server side software to support and ever increasing user base. They could also work forever on making suggestions better. As well as new features like lossless audio coming up soon. Supporting new iOS and android versions/features. There is never a point where a piece of software is simply done because the OS changes how things work constantly. The companies that just contract out for a tiny bit of work every few months end up with garbage software because no one really knows or understands the code so they just tack on bad patches until the system eventually crumbles. And every bank I have used does have a full time development team. The one I currently use sends out monthly emails for the new features they have released and has a road map showing what they are planning on adding.
- irskep 5y ago
  To be fair to Spotify, Apple Watch development is pure hell, and I wouldn't expect them to ever implement that feature. On the other hand, the LG TV app for Spotify doesn't support gapless playback, which completely blows my mind.
  - SilverRed 5y ago
    >I wouldn't expect them to ever implement that feature. Most users will though. Apple music implements that feature and charges the same amount for subscriptions. So if spotify wants to stay competitive they need a team of developers to keep up with whatever Apple and Google are doing. It's not good enough to just say "oh well the app is feature complete so we won't be working on anything new" Nothing is ever feature complete when you have competition.
  - eisa01 5y ago
    I have finally got the option to test “Download to Apple Watch”, so only took Spotify 2-3 years after the feature was made available? Not sure if it’s widely available yet Had to buy the 4G version last time though, as Apples podcast and Music app is horrible at downloading, and Overcast was not much better.
emodendroket 5y ago
Even if we just accepted your premise and ignored the fact that people are put off by old-looking apps, eventually something like iOS updates is going to break one of the apps. And in reality they add features regularly too.
equality_1138 5y ago
"A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example." How else will all those SVP's at your bank justify their fat salaries? They NEED more minions. Same goes for VC ecosystem. Funny how everyone has a scapegoat or a solution to this supposed software quality problem, not quite understanding the underlying financial incentives. Easy money -> rotten management -> crappy design.
Solstafir 5y ago
In my experience, I have rarely seen anything which is feature complete. Either UI needs revamp because it's stale and not in current trends (like fashion industry) or the the backend starts to crumble with the weight of new ad-hoc features, increased number of users etc. With agile, practically, many times development is just in time with little regard to long term requirements or the evolution of software so it's all layers of layers of things that work. There's rarely a time for fundamental restructuring of the codebase to meet the new requirement correctly. Once the cracks begin to show, we start thinking of software rewrite. For a construction of buildings, the redevelopment is about once 40 years, for software, it's about 5-7 years.
- JadeNB 5y ago
  > I have rarely seen anything which is feature complete. Either UI needs revamp because it's stale and not in current trends (like fashion industry) Stale UI is very different from not being feature complete. vim and emacs are very stale UIs, but also as close to feature complete as I need, and thank God no-one feels the need to update them for modern UI preferences (or, rather, that those who do feel that need can do it without taking away my experience of classic vim).

topkai22 5y ago

“A bank doesn’t need a full time development team for example” Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. I might be misunderstanding your point, but a bank doing digital banking needs a huge IT staff, including software devs. Even if no new products are being developed (unlikely), they support changes to common industry systems, redevelop systems for retiring hardware/operating systems, support integrations with changing business partners, changes to regulatory requirements, etc. I’m sure some devs pulled late nights trying to support the PPP program for example.

grishka 5y ago
> Banks and finance are like the number one employer of software developers outside of pure tech companies. Right now, with all the churn that only serves to update various financial numbers in databases and is generally useless for the society at large. As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. It already works for me as it is right now. A rather popular bank in Russia is now trying its damnest to become a super-app. It's developing a voice assistant. Its mobile app has stories. A bank. Is developing a voice assistant and becoming an operating system. Where did we make the wrong turn? And maybe, just maybe, regulatory change doesn't need to happen in the first place?
- blibble 5y ago
  > As an end user, I view a bank as a box to keep my money so I don't have to deal with cash. That's really it. I personally like features such as savings accounts (which require a treasury department), a brokerage, lending, mortgages, wire transfers, detection of fraud, and so-on a bank does far more than provide a safe place for your cash to sit
  - jagged-chisel 5y ago
    I believe the point is that all those services have existed for Quite Some Time, don’t need consumer-facing changes, and any additional consumer-facing software changes are bunk.
    - grishka 5y ago
      Yes. And they somehow existed even before computers were invented. Computers sure did help streamline the processes tho.
      - jagged-chisel 5y ago
        Sure did. Did. As in already done. What else, aside from security fixes, needs to change software-wise? Edit: I realize this can be read with a pile of snark that I didn’t intend. Apologies.
        TuringNYC 5y ago
        Modern payment support; Keeping up with regulatory changes; Keeping up with regulatory report of the year; Updating risk systems to account for modern mortgage risks; Expanding integrations to other countries; Keeping up with OS changes for existing apps; Responding on court data requests
      - actually_a_dog 5y ago
        Computers allowed the development of ACH, debit cards, and ATMs. They gave us the ability to bank by phone, and by web. But, I think your general point, sans snark, is correct in that I can’t think of any significant, novel banking service that’s been introduced since about the 1970s. (I count ACH as novel, because it enables you to do things you couldn’t do before. Banking at home in your pajamas isn’t any different than waiting until Monday morning and physically going to the bank.)
    - blibble 5y ago
      the point was: > A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example. all of the areas I mentioned are subject to constant change, mostly from regulators implementing the Payment Services Directive, Solvency II or MiFID II all require developers the developers working on the app/website that you interact with are always going to be a small fraction of the developers that work for a bank and if you think this isn't the case (in a very cut-throat industry), I would suggest you start a bank and put the rest of them out of business with your vastly reduced costs
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  > Where did we make the wrong turn? We force companies to grow, I guess. All of the bullcrap the banks are doing mostly serves one purpose: get you to buy more of their products at terms that are bad for you. All the complaints I have against the UX of the banking websites and apps I use can be attributed to this: they do a shitty job on purpose, because the site/app is primarily a vector to upsell you loans, credit cards and insurance. (All complaints except one: the bank I used for my business accounts when contracting decided to make an SPA with one of the trendy JavaScript frameworks. Well, they botched it. This failure doesn't even help them sell anything, it's just the usual webdev incompetence.)
  - antihero 5y ago
    Line. Must. Go. Up.
  - lupire 5y ago
    Why would a shitty app promote more sales? The only reason I use MegaBank and its obnoxious but functional app is that Local Credit Union can't afford to build a decently functional app.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      > Why would a shitty app promote more sales? Because part of it being shitty is obnoxiously advertising you financial products, making it hard to perform the tasks you want with your money without being upsold something, and making it near-impossible to use your account without going through the app/webapp (or a visit to the bank, or the ATM - which is also pushing ads).

randomdata 5y ago

In my experience, bank software (customer facing) could use a development team.

wott 5y ago
Mine seems to use a different one each year :-/
SilverRed 5y ago
I recently switched to a new bank which is basically an offshoot of an existing one where they handle all of the development, and the parent company manages the legal/banking part. It's a really awesome setup really because they are constantly adding new and fun features, experimenting with what works best. Stuff like automatically rounding up every transaction and sending the remainder to your savings. The ability to instantly create and delete savings "accounts" without having to register a real account number on the phone. My favorite feature is what they call 2up where you send an invite to another member of the bank and you instantly get a shared account where you can both add and withdraw money. It also adds a second card to your phone wallet which draws from the shared account. So much less work and risk than traditional shared accounts.

maficious 5y ago

Exactly, but banks aren't a good example. Some people here mention feature plateaus and completeness of the app. Obvious question is, what should the employer then do? The software is complete, from now on there's only maintenance, which is relatively less work compared to building from scratch, so as a consequence I guess developers should be paid less then? Or like you said, fired? Obviously the manpower could be just moved to the next project, but what if we look at the worst case scenario? What comes next? Are there at all such mechanisms that could allow for, say, a team of engineers that maintains a bunch of projects in different companies. If such a team would take a maintenance of a few complete programs, the count of them would make up the difference in pay, e.g. a few mainted apps for a lower pay equal pay for building one app from scratch.

grishka 5y ago
What does a construction worker do when they complete a building?
- DougWebb 5y ago
  Obviously they get started on redesigning the foundation.
  - grishka 5y ago
    And then start rebuilding it while people live already live or work inside.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  A great many people are involved in maintaining existing buildings. This isn’t just a gotcha but reveals fundamentally faulty thinking underlying your analogy.
  - actually_a_dog 5y ago
    I don’t think it does. Buildings aren’t maintained by construction crews. They’re maintained by facilities teams, and maintenance contractors, the latter of which are hired on an as-needed basis rather than on permanent retainer.

dcminter 5y ago

Regulatory change, 3rd party API changes, new financial products (often arising out of the regulatory changes) all require ongoing development. Plus I don't know about you, but my bank's website and app are a hot mess. In theory I suppose they could be feature complete, but in reality, nope. So, just visiting Earth, or are you here to stay? :) I've worked for banks and while there's certainly plenty of unwarranted churn the notion that they're done and the dev team can go home is ... hilarious. Edit: addressing your comment in an adjacent thread, a box to keep your money in (or, canonically, a sock under the mattress) does not need to offer/support: - Debit cards - Credit bureaus. Yes, even if it's just a deposit account and no, this isn't optional. - Know Your Customer (KYC) regulations - Anti Money Laundering (AML) checks That's before you get into other account types, offering credit, currency conversions and the zillion other things that sock doesn't have to do.

SilverRed 5y ago

Spotify has a lot to work on. Integrations with new devices is a big one. They recently added support for streaming songs directly on the Apple Watch but are still yet to support saving them locally to play offline if you don't have your phone. New required features like this are constantly popping up. As well as other infinitely big tasks like optimizing all of their server side software to support and ever increasing user base. They could also work forever on making suggestions better. As well as new features like lossless audio coming up soon. Supporting new iOS and android versions/features. There is never a point where a piece of software is simply done because the OS changes how things work constantly. The companies that just contract out for a tiny bit of work every few months end up with garbage software because no one really knows or understands the code so they just tack on bad patches until the system eventually crumbles. And every bank I have used does have a full time development team. The one I currently use sends out monthly emails for the new features they have released and has a road map showing what they are planning on adding.

irskep 5y ago
To be fair to Spotify, Apple Watch development is pure hell, and I wouldn't expect them to ever implement that feature. On the other hand, the LG TV app for Spotify doesn't support gapless playback, which completely blows my mind.
- SilverRed 5y ago
  >I wouldn't expect them to ever implement that feature. Most users will though. Apple music implements that feature and charges the same amount for subscriptions. So if spotify wants to stay competitive they need a team of developers to keep up with whatever Apple and Google are doing. It's not good enough to just say "oh well the app is feature complete so we won't be working on anything new" Nothing is ever feature complete when you have competition.
- eisa01 5y ago
  I have finally got the option to test “Download to Apple Watch”, so only took Spotify 2-3 years after the feature was made available? Not sure if it’s widely available yet Had to buy the 4G version last time though, as Apples podcast and Music app is horrible at downloading, and Overcast was not much better.

emodendroket 5y ago

Even if we just accepted your premise and ignored the fact that people are put off by old-looking apps, eventually something like iOS updates is going to break one of the apps. And in reality they add features regularly too.

equality_1138 5y ago

"A bank doesn't need a full-time development team for example." How else will all those SVP's at your bank justify their fat salaries? They NEED more minions. Same goes for VC ecosystem. Funny how everyone has a scapegoat or a solution to this supposed software quality problem, not quite understanding the underlying financial incentives. Easy money -> rotten management -> crappy design.

Solstafir 5y ago

In my experience, I have rarely seen anything which is feature complete. Either UI needs revamp because it's stale and not in current trends (like fashion industry) or the the backend starts to crumble with the weight of new ad-hoc features, increased number of users etc. With agile, practically, many times development is just in time with little regard to long term requirements or the evolution of software so it's all layers of layers of things that work. There's rarely a time for fundamental restructuring of the codebase to meet the new requirement correctly. Once the cracks begin to show, we start thinking of software rewrite. For a construction of buildings, the redevelopment is about once 40 years, for software, it's about 5-7 years.

JadeNB 5y ago
> I have rarely seen anything which is feature complete. Either UI needs revamp because it's stale and not in current trends (like fashion industry) Stale UI is very different from not being feature complete. vim and emacs are very stale UIs, but also as close to feature complete as I need, and thank God no-one feels the need to update them for modern UI preferences (or, rather, that those who do feel that need can do it without taking away my experience of classic vim).