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

188 points by Cwizard 3y ago

MrDresden 3y ago
Having experienced working in a legacy financial institution for half a decade, the main takeaway for me was to never work for a legacy financial institution again. They are horrible places if you take your craft seriously.
Tommstein 3y ago
I was working for another bank a few years ago, and a recruiter for Deutsche hit me up about a role that sounded interesting, something pretty hardcore whose details I forget other than it involved C++. We finally get to the part about what they're looking to pay. Massive pay cut over what I was already making. The recruiter assured me they'd see if they could maybe possibly get me a slightly less massive pay cut. Never heard back. I assume they either never filled that role, or eventually found someone to take it who couldn't get a job anywhere else and was about to be homeless. Hearing that they're a shitshow internally does not surprise. Sometimes you get what you pay for.
rgavuliak 3y ago
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.
- lpfnrobin 3y ago
  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.
anitguyinabank1 3y ago
[dead]
PeterStuer 3y ago
Sounds like every other major bank's IT environment.
throwaway_db 3y ago
This is 5 year old scuttlebutt and even what's publicly known about DB's systems has superseded most of the details here.
- disgruntledphd2 3y ago
  Cool, can you share some of the publicly available information then? I interviewed at DB around 2018, and from that experience (what's the worst thing about working here, I asked my interviewer. The politics, she replied) plus that of all my friends who spent time there, this article rings pretty true. But I'd love to get some more up to date info, so would be happy if you could share.
  - throwaway_db 3y ago
    Much fresher scuttlebutt: https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2022/05/eisler-capital-quant-jobs https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2022/05/eisler-capita... Kannon isn't even mentioned in the older article. Note that I am not claiming that Deutsche's IT department is no longer dysfunctional! Just nothing in TFA provides convincing evidence about the current state of affairs.
bilekas 3y ago
Deutsche Bank has made 5 acquisitions Norisbank 1954, Bonn Carron Energy 2004, Cardiff Better Payment 2014, Berlin United Financial Group 1981, Garden City Quantiguous 2014, Mumbai Given all of these needing to integrate together to some degree, and the bureaucracy of banks in general, add that to their resistence to change / improve something related to the tech if it still works, none of this surprises me. You see these kind of problems in all conglomerates which have to absorb other companies into their ecosystem. Edit : Slightly unrelated but I have just seen that she has passed away last year from cancer. https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/former-deutsche-bank-chief-operating-officer-kim-hammonds-dies-20220704 https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/former-deutsche-bank-chief... Edit 2 : my mistake of details
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  My current consulting gig is at a government "superdepartment" that was formed by mashing together a few dozen small agencies that were previously already combined into large agencies. Their IT was as diverse as it gets, and then they were told to move into one building and "make it work". It's as messy and as broken as you imagine it is.
  - raverbashing 3y ago
    I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job. Yes because one division is sending the data in XML and a 3 letter county code and values in thousands of monetary unit and another system does things in a completely different way
    - Roark66 3y ago
      >I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job. It's not necessarily ungrateful. It can even be interesting, but it all depends how everyone approaches it and the most important thing ever is: realistic timeliness and outcomes.
      - raverbashing 3y ago
BayesianDice 3y ago
Note the article is from 2018.
evrimoztamur 3y ago
Deutsche Bank looks like a gigantic organisation rampant with misaligned incentives and barely any oversight. Looking at their list of controversies (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bank#Controversies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bank#Controversies), it is absolutely unsurprising that their IT infrastructure is a disorganised and mismanaged mess. It looks like it's beyond saving, with its depressing history over the last decade and a half.
- rnd33 3y ago
  This is what I think a lot people don't understand when it comes to unruly IT systems in large organizations. Deutsche Bank does not have an IT or software engineering problem, they have a culture and corporate politics problem. Even if you have the world's best engineered systems, as soon as you have 30 different systems you'll have a giant mess, and the reason you have 30 different systems is because you have groups of people with different incentives not interested in using someone else's system.
- throwaway_db 3y ago
  This is really a non sequitur. It's perfectly easy to imagine a large organization which has a disorganized and mismanaged mess for their IT infrastructure, but a great compliance and regulatory culture, or vice versa. DB happens to have both a broken engineering culture and (at least historically) an even more broken culture of mis-selling and fraud, but there's nothing to say that one always engenders the other.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
I very briefly worked in a similar organization a decade ago, and it checks out with how I remember things. Though in that case half the mess were from mergers leaving the bank with multiple instances of similar yet incompatible IT systems. Another source was the wave of regulation and reporting requirements crashing onto finance after the subprime crisis.
ahartmetz 3y ago
They acquired Postbank (where I have an account) some years ago. Postbank had a reputation for good IT. Now they are consolidating their online banking system... Of course, on the bad system of Deutsche Bank. It's a huge mess. I need to log into two different systems for credit card and bank account things. They mailed me account statements for the timeframe of one day once and for a few days another time. I never get printed statements otherwise. The switchover is also months behind schedule. So, Deutsche Bank is still crap at IT.
- valzam 3y ago
  I can recommend Comdirect. Have been with them for a number of years. It's not a perfect all digital experience but largely a good offering. moved to a non-european country and was able to keep my account and stock portfolio with them (just have to tell them that you aren't a tax resident anymore so they don't deduct captial gains tax automatically). I am always a bit worried about using neo-anything for the core of my savings since I would like to not have to touch then for a long time. Having to sell or move all your assets because a startup shuts down isn't fun.
- ant6n 3y ago
  Uh oh, I was considering opening an account with them… actually they couldnt in July, because of their IT transition. Maybe I‘ll pick a different one. Any recommendations for a good Business Account in Germany?
  - V__ 3y ago
    Sadly, business accounts are kinda all over the place. I use Kontist, but it's pretty basic. You could also look into your local Sparkasse, it should have everything you need.
    - konschubert 3y ago
      Revolut?
      - 3y ago
rkwz 3y ago
> Now that Cryan's gone, however, it's becoming apparent that his authority over some senior managers at Deutsche Bank was weak. He and Hammonds' ability to challenge Deutsche's most powerful tribal leaders appears to have been correspondingly limited. "It's going to be a far more uphill task to cut systems in future," says one senior insider. "The people who control these systems don't want them cut. It's all about politics." > "Hammonds was innovative, but she couldn't do what she set out to do," says one DB insider. "So we're just sitting here, waiting to see what happens next." Yikes! Sounds like an impossible uphill task. Is there any examples of such turnarounds in the recent years?
kwant_kiddo 3y ago
Worked in a similar organisation also. The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there. The view on technology and infrastructure is very primitive... as you can also read from just the header "IT division". I initially thought that they were competent but greedy turns out the banks are really just greedy, naive and sometimes... plain stupid. I don't know if it's unique to Europe, but I am never working for a non tech-first company again.
- eru 3y ago
  > The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there. > I don't know if it's unique to Europe, but I am never working for a non tech-first company again. For what it's worth, Goldman Sachs is reasonably competent in tech, and used to be even more so (at least in relative terms). Bloomberg is about half-way between the banks and the more competent tech companies. (I worked at both, and a few other financial companies and also at Google, Facebook etc.)
  - kwant_kiddo 3y ago
    I almost wrote a non-US company. In general I must say that working for tech in European firms vs US firms is night and day, but that is another discussion :)
    - zeisss 3y ago
      Willing to elaborate a bit on this?
      - mardifoufs 3y ago
        Not the person you asked but in my limited experience, tech is actually valued in the US. Sure, there is also a culture of MBAs and business types taking decisions, but they at least understand that tech is essential (regardless of the reason). In Europe, tech is seen as "just IT" especially in non tech corporations. It's much less important than in the US. It's a pretty minor thing but personally I think just the fact that I rarely see the distinction between "software engineering/development" and "IT" in Europe is pretty telling. The salaries are also another indicator.
hardlianotion 3y ago
Multiplicity of systems was a feature of nearly all banks before 2008 and was a contributing factor to some of the inability to perceive and react to risk. After 2008, and forced to by regulators, most banks focussed a lot of resources and attention to consolidate and give themselves a strategic view. Deutsche seems to have found this task far too difficult.
deleted 3y ago
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tragomaskhalos 3y ago
Don't think this is atypical of many organisations that have grown their IT over a long period. When I did some work for Network Rail (here in the UK) there were some absolutely hair-raising diagrams of umpteen systems all with lines between them, doubtless many going back to BR days.
- xmcqdpt2 3y ago
  This makes me excited for what current microservices architecture systems will look like in fifty years!
  - Nextgrid 3y ago
    Microservices just means you get that kind of mess in months instead of years/decades, and that mess is actually the objective.
  - tragomaskhalos 3y ago
    True, but at least those lines (you'd hope) will represent some json going over http, whereas with these legacy systems the lines could be more or less anything!
  - mxschumacher 3y ago
    maintaining web frontends will also be an infinite source of employment
DrBazza 3y ago
Even though this is from 2018, it was and still is completely applicable to every other investment bank out there. Investment banking organizational structures are set up such that bureaucracy encourages 'silos' where teams can deliver quicker if they don't depend on other teams, and performance related pay dominates the managers (managing directors) thinking. Having worked at Megabank, it ran at least one system on SunOS (not Solaris), well into the late 2010s. It had Windows XP, long after end-of-life. Nothing about that story is peculiar to DB.
- steveBK123 3y ago
  DB was running LotusNotes instead of Outlook well into the 2010s.
  - rcbdev 3y ago
    RBI did so until 2-3 years ago.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      Kings
  - DrBazza 3y ago
    This feels like crap-Investment-Bank poker. I'll raise you a company-wide ticketing system written in COBOL, running on an IBM mainframe.
    - steveBK123 3y ago
      That sounds kind of awesome though.
  - galacticdessert 3y ago
    So did McKinsey ;)
    - 3y ago
Roark66 3y ago
I've worked as a contractor in a large bank leading a project to migrate from a plethora of backup systems into one newly built system. 30% of my time was spent on filling "paperwork". Implementation plans, risk assessments, fail back plans and so on. There was a lot of this, but people in general had positive attitude (no big difference between contractors and employees) so I think of the time as an interesting experience rather than a negative. We too had around 30 OSes to deal with, but in itself it wasn't a problem. I suspect the problem in DB is not it's aging, disjointed IT infrastructure, but the culture.
- deadbunny 3y ago
  I did a short stint at BP and it was the same. The final straw for me was the 8 week process to get an internally signed TLS cert which required signoffs by like 6 VPs across every region (US, EMEA, etc.). It paid well but fuck that noise.
danielovichdk 3y ago
I have so many good stories from developing software inside banking. Every management team I have ever worked for in banking - I have worked 4 stints in 4 different banks as a contractor - has been so old school that its been impossible to apply any up to date constructs from the professional software world. I once had a manager who had been with the bank for 40 years. He simply drawed 3 boxes on a board, drawed a few lines between them and asked "how long will this take ?" Hmm...what is in the first box? Old school, grey and stale. That's banking for you in Europe at least.
- baz00 3y ago
  I have to run integrations with things those sort of people designed. We get EDI streams and error codes straight from some COBOL thing from the 70s which has been carefully ported through to whatever crap they're running today verbatim. Recently there was an issue where a field overflowed which broke literally everything. Then they added a zero to the start as part of the specification which broke it even more because half the companies on the planet were treating it as a string and not a number. If there's anything I've ever learned about working in the financial sector it is that the only thing that is protecting you is the legal framework around it, not the banks or financial companies which are universally a fucking shit show.
  - sgt 3y ago
    Most banks are still running COBOL at the core, I think. That's at least the case here in South Africa. Each bank then has large IT teams building interfaces and pretty things around the core, using languages such as C# and Java.
- fnordpiglet 3y ago
  It varies vastly depending on the bank and what part. I know from my career some of the most advanced computing platforms I’ve ever seen across any industry were in leading banks with sophisticated quant trading divisions - but only in the trading front office. Goldman in the late 1990’s through 2010 or so was bar none extraordinary with some of the most brilliant human beings alive developing systems that are unmatched today. On the other hand in the same bank some of the crustiest most process laden software management was crushing the life out of human souls.
Havoc 3y ago
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.
- lpfnrobin 3y ago
  As a former DBLabs employee, laughing at this was a positive.
sharas- 3y ago
banks are particularly low imagination, high control places. The "resources" they hire are particularly generic, safe and fungible/expendable. By definition, such "resources" are playing with themselves, creating "frameworks" and "platforms". The low imagination management of banks cannot understand that they got "resources" they filtered for and results accordingly. https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html
arianvanp 3y ago
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 would promise to get back to me. 3 weeks later I still couldn't access my online bank account's transaction page. I ended up eventually manually editing the HTML in inspector in order to be able to navigate to the page where I could update my phone number to a German one and I never heard back from support. I tried opening a depot account for trading stocks. It just says "Internal server error. your account id is incompatible. Please open an additional account with Deutsche Bank". I then tried this; had to go to KYC all over again; but I can't because I can't register two accounts on the 2FA app that is mandatory to have on my phone. Customer support adviced to get a second phone (??). and I'm just a normal customer. It's impossible to bank with this bank. Every time I have to interact with them it feels like i'm in some weird fever dream.
- vstollen 3y ago
  Similar experience with Comdirect. They also have a 6-digit pin. When I asked support why I have to pay for my depot (even though its free if I have a checking account) they said they signed me up under two separate customer IDs, but they cannot simply consolidate them. I have to open a new depot and transfer my stocks.
- meibo 3y ago
  That just sounds like a normal day of interacting with basic German IT infrastructure. It's all the same.
  - andersa 3y ago
    My personal favorite is the website for reporting large international transactions, which can only be using during regular working hours on weekdays.
    - 3y ago
pmarreck 3y ago
45 different operating systems?? I had no idea 45 different operating systems still existed that were functional
- munchler 3y ago
  I had the same reaction, but I don’t think they mean “operating system” in the computer science sense. (E.g. Windows, Linux, etc.) I think they’re actually talking about 45 different systems they developed internally to run their business.
  - bennyelv 3y ago
    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 all operating under one umbrella. It’s all very well pointing at a company like Goldman and saying “look, they do IT well” when they don’t have the same range of commercial and consumer businesses as part of their company. If you’re just an investment bank, life is a bit simpler. On a more general note I feel like in our industry there’s a tendency towards “perfection worship” where people think there’s some kind of immortal “perfect solution” that a company needs and anything less than that is terrible and must be chastised. This is egoistical and forgets that IT and computing exists to enable companies and not the other way round. The world does not do computing for computing’s sake. Company change can be almost constant, changing systems to keep up is hard and expensive, being able to live with imperfection is critical to commercial success.
    - smcin 3y ago
      > [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?
pmarreck 3y ago
As a firstborn American nerd with 100% German ancestors, it’s basically been frustrating my entire life to watch Germany whiff on basically any computer- or Internet-related technology. I can't even attribute it to the language barrier since they're all taught English at an early age. Perhaps it's that old German pride/hubris/NIH? “Stolz”… They’re a very smart people, not sure what gives. Perhaps a lack of respect for “nerd” aesthetic If you ever visit Germany, prepare to not be impressed by their Internet access (but possibly impressed by everything else)
- nvm0n1 3y ago
  It's not that Germany is uniquely bad at software. It's that the USA is uniquely good. A culture in which software people are considered to be really low status is pretty much the global default and is still common today, even in the US. I worked for American finance types before. They couldn't understand why programmers earned so much and why their software team couldn't be completely outsourced to India. They took perverse pride in having absolutely no idea what their own software stack actually did. Last time I checked they had got rid of the only people who were any good and then outsourced the rest (to India, of course), and apparently lost the ability to ship new versions of their software in the process. Even in the US many investment banks have totally dysfunctional IT, with the possible exception of Goldman which is famous for actually being good at it (although from reading the comments in this thread maybe that has changed?). Why is there such a thing as a "tech" firm when all firms use tech? It's because tech firm is really meaning a firm created and run by programmers, as that's the only environment in which they can get respect and a productive setup. If it weren't the case companies like Amazon could never have existed because they'd have just been crushed by other better established retailers doing the internet well.
- febed 3y ago
  Personal opinion as an outsider: Germany seems to be a very risk averse society. They love to plan everything a year in advance and hate surprises. Their lives are so ordered and predictable that they have an unconscious resistance to change, compared to other cultures.
  - 3y ago
Hendrikto 3y ago
I see lots of people abbreviating Deutsche Bank as DB. Germans think Deutsche Bahn (train company) when you say DB. Just FYI.
- diarrhea 3y ago
  Complaints in this thread seem just as applicable!
Nextgrid 3y ago
This is not surprising at all, and is not specific to Deutsche Bank or even banking in general. This is a property of large, bloated legacy companies in any field. IT is still seen as a cost center and a secondary concern rather than the enabler of their business. As a result, pay/resources and "political capital" (for the lack of a better word) are allocated accordingly. IT folks there aren't given the pay nor recognition they deserve, so no good talent joins or stays for long enough. Junior talent that joins ends up just learning from the mess and has no chance of actually becoming "good", so the problem continues. Furthermore, the messy and unefficient IT systems benefit many people there, from lower-level menial positions whose jobs would be obsoleted by good IT to managerial positions who have a large list of reports to manage which gives them prestige and justifies their salary. Third-party suppliers also benefit as a bad IT system requires constant attention while a good system would require less attention (and a competent in-house team can attend do it, requiring no third-party involvement). Bad IT can also serve as cover - problems can be blamed on it instead of incompetence. Fixing it incrementally from inside is politically impossible as people who rely on the status-quo will fight you on every step of the way. The only potential way is the organizational equivalent of a "full rewrite" - set up a subsidiary, give it unlimited money and task it with building a competing product. Operate it like a startup with the appropriate culture (especially regarding tech). Once the product is competitive, migrate customers onto it over time. This should be feasible at least for retail banking as UK fintech startups proved it's not actually impossible to create a bank from scratch. Rinse and repeat for every vertical of the business.
- readlikeasloth 3y ago
  ... 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 message bus for the company. Only then progress stalls and OLD slowly begins to crawl back in. Legal department audits the agile process and unfortunately German laws are quite tough on bogus self-employment. All the freelancers have to go and NEW loses all their expertise. Other employees follow as this whole thing does not pay that great and looks more and more like any other 9/5 job. Fast forward, 5 years later: the startup spirit is long gone. Corporate culture at NEW mirrors OLD. And not only culture wise. The NEW, "-tech" company is not seen as an independent company any more but supposed to be merged with the parent company. Because why have two of the same, right? Meanwhile OLD made some progress and introduced some reform projects. So developers do not have to fill out a printed paper application to get new servers any more. Only now you have two Kafka clusters with completely different setups as OLD also started their one one at some point. My learning here: new is not new if the culture stays the same. Also: never underestimate the power of old. People always talk about the new, shiny stuff. But old was there first. And is much more resilient than it seems.
drooopy 3y ago
Perfectly sums up my experience dealing with the mess that is the IT of major German company in the automotive industry that I work for. Tons of mini-fiefdoms, each with its own strong-minded lord who has held that position for literal decades and who wants to expand their influence on other fiefdoms, an infrastructure where every single one of its components is incompatible and was never designed to work with anything else and that is held together with figurative duct tape and tons of depressed and overworked colleagues who would jump to another opportunity in a heartbeat but the money is actually good so we all just have to deal with it.
- rft 3y ago
  Yepp, we once spent about 1.5 hours in a meeting walking the org chart of such a company to figure out which 4 emails to 4 people (plus copious amounts of CCs just to add to the "urgency" and inbox bloat) I had to write to unblock the project after 2 or 3 unproductive weekly meetings. And I did that as an external supplier, I would have thought it was in their best interested to just collect what we need and get the ball rolling internally. After all, they are paying us to deliver something.
  - drooopy 3y ago
    If you guys had 3 different town halls in the past couple of years where 3 completely different strategies and visions for IT were discussed, then we are probably colleagues lol
zxcvbn4038 3y ago
Deutsche Bank was one of the first places I worked at, closer to its heyday, I absolutely loved it. But it has been in decline for years, and has a lot of management issues, and fiefdoms. One of my favorite stories to retell is my wife had a job there also and she had a medical issue from a car wreck. Her boss said the bank couldn’t function if she was doing physical therapy two hours a week, basically fired her, all the paperwork was drawn up, sent to a manager in London to sign. The manager in London was “too important” to sign things so he just leaves it for someone else to rubber stamp in his name the next day. Meanwhile my wife goes across the street (literally), gets a doctor to sign her disability paperwork, walks it into HR - and instead of doing physical therapy two hours a week she was on paid medical leave for almost a year. Her termination paperwork did get signed eventually but because she was on a protected leave they had to throw it out.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Is getting disability for a year so easy? Afaik in Austria your GP is not enough for that. It needs to get approved by supervisors of the national insurance to get it approved to prevent cheaters with "friendly" getting fake disability claims.
  - rcbdev 3y ago
    Yeah, in AT you'll get referred to an Amtsarzt from the ÖGK before anything - Also pretty sure the employer is off the hook and you get the money straight from either the ÖGK (federal health insurance) or the AMS (unemployment office) for any sick / disability leave longer than 6 weeks.
locallost 3y ago
People build, sorry architect, incredibly complex systems and then try to stop them from being complex. I for one have learned to stop worrying and love the complexity. Maybe a naive question: why is it important that a company with thousands of people in the IT department all run on the same system? I mean I understand the many theoretical benefits of it, but in reality software is there to do something, and if you spend millions and millions and years and years on operating systems, what are you even doing for your customers? I am actually a Deutsche Bank customer and I do not care about operating systems they run. I anticipate people will tell me that surely this helps eventually fulfill business needs -- but does it really? In my experience and as others have pointed out, practically all other places are in the exact same mess, dreaming of holy grails of standardized infrastructure, clean code and engineering that will make other engineers pat you on the back. And some get it done and some can't, so basically at the end of the day you need people that will sort through the mess and get things done. It's never easy. Once they are done with all this standardization, they will realize they just have new roadblocks, and will spend a half decade trying to fix those too.
- nvm0n1 3y ago
  It does lead to real customer facing problems. A jungle of different systems won't have transactionality between them at all, it's all a mess of rec scripts, so customers will see a lot of weirdness like the bank being unable to decide what their balance actually is.
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nuancebydefault 3y ago
The branch of the company I used to work for got bought around 2013 by Lear corp. Our European headquarters shifted to a city near Munich. It took 6 months for us to get at laptop that was allowed to logon to the corporate network. After less then a year, suddenly our builds became very slow. After some investigations i sent some screendumps from task manager to one of our managers, showing that 90 percent of the cpu cycles was eaten by some security service scanning our running scripts each and every time they were invoked. It took several months before they bothered to fix the resource hog. Truly the most work-hampering IT I could imagine.
myth2018 3y ago
These days I had big trouble to get a refund from an airline. I had their confirmation, via email, that the ticket would be reimbursed. But then, after some days, they alleged, absurdly, that I had flown the ticket and hence I wouldn't get the refund. It turns out that they were mixing up that ticket with another one I bought, and I only managed to find that out after almost 1 month of trial and error talking with their staff, which pretty much resembled a chat-bot experience. We put ourselves in a sort of quicksand. Technology's promises are tempting, but there are hidden costs. We didn't know that and now we're finding out what happens when complexity is not tamed. Lessons are being hopefully learned, but I'm afraid that what we currently see is just the beginning of the nightmare
- nexus7556 3y ago
  You should name and shame the airline
  - nvm0n1 3y ago
    Not the same poster but as airlines have come up, this German IT dysfunction appears there too. At some point Lufthansa bought Swiss. Swiss previously had a pretty competent website. It worked fine, so of course, they ported it to the Lufthansa system. What a disaster. It regressed about 15 years overnight. Incredibly buggy, primitive ugly clunky UI. Ordering tickets was easy and never failed on the old system, on the new one there would often be just random failures halfway through the process and you'd get stuck unable to proceed. Did NOT leave me with a good impression of German IT.
    - nexus7556 3y ago
      Definitely agree. Lufthansa’s website and app are a complete mess.
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188 points by Cwizard 3y ago

Having experienced working in a legacy financial institution for half a decade, the main takeaway for me was to never work for a legacy financial institution again. They are horrible places if you take your craft seriously.

Tommstein 3y ago

I was working for another bank a few years ago, and a recruiter for Deutsche hit me up about a role that sounded interesting, something pretty hardcore whose details I forget other than it involved C++. We finally get to the part about what they're looking to pay. Massive pay cut over what I was already making. The recruiter assured me they'd see if they could maybe possibly get me a slightly less massive pay cut. Never heard back. I assume they either never filled that role, or eventually found someone to take it who couldn't get a job anywhere else and was about to be homeless. Hearing that they're a shitshow internally does not surprise. Sometimes you get what you pay for.

rgavuliak 3y ago

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.

lpfnrobin 3y ago
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.

anitguyinabank1 3y ago

[dead]

PeterStuer 3y ago

Sounds like every other major bank's IT environment.

throwaway_db 3y ago

This is 5 year old scuttlebutt and even what's publicly known about DB's systems has superseded most of the details here.

disgruntledphd2 3y ago
Cool, can you share some of the publicly available information then? I interviewed at DB around 2018, and from that experience (what's the worst thing about working here, I asked my interviewer. The politics, she replied) plus that of all my friends who spent time there, this article rings pretty true. But I'd love to get some more up to date info, so would be happy if you could share.
- throwaway_db 3y ago
  Much fresher scuttlebutt: https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2022/05/eisler-capital-quant-jobs https://www.efinancialcareers.com/news/2022/05/eisler-capita... Kannon isn't even mentioned in the older article. Note that I am not claiming that Deutsche's IT department is no longer dysfunctional! Just nothing in TFA provides convincing evidence about the current state of affairs.

bilekas 3y ago

Deutsche Bank has made 5 acquisitions Norisbank 1954, Bonn Carron Energy 2004, Cardiff Better Payment 2014, Berlin United Financial Group 1981, Garden City Quantiguous 2014, Mumbai Given all of these needing to integrate together to some degree, and the bureaucracy of banks in general, add that to their resistence to change / improve something related to the tech if it still works, none of this surprises me. You see these kind of problems in all conglomerates which have to absorb other companies into their ecosystem. Edit : Slightly unrelated but I have just seen that she has passed away last year from cancer. https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/former-deutsche-bank-chief-operating-officer-kim-hammonds-dies-20220704 https://www.fnlondon.com/articles/former-deutsche-bank-chief... Edit 2 : my mistake of details

jiggawatts 3y ago
My current consulting gig is at a government "superdepartment" that was formed by mashing together a few dozen small agencies that were previously already combined into large agencies. Their IT was as diverse as it gets, and then they were told to move into one building and "make it work". It's as messy and as broken as you imagine it is.
- raverbashing 3y ago
  I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job. Yes because one division is sending the data in XML and a 3 letter county code and values in thousands of monetary unit and another system does things in a completely different way
  - Roark66 3y ago
    >I wonder if maybe AI could help with such an ungrateful job. It's not necessarily ungrateful. It can even be interesting, but it all depends how everyone approaches it and the most important thing ever is: realistic timeliness and outcomes.
    - raverbashing 3y ago

BayesianDice 3y ago

Note the article is from 2018.

evrimoztamur 3y ago

Deutsche Bank looks like a gigantic organisation rampant with misaligned incentives and barely any oversight. Looking at their list of controversies (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bank#Controversies https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Bank#Controversies), it is absolutely unsurprising that their IT infrastructure is a disorganised and mismanaged mess. It looks like it's beyond saving, with its depressing history over the last decade and a half.

rnd33 3y ago
This is what I think a lot people don't understand when it comes to unruly IT systems in large organizations. Deutsche Bank does not have an IT or software engineering problem, they have a culture and corporate politics problem. Even if you have the world's best engineered systems, as soon as you have 30 different systems you'll have a giant mess, and the reason you have 30 different systems is because you have groups of people with different incentives not interested in using someone else's system.
throwaway_db 3y ago
This is really a non sequitur. It's perfectly easy to imagine a large organization which has a disorganized and mismanaged mess for their IT infrastructure, but a great compliance and regulatory culture, or vice versa. DB happens to have both a broken engineering culture and (at least historically) an even more broken culture of mis-selling and fraud, but there's nothing to say that one always engenders the other.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

I very briefly worked in a similar organization a decade ago, and it checks out with how I remember things. Though in that case half the mess were from mergers leaving the bank with multiple instances of similar yet incompatible IT systems. Another source was the wave of regulation and reporting requirements crashing onto finance after the subprime crisis.

ahartmetz 3y ago

They acquired Postbank (where I have an account) some years ago. Postbank had a reputation for good IT. Now they are consolidating their online banking system... Of course, on the bad system of Deutsche Bank. It's a huge mess. I need to log into two different systems for credit card and bank account things. They mailed me account statements for the timeframe of one day once and for a few days another time. I never get printed statements otherwise. The switchover is also months behind schedule. So, Deutsche Bank is still crap at IT.

valzam 3y ago
I can recommend Comdirect. Have been with them for a number of years. It's not a perfect all digital experience but largely a good offering. moved to a non-european country and was able to keep my account and stock portfolio with them (just have to tell them that you aren't a tax resident anymore so they don't deduct captial gains tax automatically). I am always a bit worried about using neo-anything for the core of my savings since I would like to not have to touch then for a long time. Having to sell or move all your assets because a startup shuts down isn't fun.
ant6n 3y ago
Uh oh, I was considering opening an account with them… actually they couldnt in July, because of their IT transition. Maybe I‘ll pick a different one. Any recommendations for a good Business Account in Germany?
- V__ 3y ago
  Sadly, business accounts are kinda all over the place. I use Kontist, but it's pretty basic. You could also look into your local Sparkasse, it should have everything you need.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Revolut?
    - 3y ago

rkwz 3y ago

> Now that Cryan's gone, however, it's becoming apparent that his authority over some senior managers at Deutsche Bank was weak. He and Hammonds' ability to challenge Deutsche's most powerful tribal leaders appears to have been correspondingly limited. "It's going to be a far more uphill task to cut systems in future," says one senior insider. "The people who control these systems don't want them cut. It's all about politics." > "Hammonds was innovative, but she couldn't do what she set out to do," says one DB insider. "So we're just sitting here, waiting to see what happens next." Yikes! Sounds like an impossible uphill task. Is there any examples of such turnarounds in the recent years?

kwant_kiddo 3y ago

Worked in a similar organisation also. The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there. The view on technology and infrastructure is very primitive... as you can also read from just the header "IT division". I initially thought that they were competent but greedy turns out the banks are really just greedy, naive and sometimes... plain stupid. I don't know if it's unique to Europe, but I am never working for a non tech-first company again.

eru 3y ago
> The culture in european banks is even more dull than I expected before working there. > I don't know if it's unique to Europe, but I am never working for a non tech-first company again. For what it's worth, Goldman Sachs is reasonably competent in tech, and used to be even more so (at least in relative terms). Bloomberg is about half-way between the banks and the more competent tech companies. (I worked at both, and a few other financial companies and also at Google, Facebook etc.)
- kwant_kiddo 3y ago
  I almost wrote a non-US company. In general I must say that working for tech in European firms vs US firms is night and day, but that is another discussion :)
  - zeisss 3y ago
    Willing to elaborate a bit on this?
    - mardifoufs 3y ago
      Not the person you asked but in my limited experience, tech is actually valued in the US. Sure, there is also a culture of MBAs and business types taking decisions, but they at least understand that tech is essential (regardless of the reason). In Europe, tech is seen as "just IT" especially in non tech corporations. It's much less important than in the US. It's a pretty minor thing but personally I think just the fact that I rarely see the distinction between "software engineering/development" and "IT" in Europe is pretty telling. The salaries are also another indicator.

hardlianotion 3y ago

Multiplicity of systems was a feature of nearly all banks before 2008 and was a contributing factor to some of the inability to perceive and react to risk. After 2008, and forced to by regulators, most banks focussed a lot of resources and attention to consolidate and give themselves a strategic view. Deutsche seems to have found this task far too difficult.

deleted 3y ago

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tragomaskhalos 3y ago

Don't think this is atypical of many organisations that have grown their IT over a long period. When I did some work for Network Rail (here in the UK) there were some absolutely hair-raising diagrams of umpteen systems all with lines between them, doubtless many going back to BR days.

xmcqdpt2 3y ago
This makes me excited for what current microservices architecture systems will look like in fifty years!
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Microservices just means you get that kind of mess in months instead of years/decades, and that mess is actually the objective.
- tragomaskhalos 3y ago
  True, but at least those lines (you'd hope) will represent some json going over http, whereas with these legacy systems the lines could be more or less anything!
- mxschumacher 3y ago
  maintaining web frontends will also be an infinite source of employment

DrBazza 3y ago

Even though this is from 2018, it was and still is completely applicable to every other investment bank out there. Investment banking organizational structures are set up such that bureaucracy encourages 'silos' where teams can deliver quicker if they don't depend on other teams, and performance related pay dominates the managers (managing directors) thinking. Having worked at Megabank, it ran at least one system on SunOS (not Solaris), well into the late 2010s. It had Windows XP, long after end-of-life. Nothing about that story is peculiar to DB.

steveBK123 3y ago
DB was running LotusNotes instead of Outlook well into the 2010s.
- rcbdev 3y ago
  RBI did so until 2-3 years ago.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    Kings
- DrBazza 3y ago
  This feels like crap-Investment-Bank poker. I'll raise you a company-wide ticketing system written in COBOL, running on an IBM mainframe.
  - steveBK123 3y ago
    That sounds kind of awesome though.
- galacticdessert 3y ago
  So did McKinsey ;)
  - 3y ago

Roark66 3y ago

I've worked as a contractor in a large bank leading a project to migrate from a plethora of backup systems into one newly built system. 30% of my time was spent on filling "paperwork". Implementation plans, risk assessments, fail back plans and so on. There was a lot of this, but people in general had positive attitude (no big difference between contractors and employees) so I think of the time as an interesting experience rather than a negative. We too had around 30 OSes to deal with, but in itself it wasn't a problem. I suspect the problem in DB is not it's aging, disjointed IT infrastructure, but the culture.

deadbunny 3y ago
I did a short stint at BP and it was the same. The final straw for me was the 8 week process to get an internally signed TLS cert which required signoffs by like 6 VPs across every region (US, EMEA, etc.). It paid well but fuck that noise.

danielovichdk 3y ago

I have so many good stories from developing software inside banking. Every management team I have ever worked for in banking - I have worked 4 stints in 4 different banks as a contractor - has been so old school that its been impossible to apply any up to date constructs from the professional software world. I once had a manager who had been with the bank for 40 years. He simply drawed 3 boxes on a board, drawed a few lines between them and asked "how long will this take ?" Hmm...what is in the first box? Old school, grey and stale. That's banking for you in Europe at least.

baz00 3y ago
I have to run integrations with things those sort of people designed. We get EDI streams and error codes straight from some COBOL thing from the 70s which has been carefully ported through to whatever crap they're running today verbatim. Recently there was an issue where a field overflowed which broke literally everything. Then they added a zero to the start as part of the specification which broke it even more because half the companies on the planet were treating it as a string and not a number. If there's anything I've ever learned about working in the financial sector it is that the only thing that is protecting you is the legal framework around it, not the banks or financial companies which are universally a fucking shit show.
- sgt 3y ago
  Most banks are still running COBOL at the core, I think. That's at least the case here in South Africa. Each bank then has large IT teams building interfaces and pretty things around the core, using languages such as C# and Java.
fnordpiglet 3y ago
It varies vastly depending on the bank and what part. I know from my career some of the most advanced computing platforms I’ve ever seen across any industry were in leading banks with sophisticated quant trading divisions - but only in the trading front office. Goldman in the late 1990’s through 2010 or so was bar none extraordinary with some of the most brilliant human beings alive developing systems that are unmatched today. On the other hand in the same bank some of the crustiest most process laden software management was crushing the life out of human souls.

Havoc 3y ago

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.

lpfnrobin 3y ago
As a former DBLabs employee, laughing at this was a positive.

sharas- 3y ago

banks are particularly low imagination, high control places. The "resources" they hire are particularly generic, safe and fungible/expendable. By definition, such "resources" are playing with themselves, creating "frameworks" and "platforms". The low imagination management of banks cannot understand that they got "resources" they filtered for and results accordingly. https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html https://bitslap.it/blog/posts/playground-it.html

arianvanp 3y ago

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 would promise to get back to me. 3 weeks later I still couldn't access my online bank account's transaction page. I ended up eventually manually editing the HTML in inspector in order to be able to navigate to the page where I could update my phone number to a German one and I never heard back from support. I tried opening a depot account for trading stocks. It just says "Internal server error. your account id is incompatible. Please open an additional account with Deutsche Bank". I then tried this; had to go to KYC all over again; but I can't because I can't register two accounts on the 2FA app that is mandatory to have on my phone. Customer support adviced to get a second phone (??). and I'm just a normal customer. It's impossible to bank with this bank. Every time I have to interact with them it feels like i'm in some weird fever dream.

vstollen 3y ago
Similar experience with Comdirect. They also have a 6-digit pin. When I asked support why I have to pay for my depot (even though its free if I have a checking account) they said they signed me up under two separate customer IDs, but they cannot simply consolidate them. I have to open a new depot and transfer my stocks.
meibo 3y ago
That just sounds like a normal day of interacting with basic German IT infrastructure. It's all the same.
- andersa 3y ago
  My personal favorite is the website for reporting large international transactions, which can only be using during regular working hours on weekdays.
  - 3y ago

pmarreck 3y ago

45 different operating systems?? I had no idea 45 different operating systems still existed that were functional

munchler 3y ago
I had the same reaction, but I don’t think they mean “operating system” in the computer science sense. (E.g. Windows, Linux, etc.) I think they’re actually talking about 45 different systems they developed internally to run their business.
- bennyelv 3y ago
  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 all operating under one umbrella. It’s all very well pointing at a company like Goldman and saying “look, they do IT well” when they don’t have the same range of commercial and consumer businesses as part of their company. If you’re just an investment bank, life is a bit simpler. On a more general note I feel like in our industry there’s a tendency towards “perfection worship” where people think there’s some kind of immortal “perfect solution” that a company needs and anything less than that is terrible and must be chastised. This is egoistical and forgets that IT and computing exists to enable companies and not the other way round. The world does not do computing for computing’s sake. Company change can be almost constant, changing systems to keep up is hard and expensive, being able to live with imperfection is critical to commercial success.
  - smcin 3y ago
    > [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?

pmarreck 3y ago

As a firstborn American nerd with 100% German ancestors, it’s basically been frustrating my entire life to watch Germany whiff on basically any computer- or Internet-related technology. I can't even attribute it to the language barrier since they're all taught English at an early age. Perhaps it's that old German pride/hubris/NIH? “Stolz”… They’re a very smart people, not sure what gives. Perhaps a lack of respect for “nerd” aesthetic If you ever visit Germany, prepare to not be impressed by their Internet access (but possibly impressed by everything else)

nvm0n1 3y ago
It's not that Germany is uniquely bad at software. It's that the USA is uniquely good. A culture in which software people are considered to be really low status is pretty much the global default and is still common today, even in the US. I worked for American finance types before. They couldn't understand why programmers earned so much and why their software team couldn't be completely outsourced to India. They took perverse pride in having absolutely no idea what their own software stack actually did. Last time I checked they had got rid of the only people who were any good and then outsourced the rest (to India, of course), and apparently lost the ability to ship new versions of their software in the process. Even in the US many investment banks have totally dysfunctional IT, with the possible exception of Goldman which is famous for actually being good at it (although from reading the comments in this thread maybe that has changed?). Why is there such a thing as a "tech" firm when all firms use tech? It's because tech firm is really meaning a firm created and run by programmers, as that's the only environment in which they can get respect and a productive setup. If it weren't the case companies like Amazon could never have existed because they'd have just been crushed by other better established retailers doing the internet well.
febed 3y ago
Personal opinion as an outsider: Germany seems to be a very risk averse society. They love to plan everything a year in advance and hate surprises. Their lives are so ordered and predictable that they have an unconscious resistance to change, compared to other cultures.
- 3y ago

Hendrikto 3y ago

I see lots of people abbreviating Deutsche Bank as DB. Germans think Deutsche Bahn (train company) when you say DB. Just FYI.

diarrhea 3y ago
Complaints in this thread seem just as applicable!

Nextgrid 3y ago

This is not surprising at all, and is not specific to Deutsche Bank or even banking in general. This is a property of large, bloated legacy companies in any field. IT is still seen as a cost center and a secondary concern rather than the enabler of their business. As a result, pay/resources and "political capital" (for the lack of a better word) are allocated accordingly. IT folks there aren't given the pay nor recognition they deserve, so no good talent joins or stays for long enough. Junior talent that joins ends up just learning from the mess and has no chance of actually becoming "good", so the problem continues. Furthermore, the messy and unefficient IT systems benefit many people there, from lower-level menial positions whose jobs would be obsoleted by good IT to managerial positions who have a large list of reports to manage which gives them prestige and justifies their salary. Third-party suppliers also benefit as a bad IT system requires constant attention while a good system would require less attention (and a competent in-house team can attend do it, requiring no third-party involvement). Bad IT can also serve as cover - problems can be blamed on it instead of incompetence. Fixing it incrementally from inside is politically impossible as people who rely on the status-quo will fight you on every step of the way. The only potential way is the organizational equivalent of a "full rewrite" - set up a subsidiary, give it unlimited money and task it with building a competing product. Operate it like a startup with the appropriate culture (especially regarding tech). Once the product is competitive, migrate customers onto it over time. This should be feasible at least for retail banking as UK fintech startups proved it's not actually impossible to create a bank from scratch. Rinse and repeat for every vertical of the business.

readlikeasloth 3y ago
... 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 message bus for the company. Only then progress stalls and OLD slowly begins to crawl back in. Legal department audits the agile process and unfortunately German laws are quite tough on bogus self-employment. All the freelancers have to go and NEW loses all their expertise. Other employees follow as this whole thing does not pay that great and looks more and more like any other 9/5 job. Fast forward, 5 years later: the startup spirit is long gone. Corporate culture at NEW mirrors OLD. And not only culture wise. The NEW, "-tech" company is not seen as an independent company any more but supposed to be merged with the parent company. Because why have two of the same, right? Meanwhile OLD made some progress and introduced some reform projects. So developers do not have to fill out a printed paper application to get new servers any more. Only now you have two Kafka clusters with completely different setups as OLD also started their one one at some point. My learning here: new is not new if the culture stays the same. Also: never underestimate the power of old. People always talk about the new, shiny stuff. But old was there first. And is much more resilient than it seems.

drooopy 3y ago

Perfectly sums up my experience dealing with the mess that is the IT of major German company in the automotive industry that I work for. Tons of mini-fiefdoms, each with its own strong-minded lord who has held that position for literal decades and who wants to expand their influence on other fiefdoms, an infrastructure where every single one of its components is incompatible and was never designed to work with anything else and that is held together with figurative duct tape and tons of depressed and overworked colleagues who would jump to another opportunity in a heartbeat but the money is actually good so we all just have to deal with it.

rft 3y ago
Yepp, we once spent about 1.5 hours in a meeting walking the org chart of such a company to figure out which 4 emails to 4 people (plus copious amounts of CCs just to add to the "urgency" and inbox bloat) I had to write to unblock the project after 2 or 3 unproductive weekly meetings. And I did that as an external supplier, I would have thought it was in their best interested to just collect what we need and get the ball rolling internally. After all, they are paying us to deliver something.
- drooopy 3y ago
  If you guys had 3 different town halls in the past couple of years where 3 completely different strategies and visions for IT were discussed, then we are probably colleagues lol

zxcvbn4038 3y ago

Deutsche Bank was one of the first places I worked at, closer to its heyday, I absolutely loved it. But it has been in decline for years, and has a lot of management issues, and fiefdoms. One of my favorite stories to retell is my wife had a job there also and she had a medical issue from a car wreck. Her boss said the bank couldn’t function if she was doing physical therapy two hours a week, basically fired her, all the paperwork was drawn up, sent to a manager in London to sign. The manager in London was “too important” to sign things so he just leaves it for someone else to rubber stamp in his name the next day. Meanwhile my wife goes across the street (literally), gets a doctor to sign her disability paperwork, walks it into HR - and instead of doing physical therapy two hours a week she was on paid medical leave for almost a year. Her termination paperwork did get signed eventually but because she was on a protected leave they had to throw it out.

FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Is getting disability for a year so easy? Afaik in Austria your GP is not enough for that. It needs to get approved by supervisors of the national insurance to get it approved to prevent cheaters with "friendly" getting fake disability claims.
- rcbdev 3y ago
  Yeah, in AT you'll get referred to an Amtsarzt from the ÖGK before anything - Also pretty sure the employer is off the hook and you get the money straight from either the ÖGK (federal health insurance) or the AMS (unemployment office) for any sick / disability leave longer than 6 weeks.

locallost 3y ago

People build, sorry architect, incredibly complex systems and then try to stop them from being complex. I for one have learned to stop worrying and love the complexity. Maybe a naive question: why is it important that a company with thousands of people in the IT department all run on the same system? I mean I understand the many theoretical benefits of it, but in reality software is there to do something, and if you spend millions and millions and years and years on operating systems, what are you even doing for your customers? I am actually a Deutsche Bank customer and I do not care about operating systems they run. I anticipate people will tell me that surely this helps eventually fulfill business needs -- but does it really? In my experience and as others have pointed out, practically all other places are in the exact same mess, dreaming of holy grails of standardized infrastructure, clean code and engineering that will make other engineers pat you on the back. And some get it done and some can't, so basically at the end of the day you need people that will sort through the mess and get things done. It's never easy. Once they are done with all this standardization, they will realize they just have new roadblocks, and will spend a half decade trying to fix those too.

nvm0n1 3y ago
It does lead to real customer facing problems. A jungle of different systems won't have transactionality between them at all, it's all a mess of rec scripts, so customers will see a lot of weirdness like the bank being unable to decide what their balance actually is.

deleted 3y ago

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nuancebydefault 3y ago

The branch of the company I used to work for got bought around 2013 by Lear corp. Our European headquarters shifted to a city near Munich. It took 6 months for us to get at laptop that was allowed to logon to the corporate network. After less then a year, suddenly our builds became very slow. After some investigations i sent some screendumps from task manager to one of our managers, showing that 90 percent of the cpu cycles was eaten by some security service scanning our running scripts each and every time they were invoked. It took several months before they bothered to fix the resource hog. Truly the most work-hampering IT I could imagine.

myth2018 3y ago

These days I had big trouble to get a refund from an airline. I had their confirmation, via email, that the ticket would be reimbursed. But then, after some days, they alleged, absurdly, that I had flown the ticket and hence I wouldn't get the refund. It turns out that they were mixing up that ticket with another one I bought, and I only managed to find that out after almost 1 month of trial and error talking with their staff, which pretty much resembled a chat-bot experience. We put ourselves in a sort of quicksand. Technology's promises are tempting, but there are hidden costs. We didn't know that and now we're finding out what happens when complexity is not tamed. Lessons are being hopefully learned, but I'm afraid that what we currently see is just the beginning of the nightmare

nexus7556 3y ago
You should name and shame the airline
- nvm0n1 3y ago
  Not the same poster but as airlines have come up, this German IT dysfunction appears there too. At some point Lufthansa bought Swiss. Swiss previously had a pretty competent website. It worked fine, so of course, they ported it to the Lufthansa system. What a disaster. It regressed about 15 years overnight. Incredibly buggy, primitive ugly clunky UI. Ordering tickets was easy and never failed on the old system, on the new one there would often be just random failures halfway through the process and you'd get stuck unable to proceed. Did NOT leave me with a good impression of German IT.
  - nexus7556 3y ago
    Definitely agree. Lufthansa’s website and app are a complete mess.

deleted 3y ago

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