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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 diff

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.

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.