9 ms·

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 a

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.
  - scanny 3y ago
    What exactly is that? Is it for moving savings from a non-eu country into Germany ?
    - andersa 3y ago
      This thingy: https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams How they describe it: https://www.bundesbank.de/en/service/reporting-systems/external-sector/electronical-submission/general-statistics-reporting-portal/general-statistics-reporting-portal-619740 https://www.bundesbank.de/en/service/reporting-systems/exter... Any single transaction exceeding 12500€ entering (or leaving) Germany has to be manually reported here. So for example if you're living in Germany and working remotely as a contractor for a US based company you'll probably have to report your income every month. There are many exceptions that don't need manual reporting though, like if you're buying physical goods from overseas. I guess those are already automatically tracked through other ways. For fun, I just tried to login at ~9:30 PM local time on a Sunday, and it said: "Access Denied" "You cannot access the resource you have requested at this time." "The resource you have requested is protected by a policy restricting access to specific time periods. Your request has occured outside of those permitted time periods."
      - pimeys 3y ago
        For some of us, using a middle company such as Deel might be a good idea. They take some money for that, but you get a real German contract and don't have to care dealing with the local bureaucracy.
      - tentacleuno 3y ago
        > This thingy: https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams My favourite thing on that website is the script block inside a noscript tag that they actually expect to run. Things like that tend to suggest the developers have absolutely no idea how to code for a web browser.
        3y ago
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  Germany, IT superpower by 2030. /s
  - FreshStart 3y ago
    Year of the lynux desktop
- lobsterthief 3y ago
  To be honest, average American IT infrastructure is the same; the larger the business, the worse it seems to be. Large tech companies like Google are outliers.
  - cscurmudgeon 3y ago
    Have you used Bank of America’s app? It is quite good.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    Not just business. My dad worked for the FBI in IT for about 15 years after he retired from the military. The stories he can tell….
  - lopatin 3y ago
    I bank with Chase and the app is really good. Are there major US banks with crappy apps?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - prmph 3y ago
      Can second this. I'm not even living in the US any longer, and yet I have never had an instance where the Chase website or app failed to provide a wanted service or work as expected. Their I.T, at least from the customer point of view, seems top notch.
    - xahhkakappy11 3y ago
      The US is not anywhere near as bad as Deutsche that's for sure. I think whether or not the app is crappy depends on your perspective in the US. I've never seen one try to give me a pin instead of a password, and like you said, some of them are pretty good like Chase.
    - cebert 3y ago
      PNC Bank’s mobile app and website are pretty bad. The only reason I haven’t switched is due to friction and because I have my mortgage with them. The website won’t work unless I allow 3rd party scripts from Adobe to run. The UX is terrible too.
LaurensBER 3y ago
German speaking financial institutions are a special kind of IT hell. Perhaps it's a cultural love for rules in combination with compliance that evolves in a hellish bureaucracy, perhaps it's something in the local beer. We can only speculate but I've never worked in an environment as dysfunctional as the ones I've seen at big German companies. To give a few examples: - Running all services under a single Linux account, then requiring vendors to support password encryption in the startup scripts (everyone can access our production passwords!), then proceeding to store the production password in plain text in GIT and Confluence where everyone could read it. - Everyone (including contractors) had access to the production environment through the testing environments, including unrestricted access to the production database (without requiring as much as a password). This was not deemed nearly as important as the passwords in the point above. - I received an official warning for disclosing to AWS/GCloud that we did not have CI/CD setup but would be interested in getting one up and running at some point. This was considered to be "sensitive" information. - Ansible deployments taking 12 hours (on a 6 server environment) because as it turns out, some random "security" settings slowed down SSH, incompetent people not really understanding what they we're doing did the rest. - Ansible being blocked because someone in the security department read that it only required HTTPs access, turned out that they were reading the documentation for the WebUI. - Requiring manual deployment of PR's to test environments and manual testing, the "evidence" + logs of doing this was to be documented in a Word document and attached to the PR. - Automation and DevOps was banned because "The law does not allow us to do this" - No rsync due to security reasons, great fun when you had to sync 200k small files :) - PRs were kept around for months, so "senior" developers could estimate the risk. This included fixes that were hotfixed in production so that it was guaranteed to break again at the next 12 hour deployment (thus giving the same developers even more reasons to be even more "cautious" with all future PRs) - Three different database schema's, three different database technologies, microservices, a React frontend, 50 outsourced developers for an internal CRUD application with 2000 entities, to be used by 10-20 users - All .exes not on a whitelist were banned, so in order to run your application you just had to rename it to word.exe :) - At one point external developers were hired, we requested a desktop for them that would allow them to "write" code. They got a locked down VM with notepad installed and nothing else
- 3y ago
ano-ther 3y ago
They sent me a very phishing looking email. From a domain like db-service.com, only text “there is a problem with your account, please call xxx”, with xxx a number that was nowhere to be found on their website. Turned out to be a legit inquiry from some audit department.
paulddraper 3y ago
I would imagine a water fire to be a very interesting phenomenon, no?

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.
- scanny 3y ago
  What exactly is that? Is it for moving savings from a non-eu country into Germany ?
  - andersa 3y ago
    This thingy: https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams How they describe it: https://www.bundesbank.de/en/service/reporting-systems/external-sector/electronical-submission/general-statistics-reporting-portal/general-statistics-reporting-portal-619740 https://www.bundesbank.de/en/service/reporting-systems/exter... Any single transaction exceeding 12500€ entering (or leaving) Germany has to be manually reported here. So for example if you're living in Germany and working remotely as a contractor for a US based company you'll probably have to report your income every month. There are many exceptions that don't need manual reporting though, like if you're buying physical goods from overseas. I guess those are already automatically tracked through other ways. For fun, I just tried to login at ~9:30 PM local time on a Sunday, and it said: "Access Denied" "You cannot access the resource you have requested at this time." "The resource you have requested is protected by a policy restricting access to specific time periods. Your request has occured outside of those permitted time periods."
    - pimeys 3y ago
      For some of us, using a middle company such as Deel might be a good idea. They take some money for that, but you get a real German contract and don't have to care dealing with the local bureaucracy.
    - tentacleuno 3y ago
      > This thingy: https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams https://extranet.bundesbank.de/ams My favourite thing on that website is the script block inside a noscript tag that they actually expect to run. Things like that tend to suggest the developers have absolutely no idea how to code for a web browser.
      - 3y ago
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
Germany, IT superpower by 2030. /s
- FreshStart 3y ago
  Year of the lynux desktop
lobsterthief 3y ago
To be honest, average American IT infrastructure is the same; the larger the business, the worse it seems to be. Large tech companies like Google are outliers.
- cscurmudgeon 3y ago
  Have you used Bank of America’s app? It is quite good.
- dmvdoug 3y ago
  Not just business. My dad worked for the FBI in IT for about 15 years after he retired from the military. The stories he can tell….
- lopatin 3y ago
  I bank with Chase and the app is really good. Are there major US banks with crappy apps?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - prmph 3y ago
    Can second this. I'm not even living in the US any longer, and yet I have never had an instance where the Chase website or app failed to provide a wanted service or work as expected. Their I.T, at least from the customer point of view, seems top notch.
  - xahhkakappy11 3y ago
    The US is not anywhere near as bad as Deutsche that's for sure. I think whether or not the app is crappy depends on your perspective in the US. I've never seen one try to give me a pin instead of a password, and like you said, some of them are pretty good like Chase.
  - cebert 3y ago
    PNC Bank’s mobile app and website are pretty bad. The only reason I haven’t switched is due to friction and because I have my mortgage with them. The website won’t work unless I allow 3rd party scripts from Adobe to run. The UX is terrible too.

LaurensBER 3y ago

German speaking financial institutions are a special kind of IT hell. Perhaps it's a cultural love for rules in combination with compliance that evolves in a hellish bureaucracy, perhaps it's something in the local beer. We can only speculate but I've never worked in an environment as dysfunctional as the ones I've seen at big German companies. To give a few examples: - Running all services under a single Linux account, then requiring vendors to support password encryption in the startup scripts (everyone can access our production passwords!), then proceeding to store the production password in plain text in GIT and Confluence where everyone could read it. - Everyone (including contractors) had access to the production environment through the testing environments, including unrestricted access to the production database (without requiring as much as a password). This was not deemed nearly as important as the passwords in the point above. - I received an official warning for disclosing to AWS/GCloud that we did not have CI/CD setup but would be interested in getting one up and running at some point. This was considered to be "sensitive" information. - Ansible deployments taking 12 hours (on a 6 server environment) because as it turns out, some random "security" settings slowed down SSH, incompetent people not really understanding what they we're doing did the rest. - Ansible being blocked because someone in the security department read that it only required HTTPs access, turned out that they were reading the documentation for the WebUI. - Requiring manual deployment of PR's to test environments and manual testing, the "evidence" + logs of doing this was to be documented in a Word document and attached to the PR. - Automation and DevOps was banned because "The law does not allow us to do this" - No rsync due to security reasons, great fun when you had to sync 200k small files :) - PRs were kept around for months, so "senior" developers could estimate the risk. This included fixes that were hotfixed in production so that it was guaranteed to break again at the next 12 hour deployment (thus giving the same developers even more reasons to be even more "cautious" with all future PRs) - Three different database schema's, three different database technologies, microservices, a React frontend, 50 outsourced developers for an internal CRUD application with 2000 entities, to be used by 10-20 users - All .exes not on a whitelist were banned, so in order to run your application you just had to rename it to word.exe :) - At one point external developers were hired, we requested a desktop for them that would allow them to "write" code. They got a locked down VM with notepad installed and nothing else

3y ago

ano-ther 3y ago

They sent me a very phishing looking email. From a domain like db-service.com, only text “there is a problem with your account, please call xxx”, with xxx a number that was nowhere to be found on their website. Turned out to be a legit inquiry from some audit department.

paulddraper 3y ago

I would imagine a water fire to be a very interesting phenomenon, no?