5 ms·

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 fi

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.
- Nextgrid 3y ago
  Paying good salaries (2x market rate) to 300 people will still be much cheaper than paying market rates to thousands of people (which is what legacy orgs currently do) and then the problem goes away. Disguised self-employment is not the only way to run a successful engineering team.
  - DanielHB 3y ago
    > paying market rates to thousands of people (which is what legacy orgs currently do) * paying contractor rates to thousands of people
microtonal 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. There is also a large cultural component. Having lived both in The Netherlands and Germany, dealing with banks or government institutions is a stark difference. The large Dutch banks (eg. ING) are efficient, you can arrange everything online and they have modern apps. With German banks for every small administrative change we had to go to a physical office and the apps/website looked as if they were literally from 1999 (and weird security practices like using a pin to log in). Similar with government institutions, in NL almost everything can be arranged online with a single authentication method (everything from requesting a parking permit to filing for taxes). In Germany it's a lot of literal paperwork, going to offices, waiting in line, and no integration between administration of different public institutions. My wife (who is German) says that one factor is German history (nazis and the stasi), which makes people distrust any kind of central (digital) administration. So all databases are uncoupled from eachother, people prefer cash, etc. Another thing that is really stifling in Germany is the hierarchy, there is so much formalistic bullshit around company/government/... hierarchies. I experienced this a lot when working with the university administration (I was a researcher/lecturer at a German university). No one dares to make choices that can have some impact, afraid that higher-ups, the court, or whatever will punish them for making the wrong choice. So they hide behind rules and necessary decisions are not made/postponed. Almost no one stands up to their leadership, so even they have wrong ideas, there is rarely any counterbalance.
- aleph_minus_one 3y ago
  > My wife (who is German) says that one factor is German history (nazis and the stasi), which makes people distrust any kind of central (digital) administration. So all databases are uncoupled from eachother, people prefer cash, etc. True. > Another thing that is really stifling in Germany is the hierarchy, there is so much formalistic bullshit around company/government/... hierarchies. I experienced this a lot when working with the university administration (I was a researcher/lecturer at a German university). No one dares to make choices that can have some impact, afraid that higher-ups, the court, or whatever will punish them for making the wrong choice. So they hide behind rules and necessary decisions are not made/postponed. Almost no one stands up to their leadership, so even they have wrong ideas, there is rarely any counterbalance. This depends a lot on the company, and is something that you, in my experience, mostly experience at big companies, government-run companies and government agencies (this includes university administrations, even though at many faculties, things are completely fine (even many professors prefer to keep away from the university administration as far as it is possible in their job)). So, if you really don't like this, attempt to look for a smaller company as your employer and/or find a job in the private sector.
lIIllIIllIIllII 3y ago
there are a whole array of "neobanks" in Australia, a few of which have been bought out by large incumbents and their IT platforms subsumed into the colossus or whatever. I can hazard a guess why this hasn't happened in Germany but I don't want to make assumptions based on stereotypes, lol.
- jamil7 3y ago
  No this definitely happened in Germany too, Solaris has been around for a long time and a whole slew of German neobanks and trading apps have been built on top of it. You can open an account with most of them by downloading the app and doing a video identification process with your id. Culturally though, older Germans mistrust then and want to use the older, established banks with physical branches.
  - Tainnor 3y ago
    The problem is that some of these neobanks suck too, e.g. N26 is a bit notorious for bad security (at least in the past).
    - jamil7 3y ago
      > The problem is that some of these neobanks suck too, e.g. N26 is a bit notorious for bad security (at least in the past). In the case of N26, the exploits that CCC found were disclosed and fixed before the presentation, this was also a while ago now, 2016-17 maybe? I'm not sure what the situation is now, though.
      - h4ckerle 3y ago
        N26 is also infamous for being the go-to-bank for cybercriminals. That may be because they are easier to fool than your local bank branch where most financial stuff happens in Germany, but my impression is, that they don't care...
        3y ago

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.

Nextgrid 3y ago
Paying good salaries (2x market rate) to 300 people will still be much cheaper than paying market rates to thousands of people (which is what legacy orgs currently do) and then the problem goes away. Disguised self-employment is not the only way to run a successful engineering team.
- DanielHB 3y ago
  > paying market rates to thousands of people (which is what legacy orgs currently do) * paying contractor rates to thousands of people

microtonal 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. There is also a large cultural component. Having lived both in The Netherlands and Germany, dealing with banks or government institutions is a stark difference. The large Dutch banks (eg. ING) are efficient, you can arrange everything online and they have modern apps. With German banks for every small administrative change we had to go to a physical office and the apps/website looked as if they were literally from 1999 (and weird security practices like using a pin to log in). Similar with government institutions, in NL almost everything can be arranged online with a single authentication method (everything from requesting a parking permit to filing for taxes). In Germany it's a lot of literal paperwork, going to offices, waiting in line, and no integration between administration of different public institutions. My wife (who is German) says that one factor is German history (nazis and the stasi), which makes people distrust any kind of central (digital) administration. So all databases are uncoupled from eachother, people prefer cash, etc. Another thing that is really stifling in Germany is the hierarchy, there is so much formalistic bullshit around company/government/... hierarchies. I experienced this a lot when working with the university administration (I was a researcher/lecturer at a German university). No one dares to make choices that can have some impact, afraid that higher-ups, the court, or whatever will punish them for making the wrong choice. So they hide behind rules and necessary decisions are not made/postponed. Almost no one stands up to their leadership, so even they have wrong ideas, there is rarely any counterbalance.

aleph_minus_one 3y ago
> My wife (who is German) says that one factor is German history (nazis and the stasi), which makes people distrust any kind of central (digital) administration. So all databases are uncoupled from eachother, people prefer cash, etc. True. > Another thing that is really stifling in Germany is the hierarchy, there is so much formalistic bullshit around company/government/... hierarchies. I experienced this a lot when working with the university administration (I was a researcher/lecturer at a German university). No one dares to make choices that can have some impact, afraid that higher-ups, the court, or whatever will punish them for making the wrong choice. So they hide behind rules and necessary decisions are not made/postponed. Almost no one stands up to their leadership, so even they have wrong ideas, there is rarely any counterbalance. This depends a lot on the company, and is something that you, in my experience, mostly experience at big companies, government-run companies and government agencies (this includes university administrations, even though at many faculties, things are completely fine (even many professors prefer to keep away from the university administration as far as it is possible in their job)). So, if you really don't like this, attempt to look for a smaller company as your employer and/or find a job in the private sector.

lIIllIIllIIllII 3y ago

there are a whole array of "neobanks" in Australia, a few of which have been bought out by large incumbents and their IT platforms subsumed into the colossus or whatever. I can hazard a guess why this hasn't happened in Germany but I don't want to make assumptions based on stereotypes, lol.

jamil7 3y ago
No this definitely happened in Germany too, Solaris has been around for a long time and a whole slew of German neobanks and trading apps have been built on top of it. You can open an account with most of them by downloading the app and doing a video identification process with your id. Culturally though, older Germans mistrust then and want to use the older, established banks with physical branches.
- Tainnor 3y ago
  The problem is that some of these neobanks suck too, e.g. N26 is a bit notorious for bad security (at least in the past).
  - jamil7 3y ago
    > The problem is that some of these neobanks suck too, e.g. N26 is a bit notorious for bad security (at least in the past). In the case of N26, the exploits that CCC found were disclosed and fixed before the presentation, this was also a while ago now, 2016-17 maybe? I'm not sure what the situation is now, though.
    - h4ckerle 3y ago
      N26 is also infamous for being the go-to-bank for cybercriminals. That may be because they are easier to fool than your local bank branch where most financial stuff happens in Germany, but my impression is, that they don't care...
      - 3y ago