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> This position is the most important one in the bank, at least from a technical standpoint. If, let’s say, my mother and everyone on her team would quit their
by vanderZwan 3y ago
> This position is the most important one in the bank, at least from a technical standpoint. If, let’s say, my mother and everyone on her team would quit their job, the bank would go under within a matter of weeks if they’re lucky.
And given how big the market share of Nordea is in Sweden (and other Nordic countries, for that matter) that would probably bring down the Swedish, and possibly Nordic economy. Which would then impact a lot of the EU as well, I guess.
Ever since reading this article I've wondered if these COBOL programmers that keep banks like this running are an enormously underestimated "bus factor" for many of the world's economies, and what kind of back-up plans they have for such a scenario.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordea
- TomK32 3y agoAs a programmer who has been hit by a bus (after riding on that same bus for five hours to it's endstop in western Greece) I'd like to point out that getting hit and killed by a car is a much higher risk. Add the rise of SUV sales which are more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, and you might be as surprised as I am that banks don't go down due to dead programmers but due to bad accounting and fraud...
- vanderZwan 3y agoIf only "SUV factor" rolled of the tongue better, I'd switch in a heartbeat. I hope you came out with more of a scare than anything else?
- TomK32 3y agoyeah, just a scare and something for the CV :-)
- veddox 3y agoThe „bus factor“ is a pars-pro-toto idiom. The „bus“ refers to any event that suddenly removes an important team member. This could be literally being hit by a bus (or SUV…), but could also be an illness, a move to another city, or simply a new position.
- rsynnott 3y ago> and what kind of back-up plans they have for such a scenario. I mean, notoriously, stop working, for weeks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Migration_to_the_Sabadell_Proteo_banking_platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TSB_Bank_(United_Kingdom)#Migr... (I've got to assume that loss of institutional knowledge was a big factor in that fiasco.)
- bear8642 3y ago>programmers that keep banks like this running are an enormously underestimated "bus factor" for many of the world's economies, and what kind of back-up plans they have for such a scenario. Hmm, makes me wonder about potential similar situation with APL programmers - a language I know quite a few large companies use.
- glaucon 3y agoWow, I'd forgotten APL existed, my finger-in-the-air sense is that while APL occupied/occupies some important places in infrastructure the actual number of lines of code (and so, roughly, maintenance effort required) is significantly smaller ? I'm not doubting that what it does is important but just thinking that the size of the installed base that will, in time, need to be replaced is quite a bit smaller than COBOL.
- ngcc_hk 3y agoAre you joking to compare number of lines of apl with cobol. Come on. One page of apl can do thousand.
- vanderZwan 3y agoLol, I never considered how hard it would be to compare APL codebases to other codebases. It's probably also a lot more difficult to read someone else's APL cole, given the symbol overloadin. In which case porting it is even harder beyond the somewhat-quantifyable difference in "code density" between langages would suggest
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]