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I did work in banking for a few years. The article is accurate, especially about the detective work involved in tracking down data problems. But there is yet a

by synnik 17y ago

I did work in banking for a few years. The article is accurate, especially about the detective work involved in tracking down data problems. But there is yet another underlying problem behind the IT systems. The leadership of the banks I've worked with considered IT just a "cost center". They recognized the problems with the systems, but rather than investing in improvements, they threw blame towards IT, approving budgets only grudgingly. The leaders in the industry need to start to respect technology and the people behind it before anything will change.

stcredzero 17y ago
Happenings at a multinational petroleum firm: One process writes something to a database table. Another periodically queries it out of a table. This results in an email with a text attachment being generated. The text attachment is then retrieved from the inbox and FTP'd to another server, where a polling process retrieves it, does some processing, and ends up saving something into a database table. I am not making this up, one distributed system was really put together like this. What's more, this Rube Goldberg monstrosity broke all the time, and when it got fixed, the techie doing the fix was lauded, since he was ensuring this link, which was vitally important to the business, continued to work.