[jedberg]

For everyone complaining about "how could they not have failover" let me ask you this: Would you take a job with Wells Fargo to fix their infrastructure?

And if you did take such a job, how long do you think it would take you to get the budget and approvals from all the auditors necessary to fix everything?

How much would they have to pay you to take that job, knowing how frustrating it would be to get anything done?

And now you see why banks have such terrible IT.

(One of my mentors actually works at BofA, and says he only does it because he gets to work 6 hours a day, gets a VP title and a ton of money, but nothing ever gets done)

[WhitneyLand]

This gives a good idea of a very real phenomenon that plays a huge but largely hidden role in the failure, success, and form that technology takes at companies.

It's not just infrastructure. Quality, innovation, speed, efficiency, etc. To whatever degree you believe the old 10x programmer meme, believe this: Change that constant 10 to any value for many employees at once at a company and the impact is staggering.

Good people don't think to they are too good for these types of companies. They think the companies are too constraining and place a limit on their ability to realize dreams or their potential to perform.

They don't prefer to work with less passionate peers. Not because such are lesser human beings to be avoided. Rather, it gives them another edge. Constant, motivating, cross-reinforcement during discussion, doesn't just inspire it creates action.

Finally, most of these companies don't have tech as their core business. That correlates very directly to the fact that the most senior and influential people in the company will care less about you, being willing to partner on ideas, etc. It's not personal, Banks think bank stuff is most important and anything else is less important, even if it's a critical operational component of the business.

[Gokenstein]

If you're the best engineer for a company who's bottom line is not direct sales of engineered products you are a middle tier or bottom tier engineer on the open market.

You're the best engineer willing to work in a black box, a niche, in isolation from your peers with constant pushback.

[tnolet]

Well, I bet there are continents of people who would love a corporate IT job at WF. You make it seem like it's equivalent to mining coal in the 1920's.

[tastroder]

It's not like people blame the staff working on wiring the network hardware here. For any company in that position I'd assume they realize their dependence on that part of the infrastructure for their core business. I don't really see the relevance of how long compliance processes take, that's part of the industry and WF didn't discover the internet last week. Salaries in finance reflect that frustration, who cares.

If the answer to that challenge was one of "too hard", "it works for now" or "too expensive" that's still a strategic failure that impacts their core business now.

[close04]

It's because management doesn't want to touch the topic. No CIO wants to risk breaking something so they all pray to God nothing breaks on their watch and they can get their retirement package or move on to the next job and it's someone else's problem.

This is why sometimes absurd amounts of money are paid to keep the old system going as it is. It's "safer" than to move to a new one with the associated risks and teething issues.

[benoror]

Nice mentor you got there

[jedberg]

Heh, well he's also a brilliant technologist. He just has other priorities now.

[dalbasal]

You can sympathize, mock or rationalize through the corporate-political logic that inevitably leads here... the interesting points remain the same: most tech operations suck.

This is not really related to costs. It's related to culture. Costs and quality of software, including infrastructure, range by orders of magnitude per theoretical quanta of software.

We don't really know how to fix this.

[msla]

> And if you did take such a job, how long do you think it would take you to get the budget and approvals from all the auditors necessary to fix everything?

The only people who think auditors are bad are the ones trying to pull something an auditor would catch.

[smolder]

I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion. I had to work on software in a heavily audited (finance) environment and there were a lot of beaurocratic obstacles related to that, but the code was fine and unaffected by the whole process. I would have been happier not having to think about audit requirements and just focusing on making working software.