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by oldsecondhand 339 days ago
> missing the real problem that your developers are probably using their home gaming PC for work because it's 10x faster than the garbage you gave them.

> Yes, this happens. All the time. You just don't know because you made the perfect the enemy of the good.

That only happens in cowboy coding startups.

In places where security matters (e.g. fintech jobs), they just lock down your PC (no admin rights), encrypt the storage and part of your VPN credentials will be on a part of your storage that you can't access.
2 comments
jesus_666 339 days ago
In my experience, fintech companies (including ones that either belong to or own a bank) follow one of two playbooks:

- Issue high-powered laptops that the developers work on directly, then install so many security suites that Visual Studio takes three minutes to launch. The tech stack is too crusty and convoluted to move to anything else like developer VMs without major breakage. - Rely 100% on Entra ID to protect a tech stack that's either 100% Azure or 99% Azure with the remaining 1% being Citrix. You can dial in with anything that can run a Citrix client or a browser modern enough to run the AVD web client. If they could somehow move the client hardware to the Azure cloud, they would.

I don't really associate fintech with a modern, well-implemented tech stack. Well, I suppose moving everything to the cloud is modern but that doesn't mean it's particularly well done.

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jiggawatts 338 days ago
Microsoft, Google, or Amazon don't t care about your fintech code. Other fintechs do.

The threat isn't your cloud provider stealing your code, it's your own staff walking out the door with it and either starting their own firm or giving it to a competitor in exchange for a "job" at 2x their previous salary.

I've seen very high security fintech setups first-hand and I've got friends in the industry, including a friend that simply memorised the core algorithms, walked out, rewrote it from scratch in a few years and is making bank right now.

PS: The TV show Severance is the wet dream of many fintech managers.

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