Absolutely true.
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@quinn @jzillw I spent a few years doing back end dev in a payment service provider that hooked into all the big British high street banks. About 10% of their managers were brilliant, 70% were a waste of oxygen, and 20% were clearly undercover anarchists seeking the downfall of capitalism by weaponizing Svejk-like cheerful ineptitude.
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@bituur_esztreym @cstross @quinn It also shortens to a nice acronym that sounds way less insulting than it really is ("WoO manager", "he has WoOed all the way through this project", "that's a glorious pile of WoO").
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
@cstross As a person, who was working in banking IT: yes, but no.
I do not know, how that matches other banks, but for me that was: they were risk averse, because of that they were conservative, and that has caused another class of problems.
There was one delivery a colleague working in another dept was working on. The delivery required some changes in the storage configuration. It was well tested and documented, and it was sound. However, to make a change on production they needed a blessing from involved department. And, obviously, they needed one from the storage guys, as they will be implementing this part of the change. And they said: sorry, not this quarter.
There was a rule for dept managers: three strikes and you are out. Three serious fuckups (affecting prod) happen during a quarter in your dept, and you're fired. Doesn't matter, if you're at fault.
So, the storage dept has a serious h/w failure already. You know, those pesky spinning rusts decided to get more rusty. And the manager wasn't keen to take any new risks this quarter.
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@bituur_esztreym @cstross @quinn It also shortens to a nice acronym that sounds way less insulting than it really is ("WoO manager", "he has WoOed all the way through this project", "that's a glorious pile of WoO").
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@causticmsngo @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross
So...are you all saying I need to stash my cash under my mattress or in my freezer?@ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross
No. But definitely try not to exceed the FDIC-insured maximum of $250,000 per bank if you can. If you have $500K lying around, keep it in two different banks.
Notwithstanding the incompetence and corruption of the Trump regime, the Federal Reserve and its affiliated systems are still holding up.
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I have a friend who has run loan operations in small to mid-sized regional banks her whole career and it's kind of amazing that none has gone down hard
yet, just on the basis of systems issues. The companies merge repeatedly and each successor enterprise is a frakenstein's monster of old systems from each previous merger held together by baling wire and bubble gum. Throw vibe coding into the mix and the whole jenga pile (to mix metaphors) may finally come tumbling down.Vibe coding could cause a disaster there, yes. But AI assisted refactoring might be part of a solution.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
@cstross I've had a project sponsor in a financial institution tell me, within the same week, "If we get this wrong I could go to prison" and "We can go faster if Copilot reviews the pull requests that Claude generates" so I do not have much trust in banking being averse to risk.
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I have a friend who has run loan operations in small to mid-sized regional banks her whole career and it's kind of amazing that none has gone down hard
yet, just on the basis of systems issues. The companies merge repeatedly and each successor enterprise is a frakenstein's monster of old systems from each previous merger held together by baling wire and bubble gum. Throw vibe coding into the mix and the whole jenga pile (to mix metaphors) may finally come tumbling down.Ex-outsourcing moose here: Mainly "Closed Book Life Insurance" companies with a steadily shrinking workload, so they offload their computing to someone else. Then the companies get bought, sold and merged and we had to migrate the workloads (with incompatible support software (tape management, print archiving, etc.) to a single system. Changing their networks from SNA to TCP/IP was also "interesting"... 3:OP>
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
@cstross As someone who has spent the last twelve or so years working with one of these systems, I regret to report that the people at the top are absolutely working on using LLMs to convert the stable COBOL codebase into Java that runs in the cloud. But on the other hand, they've been talking about moving off the mainframe for at least ten of those twelve years, and we're no closer to it now than we were then
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@cstross I've had a project sponsor in a financial institution tell me, within the same week, "If we get this wrong I could go to prison" and "We can go faster if Copilot reviews the pull requests that Claude generates" so I do not have much trust in banking being averse to risk.
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RE: https://mstdn.ca/@charette/116127384919473905
Absolutely true.
(For those who haven't dealt with banking IT: banks are in the business of managing financial risk, and it doesn't get any riskier than allowing an enthusiastic intern who occasionally lies to you and hallucinates on the job to refactor a 60 year old code base that nobody really understands, without oversight, that handles all your customers' money. The phrase "sued into a smoking crater of banking wreckage the instant anything goes wrong" springs to mind!)
@cstross Don't banks also have a history of getting billions in free money from the government when they fuck up hard enough...?
IT won't make that decision, but most AI mandates are coming from the higher level executives...
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@cstross Don't banks also have a history of getting billions in free money from the government when they fuck up hard enough...?
IT won't make that decision, but most AI mandates are coming from the higher level executives...
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@8r3n7 My experience was of '96-2000.
In 2008/09, half the main banks in the UK were nationalized to stop them going bust and taking half the populations' mortgages and savings with them. They ended up back in private hands again a decade later.
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@quinn @jzillw I spent a few years doing back end dev in a payment service provider that hooked into all the big British high street banks. About 10% of their managers were brilliant, 70% were a waste of oxygen, and 20% were clearly undercover anarchists seeking the downfall of capitalism by weaponizing Svejk-like cheerful ineptitude.
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Vibe coding could cause a disaster there, yes. But AI assisted refactoring might be part of a solution.
@dummzeuch @jawarajabbi @jzillw @cstross The important term is "assisted". And boy, assistance we need with that...
I'm not involved in the project in my company, we are doing exactly that refactoring (though not LLM-assisted) - and in parts actually develop new systems to replace the old one. -
@ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross
No. But definitely try not to exceed the FDIC-insured maximum of $250,000 per bank if you can. If you have $500K lying around, keep it in two different banks.
Notwithstanding the incompetence and corruption of the Trump regime, the Federal Reserve and its affiliated systems are still holding up.
@jawarajabbi @ldmay65 @causticmsngo @jzillw @cstross
And, we presume, have substantial vested interest in not collapsing....
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