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Comment by denimnerd | Hacker News Reader

i work for a bank. my coworkers are mostly not very competent. also sometimes when we move to a new system we don’t get the actual business logic. we just reverse engineer it from the data. the people who knew how it worked were laid off a long time ago

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>when we move to a new system we don’t get the actual business logic. we just reverse engineer it from the data.

I'm pretty sure this happens in most fields that don't spec out absolutely everything in advance. In an ecommerce setting my team had to do this with the checkout logic because the old system was so complex and convoluted. Starting with a fork of a 3rd party platform and then unleashing 10 years of short-term contractor enhancements basically guarantees that no one will have full specs.

well my team builds the software to please regulators so all the original specs were signed off by legal and regulators. the next generation of each project simply fork lifts that data and massages the logic until it matches up

Why is that? Is it because of low pay?

Government style bureaucracy with MBA management culture, heavy risk management, and constant growth by acquisition.

Some roles pay very well, but are inflexible and boring. I knew a guy making $180k as a contractor to be a storage engineer. His entire job was fulfilling SAN zoning requests. He ended up bootstrapping a startup just to stay sane.

Yeah there’s a thousand vice presidents at my location that make 160k which in TX is a high wage. they don’t have high productivity compared to a real tech company. it’s all manual bureaucratic work.

I had a grand-uncle was a bank Vice President. His main responsibility was reading the obituaries of about 25 papers and making sure relatives didn’t open the safe deposit boxes before probate.

Not sure of salary, but his schtick was 12 month leases of black Cadillacs, so it was pretty good. :)

vp is nothing at a bank but i guess it looks good on a resume lol

they haven’t adopted silicon valley style hiring practices so a good resume is all that matters. interviews are a 10m HR screen and a 45 minutes interview by a hiring manager that hasn’t been in the ditches in 10 years. All my coworkers came from a staffing agency like Infosys or Accenture. Contract to hire. I think their resumes were all fake.

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