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Comment by surfingdino | Hacker News Reader

Having worked on projects related to integration of other systems with the banking systems I can confirm a massive lack of skills, experience, and imagination amongst developers and managers working for banks. They pay hundreds of millions of dollars and get very poor return on their investment in IT because they themselves have no people working for them who have any idea how to build a secure system and the consultancies providing bodies have no idea how to build what the client wants. The turf what between various consultancies and managers make things even worse. The results are mediocre and laughable.

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This is by design. For some ideological reason it looks like the biggest fear of bank execs is to depend on talented developers. The prospect of a developer or team that completely crushes deadlines and deliver beyond expectations is horrifying to banks. They find far more palatable to pay tens of millions every year to IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and even far less known and ancient entities than, horror of horrors!!! Have to pay FAANG salaries! This is absolutely a no-no for bank bureaucracies

I've heard this many times, also directly from a guy I knew years ago, so I guess there has to be some truth to it.

What I don't understand is how that comes to be. Are just people who are not skilled enough applying to work at a bank? Do they have some weird selection criteria that tends to discard all the good people?

You'd think that they'd hire some good people by accident and those people would be more than capable of running the whole operation, but apparently they don't.

Decisions are all top down. Projects are run top down. The developer delivers the spec the consultant has approval on. Each idea gies through rounds of approvals. Have a great idea as a developer? Save it for your next role.

Spot on! Also many projects end after achieving the main goal - a powerpoint slide deck, claiming something was done. No one has ability to ask what was done and why it was done. Also the same project is reworked multiple times, during dev stage, over multiple years as the tech becomes old or other dependencies change.

When you do release everyone claims it is never what they wanted. As a developer your job hangs on the fact that you followed the spec. It makes you happy when they cancel a project at the very end. You get to do the fun stuff (coding) and don't have to deal with the negatives of a release.

> Have a great idea as a developer? Save it for your next role.

And if you don't save it you'll get a bollocking for showing initiative. Because, apparently, our fetishistic obsession with WIP-limiting means we can't walk and chew gum at the same time.

I've never worked for a bank but this all sounds very similar to a (mercifully brief) contract I did for a multinational in a different sector many years ago.

In my experience of these things the environment at many banks greatly reduced the effectiveness of technical software staff. For example when I went to do some workshops for a bank a while back on data science, half the room didn't have their access approved to get the data and a third of the room didn't have access to the big data platform and many couldn't install any analysis software on their work laptops and it had been over 8 weeks since their project started. People who are really passionate about technology will find this sort of situation quite annoying.

I work at a bank and we could work at the same bank.

Approvals take 6 to 8 months

The level of technical debt is also huge. So there is just tons of bureaucracy and red tape that you couldn't even make a big difference if you wanted to. The difference of working at a startup vs. a big stodgy company is just so immense. Not saying startups have it all right, but even if you are a 10x dev in the startup world, you would be amazed how quickly that motivation could dissipate working at a place that moves at a snails pace.

They do hire good people sometimes but then those good people leave. One of my colleague was complaining about getting sign off from 12 different people for releasing a minor feature to Prod.

Most people dont like that kind of bureaucracy.

Commenter is talking about retail banks that outsource everything. They get bottom of the barrel outsourcing firms that sends them any hot body that's available (you don't need to be a developer to enter an outsourcing firm).

Add the usual outsourcing issues, managing communications across 3 countries and 3 opposing project managers and little happens.

Banking does have good developers but they mostly aggregate in investment banks and hedge funds, that are inhouse and have more means. Retail banking is unfortunately not a great industry financially or technically.

The same reason that trust fund kids end up being dumb and lazy. When you have a corporate cash machine printing money, you end up getting lazy and stupid.

This

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