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Comment by haswell | Hacker News Reader

I spent ~7 years or so at one of the large credit card companies. The adage "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" was very prevalent there, and anything that even hinted at touching the core payment processing code was scrutinized heavily and usually avoided entirely.

At the time, the cost of an outage was estimated in the $100K's per minute, and is likely significantly higher now.

When I moved away from FinServ, I found it surprising at first how cavalier some orgs are about ripping/replacing core services in the name of "modernization". Move fast & break things and all of that...

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As someone who was recruited to a financial firm a year ago to execute a modernization effort, I think the difference is due to (simplified) two types of firms: Big ones with huge moats often protected by regulators and profitability, and ones that are insecure. There is a pretty big population of companies that are at huge risk of being disrupted in the best sense of that term, and that's why they need to modernize. Many of these outdated core systems don't have modern capabilities, such as being desktop apps that can't integrate with the web or provide/use APIs without heavy refactoring anyway.

Those big companies can be disrupted even faster if they break something though.

I'm not allowed to talk about it, but I know people in tier-2 support who were on an all night phone call with a big bank customer because if the computer wasn't up by morning the government would shut them down. (somewhat like the government did shut down some big banks in the 2008 crisis, but this was in the 1990s) At the start of the call the rep told them "We are pretty sure we know where the problem is and it isn't you, but we need you on the phone anyway just in case anyone has a question you are ready to answer." That is also why big companies have the million dollar support contracts: someone who can stay up all night and answer obscure questions.

Break things is a bad thing sometimes. I wish more of the move fast and break things companies would realize who annoying it is when they break something.

Some years ago, one of the UK's air traffic control systems needed to be uplifted off the deprecated hardware it ran on. Going anywhere near the code itself was a total no-no - even though there were known glitches, the risk of touching that code was just deemed too high. So they instead wrote an emulator for the old machine and ran the unaltered s/w that way. Never underestimate the power of legacy that works.

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