TSB banking app is failing, users presented with error “Not enough good slaves”

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15 points·davidgerard··5 comments

I'm worried by the fact that low-level backend exceptions are returned directly to clients, but then again this is a big legacy bank so no surprise there considering the salaries they pay their engineers and the terrible working environment. You get what you pay for.

TSB have had problems for years after they separated their infrastructure from Lloyds. They had a major weekish long outage and had to call in IBM to get them back and running. Not surprising they're still having problems.

They had an absolute shit-show of a migration a couple years ago where people were seeing others' accounts. "You get what you pay for" has struck them once and strikes again.

A good engineering culture requires investment, both in monetary fronts (make it worthwhile for people to actually work for you) as well as political/work environment fronts - engineering should be a first-class citizen in the business and not something on the wayside. Legacy companies still don't want to learn this because a lot of people's salaries currently depend on them not learning it.

Okay, maybe those folks who were warning us about that problematic "master-slave" terminology had a point after all. Now how do I fix my clunky IDE hard drives?

Make them all masters.

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