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Comment by lobsterthief | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, average American IT infrastructure is the same; the larger the business, the worse it seems to be. Large tech companies like Google are outliers.

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Rather, the large tech companies are some of the worst offenders, but it's coupled with egregious arrogance and a self-held belief that they're better and smarter than everyone else. Google is in an even more unique position as they can bully their way around the internet by breaking and influencing standards at their whims. Ever tried to get support from Google? Go ahead, I'll wait.

That’s a conspiracy theory.

Reality is much mundane and boring: the person writing the web app has no vested interest in the app actually providing a good service for customers. His or her boss doesn’t care either.

It’s simple disinterest: the self-interests of the coders are too far removed from the interests of the customers.

If you’re a solo dev working on a startup and every lost customer is money gone from your pocket, you will pay attention to every little detail.

If you’re a cog in a giant soulless machine, you do the bare minimum and go home.

Not just business. My dad worked for the FBI in IT for about 15 years after he retired from the military. The stories he can tell….

I bank with Chase and the app is really good. Are there major US banks with crappy apps?

Can second this. I'm not even living in the US any longer, and yet I have never had an instance where the Chase website or app failed to provide a wanted service or work as expected. Their I.T, at least from the customer point of view, seems top notch.

I was pretty impressed with the internal IT situation working at JPMC. It's not perfect, but reading this about Deutsche Bank I can see what the alternative is and it's rightfully horrifying.

The US is not anywhere near as bad as Deutsche that's for sure. I think whether or not the app is crappy depends on your perspective in the US. I've never seen one try to give me a pin instead of a password, and like you said, some of them are pretty good like Chase.

PNC Bank’s mobile app and website are pretty bad. The only reason I haven’t switched is due to friction and because I have my mortgage with them. The website won’t work unless I allow 3rd party scripts from Adobe to run. The UX is terrible too.

Odd.. I use PNC website and app regularly and my one complaint is how difficult it is to find my account number. No need for third party scripts.

Last I heard, Google staff use Concur to handle travel... there's no escaping SAP (and similarly frustrating enterprise software) in large corporations, even FAANG ones.

Is SAP good at anything aside from locking customers in? I ask this seriously because I am an outsider on this, but I have never heard a single good thing about SAP. NOT ONE.

>Google staff use Concur to handle travel

I mean what else should they use?

Zoho? Airbase? Rydoo?

Nobody got fired for using Concur

maybe so but they took like a month to call me back about an implementation and I ended up using Certify at my company

works okay but the credit card integration is a complete sh*t show

Have you used Bank of America’s app? It is quite good.

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