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Comment by rendaw | Hacker News Reader

It's unstated but are we to understand that he set up the test to send money to a test account which was his own personal account?

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Not unheard of, unfortunately.

Funny enough, in a fintech I worked for, developers and QAs actually used their own personal credit cards and bank accounts for testing.

Interestingly, they also needed to test ApplePay, but the laptops didn't allow for adding their personal iCloud accounts. So someone in the development team got the "admin" password and distributed among devs and QA team, and they all had unprotected laptops. They probably still do.

I wonder if NOT providing a separate, exclusive account/card/sim etc to a developer is a common trope in fintech. I avoided linking my personal things like hell, and they avoided giving me a damn immutable plastic that would work/get paid for more than a few days. So much friction just because something stopped working or had to get back into oven and they had no replacement at hand. I even had to maintain a separate table for tracking personal balance-replenishing expenses cause no one’s gonna do it immediately. The same people who were chirping about the importance of experimenting, prototyping and not minding any expenses under $$$ or something all day.

It's a ouroboros of bureaucracy getting in the way of security and security causing the bureaucracy itself.

I work somewhere where it can take four layers of management to get a service or test account. No one has time for that shit.

Not to defend that, but the question is how quickly would they be able to set that dev up with a test-bank account? In the orgs I know this would probably take a month or so.

So taking your own account during early development can make sense. Leaving it in is probably a bad idea tho.

Its my opinion, but you shouldn’t need a bank account or even internet connection to work on the code at all. Instead its better to mock it out in development.

How do you ensure the mocking system represents an accurate and current response without using a real bank account first?

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