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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

"Not thinking, just complying" isn't the panacea for good outcomes you make it out to be. You definitely want to limit the amount of excitement, but I've seen many issues caused by legacy formats and practices as well.

> You comply with your employer's practices end of story.

What if you're the employer ("first engineer" etc.), and there are no practices yet? Fintech almost by definition sometimes includes doing things from scratch because some existing solution or incumbent organization isn't working that well anymore.

> Unless its your job to architect stuff

Which seems to be the target audience/scenario for TFA.

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> What if you're the employer ("first engineer" etc.), and there are no practices yet?

In that scenario the practices will still come first. You're not going to be doing any coding or systems engineering until you've got compliance signed off. You're going to be spending lots of time with lawyers and compliance people.

> Fintech almost by definition sometimes includes doing things from scratch

Yes, but cut through the noise of the typical Fintech fancy website and app and you're still staring straight down the barrel of spending 80% of your time on regulatory compliance.

Try as you might there are only so many ways you can re-invent the wheel for dealing with hard-facts legislation.

Please show me the regulation that tells me whether to use big decimals or integers in my internal monetary amount representation. Regulations usually care about outcomes (sometimes high, sometimes low level); they often don't tell you how to technically achieve them.

And if your lawyers and compliance people are actually telling you that you can absolutely not do any financial processing yourself, that the only possible way to be compliant is to license <incumbent product xyz> (unfortunately only available in COBOL) etc., you might not actually be working in a fintech, or at least not in the kind this guide seems to be targeted to.

Frankly, this kind of attitude is exactly why banking and payments is as fossilized as it is in some countries, and why fintech is eating their lunch in many cases. There has to be a balance between trying new things and doing what everybody else is already doing.

This sounds great until your counterparties, banks, the government, customers and others complain bitterly that your monetary amounts are off.

Your expectations of course are not unusual because so many developers work on systems where users are not the customers, but the product.

Facebook, Insta, Google all fuck up results very regularly, but what are you gonna do when they do?

Now imagine your bank occasionally losing deposits, your account balance going up and down a percent or two every day, the IRS fining you for tax evasion because your Cool Fintech Rounding does not match generally accepted accounting rules.

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