When a bank gets a new regulation on their table, they tend to create a department that compartmentalizes the subject within the organisation. That's how we get the exact opposite of what the Agile mindset is. And that's also how we get organisations where nobody wants to work in, except if the pay or day rates are high enough to excuse any suffering. And that's how bad, bloated software is created.

Yes, I believe that some sectors might be worse than others. There are metrics and tools provided by the Software Engineering discipline to measure quality of architecture or code. However, they have remained mostly academic. There is no standard metric, which is widely accepted to be useful. And even if some rare(?) company might systematically measure their code base, they don't put the results in the their home page and not even in the contract with their customer.

As long as that does not change, it's just more or less educated feeling where the situation might be better or worse than elsewhere.

But the worst part was that there turned out to be a single input that completely dominated the final result, and that input was a "gut feel" that the fund manager had about which way the market was going to move. So after all that calculation, the upshot was that the fund investment decisions were being made based on this individual's intuitions, and the entire spreadsheet was just window dressing. Ironically, the audience for the window dressing was the fund manager and his team because the spread sheet was considered proprietary, a closely guarded secret. That's the reason I'm not revealing the name of the manager. I'm probably still bound by the terms of the NDA.

That was the moment that I realized that much, if not most, of Wall Street is a colossal scam.

Alternatively they could wait for in-house IT to take a few years and millions of pounds (add going running over schedule and budget, too) to produce a bug ridden mess that misses.

And more importantly it enables the "money people" and the "1s and 0s people" to work together throughout the software life-cycle. When the people who input the data understand what's going in and the people who read the output know what should come out the black box in the middle is a lot easier to create and maintain.

Of course, the above is a generalization, but I stand by the assertion most tech savy bank workers try to interface with Bank IT as little as possible.

There are ways to test your tests (in a way that does not lead to an infinite regress), and alternatively you can also prove your tests correct; or just use plain old code review.

Outside of that however change is happening. And you will see new products coming out of "Innovations" groups operating entrepreneurially. My colleagues at WF and JPMC are busy experimenting with distributed ledger tech, mobile payments, global micro credit, and other "fintech." And the rollout of Zelle, instant peer-to-peer cash transfers, happened in weeks not months. Literally I was invited to participate in a beta program around the beginning of summer and a few days later billboards advertising the service started popping up around town ;)

You mentioned that your colleagues are working on things that break this mold - I won't try to speak for their companies, but in my experience those sorts of experimental projects (e.g. distributed ledger tech) tend to be wildly underfunded and consequently don't deliver much beyond an overblown, hype-building press release.

I strongly agree with your general point. Just like any extremely large business, there's small sects pushing forward in various ways, while the vast majority toils away on SSDD stuff.

Betas and hacks that make it into production because no-one is allowed to re-engineer things correctly.

Imagine in 2017 still having to run IE6 because there's a web-ui written in a COBOL system back in early 2000 that everyone is afraid to touch. And supporting Solaris 2.6 for similar reasons. You don't have to imagine.

and I agree with everything that's been said. i've been talking with a couple different banks (across the US) and they all are sharing the same concerns, whether their systems are VB6 or newer.

i'm with a group of machine learning and software maintenance folks who are trying to build tools to make refactoring/ migration/ speedups easier. if anyone is curious, we'd love to get feedback on the tools, see if they might help in similar situations, or could be improved.

Had a friend that worked at BBVA Compass. Same deal: huge mess, overworked employees, and awful experience setting up and getting into a workflow.

Why is a PR move worse than an employee who publicly badmouths his employer while being on the payroll? And why is this tolerated (upvoted) when it's a large corporation?

Edit: thanks for downvotes (this was expected)

Why do you not think that employees should be allowed to discuss how their workplace looks in reality?