How they describe it: https://www.bundesbank.de/en/service/reporting-systems/exter...
Any single transaction exceeding 12500€ entering (or leaving) Germany has to be manually reported here. So for example if you're living in Germany and working remotely as a contractor for a US based company you'll probably have to report your income every month.
There are many exceptions that don't need manual reporting though, like if you're buying physical goods from overseas. I guess those are already automatically tracked through other ways.
For fun, I just tried to login at ~9:30 PM local time on a Sunday, and it said:
"Access Denied"
"You cannot access the resource you have requested at this time."
"The resource you have requested is protected by a policy restricting access to specific time periods. Your request has occured outside of those permitted time periods."
My favourite thing on that website is the script block inside a noscript tag that they actually expect to run. Things like that tend to suggest the developers have absolutely no idea how to code for a web browser.
I mean what else would they use?
works okay but the credit card integration is a complete sh*t show
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.
To give a few examples:
- Running all services under a single Linux account, then requiring vendors to support password encryption in the startup scripts (everyone can access our production passwords!), then proceeding to store the production password in plain text in GIT and Confluence where everyone could read it.
- Everyone (including contractors) had access to the production environment through the testing environments, including unrestricted access to the production database (without requiring as much as a password). This was not deemed nearly as important as the passwords in the point above.
- I received an official warning for disclosing to AWS/GCloud that we did not have CI/CD setup but would be interested in getting one up and running at some point. This was considered to be "sensitive" information.
- Ansible deployments taking 12 hours (on a 6 server environment) because as it turns out, some random "security" settings slowed down SSH, incompetent people not really understanding what they we're doing did the rest.
- Ansible being blocked because someone in the security department read that it only required HTTPs access, turned out that they were reading the documentation for the WebUI.
- Requiring manual deployment of PR's to test environments and manual testing, the "evidence" + logs of doing this was to be documented in a Word document and attached to the PR.
- Automation and DevOps was banned because "The law does not allow us to do this"
- No rsync due to security reasons, great fun when you had to sync 200k small files :)
- PRs were kept around for months, so "senior" developers could estimate the risk. This included fixes that were hotfixed in production so that it was guaranteed to break again at the next 12 hour deployment (thus giving the same developers even more reasons to be even more "cautious" with all future PRs)
- Three different database schema's, three different database technologies, microservices, a React frontend, 50 outsourced developers for an internal CRUD application with 2000 entities, to be used by 10-20 users
- All .exes not on a whitelist were banned, so in order to run your application you just had to rename it to word.exe :)
- At one point external developers were hired, we requested a desktop for them that would allow them to "write" code. They got a locked down VM with notepad installed and nothing else
Both founders are German speaking. Good guys.
Although that was a small firm not a giant
(I worked for a Swiss company from Germany. That's how I ended up here.)
The firm in my post above is very much a Swiss firm though, you've probably heard of them, they're not a bank.
Lack of talent is not an issue in Germany. German unis and schools produces great devs. The whole "talent shortage" in Germany is propaganda from companies engaging in wage suppression, and actually a shortage of pay that keeps decent devs away from shit companies.
It's more the lack of good pay to motivate people, but the main issues are the immovable and outdated bureaucracy without any wish to address it, and the heavy top - down approach where top management is clueless and dysfunctional, scaring away the top talent over time and only ensuring that equally clueless yes-men stay.
These large German "ships" are only good at bureaucracy, maintaining the jobs and status quo for those at the top, not innovation or customer satisfaction.
My favorite about German companies is project management done in Excel, and bosses who don't want to use Jira and demand their seniors send them emails explaining the current work status. You can't make this up.
Just kidding, nightmarish as it is, beats emails and excel for sure.
Classic strategy :D, those aren't seniors: they're Gods.
I want that on a shirt lol
- technologies had to be evaluated to be allowed on the network. This process took years. Git (as a replacement for subversion) had been in evaluation for over 14 years at the time.
- network authentication mechanisms made building an http/s Webservice internally impossible without the security teams approval which takes months.
- ironically the 'rules' around 'security' were regularly broken and not audited when it was convenient for someone with the clout to make something happen.
From a domain like db-service.com, only text “there is a problem with your account, please call xxx”, with xxx a number that was nowhere to be found on their website.
Turned out to be a legit inquiry from some audit department.
When I asked support why I have to pay for my depot (even though its free if I have a checking account) they said they signed me up under two separate customer IDs, but they cannot simply consolidate them. I have to open a new depot and transfer my stocks.
I can't choose a password for my account; instead they assigned me a 6-digit PIN (Not kidding. A PIN).
When I registered my account at a local branch I gave them my dutch phone number. Their website's transaction page wouldn't load due to a JavaScript parsing error over the dutch phone number format. I called customer support and they basically reacted as if water was burning. They would promise to get back to me. 3 weeks later I still couldn't access my online bank account's transaction page. I ended up eventually manually editing the HTML in inspector in order to be able to navigate to the page where I could update my phone number to a German one and I never heard back from support.
I tried opening a depot account for trading stocks. It just says "Internal server error. your account id is incompatible. Please open an additional account with Deutsche Bank". I then tried this; had to go to KYC all over again; but I can't because I can't register two accounts on the 2FA app that is mandatory to have on my phone. Customer support adviced to get a second phone (??).
and I'm just a normal customer. It's impossible to bank with this bank. Every time I have to interact with them it feels like i'm in some weird fever dream.