Huh, interesting. Our company switched from Paychex to ADP last year. In the last month or so their online portal went through a redesign and now looks fairly similar to most modern-day web content. We also have the ability to see our paystubs, request time off and sign up for health coverage all from the same portal.

This is part of the problem. Huge enterprise companies in this space primarily grow through acquisitions, leading to a huge patchwork of products in the same company all doing the same thing. ADP are kings at this—so many different versions of so many different products (again, all doing the same thing) that there is no one ADP experience.

I think this is one of many reasons smaller companies are chipping away at these behemoths because the companies themselves (ahem, SAP) can't even keep it all straight.

I used to send a monthly email asking for my payroll slip since VS2013 required an upgrade to IE 10/11 and adp was only able to run on IE 5-9. The thing that always got me was the error message which ran something like: "please update your browser to a compatible one from this list of 4 year old software, your current browser is not advanced enough".

Sigh.

Cut them some slack. How could they anticipate that you would be running a browser from the future? /s

It is pretty typical to split sensitive personal information (e.g. SSN, pay, health records, etc) from administrative activities (e.g. leave requests). In the event that the administrative side gets compromised, it will limit how "bad" that compromise might be, additionally they may be required to store sensitive information differently (e.g. better physical security, server-drive encryption, etc).

In a well designed system this kind of segmentation and isolation can be done in a way that is transparent to the user experience.

TL;DR Have your front end talk to multiple backends-

The front end is where it usually gets compromised

Then both passwords get captured on the front end.

There's no benefit to multiple accounts unless the more important one is used much more rarely.

but they share the same username and password on the different portal?

Is this using "TLDR" as a synonym for "hint"?

I'd guess it's just turning into "thing to put at the end of a post" much like "meme" became "picture with unrelated words on top"

Not being a dick. I'm genuinely curious about the evolving usage of words.

That's not what ADP is doing. :)

>Both sites look like they were made in the IE 5/6 web development drought.

Complete it old Java Requirements and everything...

It sounds pretty similar to every 3rd party or in-house payroll/timekeeping system I've ever used, then. These things tend to be implemented silo-style because the company might change insurance providers and not payroll providers, or vice versa, ditto pension plans, health savings accounts, etc.