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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • 100÷. I used to work for a bank and the lending team didn’t even know how to calculate loan repayments. They just deferred to what the core banking system did.

    The core banking system was written in a proprietary language in the 70’s and machine translated into another (slightly newer) proprietary language in the 90’s. At the time I wouldnt be surprised if management was patting themselves on the back for a modernisation job well done. Just get the computer to do the conversion, right? The sales guys of the new platform assured us they could migrate everything automatically and we always trust a sales guy!

    Of course the machine translation is like reading machine code so very difficult to understand / follow / change. The developers working on it were in maintenance mode and everyone was afraid to touch it incase some calculation broke.

    The point is that it’s exactly what you described - the users were trained to push buttons and trust the system output without actually knowing what they were doing and if it was correct.

    Pretty sure the bank recently got fined for compliance breaches as well. It’s not because anyone there was bad, they just had no idea how anything was meant to work