
Taking The Hard Way Out: Software entrepreneurs seek fun problems, not lucrative ones. - zach
http://www.advogato.org/person/apenwarr/diary.html?start=147
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far33d
I'm sure that once you got deep into, you'd probably find banking software
pretty difficult. Since it has to work. All the time. 100%. No compromises.
That sounds pretty hard.

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nostrademons
Perhaps depressingly, much banking software _doesn't_ work 100% of the time.
Or at all, occasionally. I've worked on a few large financial apps, and the
general quality level of the industry is pretty disturbing. They aren't
architected much better than a _good_ consumer webapp - more buzzwords, more
heavyweight process, but the actual quality of the code isn't any better, nor
is the developer's understanding of what they're doing.

I've noticed the same problem from a consumer's POV too. I was just on IM with
a friend last night whose online banking account just stopped working for her.
I can't log in online with my BankNorth account, and I get some weird error
code whenever I try a "forget my password" or "reset my PIN". My dad notices
that a couple cents disappear from his bank balance every month, and no matter
how much he checks his arithmetic, there's no way to make it balance. Several
people he's talked to have noticed the same thing.

I've heard that the industry used to be better, that people actually took
"100% uptime" and "don't lose money" seriously before Java and Y2K and all
these newfangled development practices. I knew a developer that was an early
employee and later VP at Stratus, and she really did know her stuff. But she
seems to be a dying breed - everything now is moving towards J2EE and
outsourcing where nobody really takes responsibility for the quality of the
software anymore.

Sometimes I think that all the top-notch engineers at Google and Facebook
should quit their jobs and start financial software companies instead. Because
they really are more highly skilled than the folks who build the software that
manages your life-savings. Facebook manages 3 TB of data in _memcached alone_
without a hitch - that's more than we have on disk at the financial software
company I work for.

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far33d
Hm. Well, my Bank of America account has been flaky and they redesigned it in
some terrible way recently. But I imagine convincing a bank to use your
software is probably harder than getting your code adopted by the mobile
handset carriers.

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mynameishere
_banking software has got to be some of the least technically difficult
software in the universe_

Breathtaking idiocy.

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staunch
From a computer science perspective isn't that mostly true. What challenging
technical problems does a banking system pose?

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papersmith
I suppose security and fraud detection can be quite time-consuming, if you
take it seriously.

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staunch
Yeah those are good points. There are probably quite a few challenging
problems.

