
Ask HN: Does anyone have any inside info on Visa and MasterCard engineering? - jorgecastillo
We hear a lot about Google, Apple, Microsoft &amp; Facebook, since most people use one or more products from these companies. Yet we never hear about Visa &amp; MasterCard, even though their use is equally widespread. After reading Wikipedia I got curious, so I am wondering if anyone on HN has ever worked at any of these two companies.
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throwaway-1337
I don't work for any of them, but I have worked with VISA as I work for a
large payment gateway.

I'll say this - they can do some impressive transactions per second (they
hover around 2000/sec) and can burst to 40,000/sec, but they can't sustain
that amount.

That being said, all the VISA engineers I've worked with are woefully
incompetent, to the point they've spent 3+ months trying to integrate to our
payment API, and we have to conference with them to help them out.

I'm talking one POST to our servers, and one browser redirect, most developers
get it done in a few days.

Then when we integrated to them directly over individual banks (at their
request, they paid a lot of money for this), their API was terrible, REST,
RCP, XML, JSON, SOAP? Nope - a very strict space delimited text file, mean't
to be read by a mainframe from the 60's.

We can't even send them ASCII text they use a different character set that
competed with ASCII at the time of punch cards (sorry can't recall what it's
called).

I'm sure they're mainframes are virtualized these days, but there system still
acts like it's 50 years old.

In summary I'm sure they do some cool stuff somewhere in the company, but I
haven't seen any of it. You'd be surprised just how much tape holds the banks
and VI/MC together, they lose money all the time, have no clue where it goes,
but as long as it's less then 10 million they don't really care, they just pay
it out of their own pockets.

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davismwfl
Probably this character set:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC)

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mikecke
I've met with a few folks. Both companies are becoming more open with their
platform.

