13 Replies to “I, For One, Welcome Our New Self-Driving Overlords”

  1. yeeeeeeeeHAAAAAAA !!!!
    I absoLUTELY love this stuff.
    I went thru 3 mainframe switchovers in my day, not one went according to plan, but the 3rd one was close. not to brag, but I think in small part because by then the powers-that-be respected my skill level and paid attention to my suggestions.
    I was a mainframe operator for 15 yrs and got out in ’85 when the writing on the wall happened.
    seriously, it is actually good when this shyt happens occasionally. reminds the plebes EXACTLY where *we* are on the totem pole.

    sign of the times . . . .

  2. Good news for IT professionals looking for a new job. TSB will be hiring. Sadly for them, the current IT staff at TSB will also be looking for new positions.

    What a catastrophe for the bank. It may actually fail as a result. Who is going to trust them going forward? I wouldn’t.

    I’ve been on-line banking for 5 years and have had nothing but positive experiences so far. However, I keep some actual cash on hand in case of unexpected issues and also keep some funds in a local bank. It’s only prudent.

  3. 1. Is it tax time in England? I hope so.
    2. Kate looks too good having had a new baby? She looks normal to me, tell those fatties to get in shape before they become pregos and stay that way for the duration before their husbands take their sorrows to the nearest barmaid.
    3. The english press… sometimes so refreshing.

  5. I’ve never had this problem. But then I still use actual money (well, the paper that gov says is money) to pay for things. I have resisted the laziness of becoming a compete borg/drone to all technology. Of course some advances have been needed and are good but definitely not all of them.

  6. I have been saying it for at least 15 years, computers will be our downfall.

    don t get me wrong, they re wonderful machines, for certain things they are great, but our entire civilization should not be depending on them. ( maybe this could be phrased better, my first language is French )

    or as a Canadian stand up comic used to say ( I think he was called ” that Canadian guy ” ??);

    the entire knowledge of the planet should not be all on one device that can be erased with a fridge magnet

    1. …that can be erased with a fridge magnet.

      I’ve often joked that everything is connected to a Commodore 64 in a warehouse amidst acres of computers. No one knows what it does but they’re afraid to disconnect it. 😉

    2. No, the incompetence of IT administrators, software programmers and their management will be.

      The fundamental problem with software as a business sector is that it refuses to adopt basic engineering principles. They get away with this because the consequences for failure are often negligible, and their customers have been conditioned to accept a service/failure level they would never tolerate elsewhere.

      This is coming to Canada. I work in this sector, and over the last year all the major banks in Canada have been hiring like mad for Agile developers and DevOps engineers. The thirty year old mainframes in the basement are reaching their end-of-life, and all the banks are about to transition at the same time.

      FWIW, BMO seems to be the only bank not hiring in this field.

  7. Ah, the joys of benchmarking. I am an old mainframer and have been through more than one episode of great surprise at the end of a conversion. But you should anticipate your expected computing load.

    From link above:

    TSB CEO Paul Pester is now on Sky News, discussing the IT crisis which forced the bank to take its internet banking and mobile app offline this morning.

    He says that the vast majority of TSB’s services have been running smoothly since last weekend’s IT migration.

    Q: So what’s gone wrong?

    Pester says that TSB’s website app struggled with a “large number of concurrent users”, who tried to access their accounts on Sunday evening once the migration process was over.
    We didn’t have enough bandwidth to cope, he says – so we’re addressing that problem now.

    Q: Was the new platform not tested properly?

    Pester says there was “extensive testing”, with nine cycles of testing before the bank took the plunge. It’s very hard to recreate how customers are going to use the platform. he says.

    Burning the midnight oil getting ready for the big show

  9. It would not surprise me one bit to find that “Agile” project management is at the core of this.
    Its a stupid idea for real-world, critical systems. It boils down to testing in production.

    The idea that you “discover” and accommodate requirements as you develop and deploy code is lunatic.
    It may be relatively easy to delete three weeks worth of code and start again, but deleting a data center or two and suddenly realizing that the hardware you bought is inadequate tends not to go down well.

    Of course, they will tell you that’s ok, because we do everything on virtual machines “in the cloud”.
    Without mentioning that using bigger VMs will blow a huge hole in your budget.

    A couple more like this, and I can see a lot of agile project managers looking for new jobs – maybe as road sweepers.

  11. I’m in the business and this seems like a case study in what not to do.

    In a separate thought:

    Will this ever be used as one big reason why we SHOULD NOT go to a digital cash system??

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