#technicaldebt

If I bet my life on anything, it’s American Exceptionalism rooted in integrity, excellence, and courage.
Working alongside our global teams has only reinforced it: no other country comes close.

Yet stepping back, it’s clear how offshoring and outsourcing to low-cost, low-capability paired with unchecked onshore importing,
has frayed the very fabric of this nation.

These are people who haven’t invented or dominated in any meaningful field beyond cheap IT services.
What the he-l are we doing?
These jobs belong to American workers.
Have we done nearly enough to build the skills of those in weaker economic corners? There are proven ways to give back: rigorous education, hands-on training, community engagement . Lift them into the middle class and show them how capitalism actually works: through merit, productivity, and upward mobility.
Instead, too many short-sighted, narcissistic managers chase RSU windfalls by flooding teams with cheap bodies, piling up technical debt and hollowing out our edge.
Enough. Everyone must do their part,whatever it takes. No excuses. . It’s now or never.

Can we talk about our failure modes?

Our core product has exactly two states: working, or completely down. There is no middle. No degraded mode, no read-only fallback, no "feature X is unavailable but the rest still works." When something breaks, it doesn't inconvenience customers, it stops their business entirely.

That is a design choice, not an inevitability. And I think we keep making it because the honest answer to "why is it built this way" is "because it's always been built this way."

Every dependency we have is currently a single point of total failure. A hiccup in one subsystem takes down the whole thing. We treat that as an ops problem to be monitored and paged on, when it's actually an architecture problem we've decided not to solve.

Graceful degradation costs something upfront. You have to define what "partial" means for each subsystem, build the fallback paths, decide what's safe to shed under load, and actually test the failure modes. That's real work. But the alternative is what we have now: every incident is a worst-case incident.

I'm not asking for a ground-up rewrite. I'm asking us to tier our failures. Which ones should be invisible to customers, which should be a minor inconvenience, and which are genuinely catastrophic? I'd bet most of what currently triggers a full outage belongs in the "inconvenient" bucket and could be isolated without rebuilding everything.

We accept this as normal. We shouldn't....

"Based on 2025–2026 reports, Fiserv has faced significant scrutiny and operational issues, leading to allegations of providing substandard service, technical instability, and utilizing "junk fees".

Why is he still around? Shankar and Vivek sat on legacy systems for so so long. I remember a struggle few years ago when I wanted us to move to better new backend system but I was shut down saying they do not have budget.

I am pretty sure they wasted millions of dollars on hiring contractors to rip off Verizon.

TIAA is ruining career prospects for me. We use outdated legacy tech and things move so slowly. We have to learn tremendously outside of the job to even have a chance getting a better job. Please beware of the consequences of working here. What you think is normal here is actually insanely disorganized.