Wells Fargo tech is in big trouble. There have been major outages affecting large numbers of customers. Engineers have too many meetings and no time to be an engineer. Change freezes backing up the pipeline causing more risk. The 2024 tech budget is short by 100s of million dollars. Layoffs and offshoring continue to erode the knowledgebases. Failed Agile transformation is causing extra work, Tracy, our leader at the top, has no idea of technology. Did I miss anything?
20 replies (most recent on top)
What happened to our tech support? I’m in technology and I can’t get anyone to help on a very minor issue. Submit a ticket, problem not fixed, start a chat, problem not fixed, escalate, problem not fixed. Then, yes, someone else is handling it- let’s hope it gets fixed! Oops- they addressed a completely irrelevant item. At this point it’s a toss up as to whether I will ever get the issue fixed. Maybe I can get transferred to a new role and make the problem irrelevant.
Technology instead of focusing on being enablers as a solution provider, they started putting lot of manual process. Did they ever address their intake process. Now they have closer to retirement data artitects with inherited beuroracy. More process, approvals and going no where. Offshore folks happily sit idle enjoying the jokers here planning and planning so on. Even federal government is fast in implementing something. Outsource the IT for few years
When I started in tech years ago at WF, I was under the assumption that working for a huge bank, it would have the best tech. Holy cr-p was I wrong. WF was so far behind the last two companies I worked at, and that was years before. Thought my manager(s) would be tech gurus of some sort, kind of like the ones I had before. Nope, one was an executive admin years before, the other two, all they did was have a few meetings here and there. They had no clue wtf we were doing, as long as we were closing tixs, good to go, I guess. Pretty much summed it all up for me
This post is so specific, I feel like we are in the same group. This is all true. Very true.
Original poster
Being on an L3 execution team I understand the reason and need for all the process and application improvements that have been deployed. Where it all falls apart is hard set delineation of duties, enforcement of those delineations, accountability for those delineations and a one stop shopping location for customers to know wtf they are supposed to do.
None of this exists. You have App support going to Middleware who deflects to DBAs who deflect to OSE’s who deflect to Engineering and so on and so forth. It’s absolutely stupid.
16h ago by Anonymous
18 reactions (+18/-0)
Post ID: @pqi+1oepcOZH
Tech is going down the tubes!!!? Sorry, I was doing a boomerang, and watching the Bollywood TK dancers. We are 1!!!! Sorry had to post a lemon tree picture and polish my Top ( Pick a Title) Woman Selfie expert plaque.
Outages is not a TK priority.
I was laid off over a year ago. Here is my summary: 1) there are NO project managers at Wells. Instead every "manager" is a facilitator. Big difference -- prompt it. 2) There is no banking platform at Wells.. unless you consider core/mide/mode a platform. Now there are many https://www.g2.com/categories/digital-banking-platforms. But Wells never goes outside to buy their technology. 3) There is limited product design at Wells. No UI libraries. I just saw a bunch of shaky siloed web apps using various libraries, no testing (integrated, unit, UI), and no consistent CI/CD pipeline. Yup, a cluster f. On top of that, a bunch of facilitators using the latest silver bullet, agile, in their employment of rank to yank sarlacc process to turn over the workforce. I recommend for any tech employee under 60 start looking outside the bank.
Need Project Managers / Waterfall back, at least PMs knew wWTH needs to get done.
Being on an L3 execution team I understand the reason and need for all the process and application improvements that have been deployed. Where it all falls apart is hard set delineation of duties, enforcement of those delineations, accountability for those delineations and a one stop shopping location for customers to know wtf they are supposed to do.
None of this exists. You have App support going to Middleware who deflects to DBAs who deflect to OSE’s who deflect to Engineering and so on and so forth. It’s absolutely stupid.
Would someone please do the needful?
Don't worry guys, flushing talent down the drain with RTO, location strategy, and India will surely solve the issue! 😐
The “Lead Scrum Master” role is pathetic. They just ask how work is going on Y, to completely fill out the X jira acceptance criteria.
They expect the engineers to do most of the Jira work and then actually code the critical work that runs the back. And now we’re supposed to be worried about being laid off and replaced by 2-3 subpar engineers in India that don’t know much at all about the system.
If you’ve been there more than a few years you should interview elsewhere. Tech salaries are way bigger now.
So now we have 2x or 3x weekly stand-up meetings, and have 3 or MORE scrum masters....and product owners....and product areas (read silos) all making big bucks to oversee the standup meetings. Think 160k plus for each of them. And they do not do engineering work - just shuffling around engineering work.
And engineers laid off. New ones hired at higher rates, buddies with the new management, that don't know the environment or the work needed. But boy can they talk in meetings!!
Bottom line - yes institutional knowledge is leaving at a high rate....this is what eventually weakens the tech infrastructure to the point customers are impacted. Its real, and its happening.
Kanbans lead by grossly overpaid babysitters. Sure sgn of failing co.
Sprints stumble and halt,
Agile dance loses its grace,
Learning from each fall.
Silent screens stare back,
Code's intentions gone awry,
Tech's glitches unfold.
Tech has been in big trouble for years now. Ever since they started pushing the Agile, SRE, NFR cr-p. There were entire teams sitting around with nothing to do for years - I know, I was on 2 different ones. The disorganization was mind blowing. I luckily got out, but I imagine not much has changed.
Offshoring all the jobs is just going to make things exponentially worse.
Apparent refusal to address any tech debt by modernizing applications, or eliminating manual processes in a thoughtful, step-wise way unless on the cusp of disaster, at which point there is not time to create a stable solution with lets say a reasonable short/medium term timeline of 2-3 years into the future. [Home Lending]
But let's spend engineers time submitting requests to update database passwords, etc...right.
The problem is that you IT guys have been saying this every year or every month. It's like the analysts predicting a market crash every six months for the last ten years.
Maybe eventually you'll be right.
Nothing better than daily stand up meetings with Kanban Leads asking everyone what they did yesterday and what they are planning on doing today, when the Kanban Lead has no idea what any of it is about anyway.
And if they need updates, they are already in the Jira stories.