Does anyone else who’s been here many years feel they’ve wasted their career ?
24 replies (most recent on top)
@Kyhx, exchange wasn't ready for prime time when Mellon was on it. Plus, BNY had many legacy apps on Lotus Notes so moving everyone to exchange wasn't an option.
Or, after merger, the 5 month search to find the BONY Transit Routing number. Finally found… scotched taped to the top of the slide out leaf on an old 1920’s mahogany desk. Then we were backed off from Microsoft Office & Exchange all the way back to circa 1980s IBM Lotus Notes.
Like going through a time warp in the Twilight Zone or Outer Limits.
On to dbase 3 if Ashton-Tate is still around?
And on June 24 2022 we celebrated the retirement of our Foxpro application in custody
On April 7, 1964, Bank of New York unveiled its latest and greatest application, GSP. Cutting edge 80 column cards
On April 7, 1997, Bank of New York unveiled its latest and greatest application, SMDB.
Cutting edge 8 track tapes.
On April 7, 2022, BNY Mellon celebrated it's asset servicing technology museum diamond jubilee celebration, just like the Queen. Both applications still running.
The best example of antiquated technology was before 9/11 on the 13th floor of 240, in some printer room there was an early model IBM PC from the 1980s that was STILL running. Not sure if it had any purpose, but it was definitely there powered on,sitting on a table near the printer. Always gives me a good laugh.
@skjz, those weren't mainframes. I think IBM knows a little more about it than wikipedia.
https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/blogs/destination-z1/2019/12/23/a-brief-history-of-the-mainframe-world
"On April 7, 1964, IBM unveiled the first mainframe computer system, System/360. Costing $5 billion, roughly $34 billion"
Try 1952.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_mainframe
@3ivs, that's funny, the first mainframe was the system/360 which IBM unveiled on April 7, 1964.
@OP, is that you, Todd?
Signs point to yes
@asze, yeah, because it works.
@3ivs+1gCoWYDy ... I agree ... and we're still using it.
Next CIO should be an antique collector type. There are already areas for technology in the Smithsonian and other museums. I know that we talk Fintech, but really, we are now the laggards. Someone who cares might want to get our history into the Smithsonian.
Food for thought…
Mellon Bank was the very first bank to purchase an IBM mainframe computer, way back in 1959. Pretty cool,
Much, likely most, of this runs every night.
Nope, didn’t waste my whole career, far from it. Put us on the map in 4 different decades. You can only do as much as management envisions or even allows, so nothing is possible now unfortunately.
Good luck, and get out. Trust me.
Suresh’s Greatest Hits:.
“We should leverage free APIs like Uber does to drive efficiencies”.
Great Suresh, do you know of anyone offering APIs for free ACH, Wires, Swift and other money movement?
“if you have an idea for a patent please let us know and we will recognize you and register it.”
Great Suresh, Can I send you my car keys as well?
@1afg, I hear ya. It was pretty frustrating listening to Suresh talk about self driving cars and AI when we couldn't even host a modern web app with our infrastructure. I'd sit through his town halls then go back to my desk and try to figure out how to modify my CRQ so I could put a simple change into production within two weeks.
And many of the issues stemmed from him forcing us to use developers from his offshore company that barely knew how to code, much less code a modern, maintainable application.
2 words: Cobol !
No, only the portion hat I spent here.
@1daw, you sound like a leach just riding the coattails of those of us who get things done.
Career? Get over yourself. It’s nothing but a job. You can either rob, cheat, steal or be a sociopath in general and get rich, or you get a job. Career? Lol
I was a developer at BK for about 16 years. It was pretty difficult keeping my skillset current with all the antiquated technology at the bank. But I accomplished a lot even though it was 10x harder than it should have been.
When I first joined, we changed as little code as we could. We couldn't clean up confusing logic that just kept growing in complexity. Heck, we couldn't even delete lines of code that we wanted gone, we had to comment them out.
Our systems were severely limited by what INFORM could handle until the NEXEN push about 5 years ago. So for over a decade we couldn't call an API from a web front end. I tried to get us to at least design the code so it could easily be used by an API but my suggestions fell on deft ears.
But I was persistent and finally we ended up with some pretty darn good system that were much more maintainable, testable and resilient. And while I could have made quite a bit more money somewhere else, I was able to save enough to not need to work now.