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Admin
Denied - no Euro for you.
Fist !!
Admin
Imagine the next job interview - "I see on your resume you worked for Danske.... NEXT!"
Admin
with enough resources, it could have been built in a day!
Admin
Switching a good system to something half-baked couldn't yield any other results. This decision was doomed to fail, no matter how hard would they work. "If it works, don't touch it"
Admin
Great WTF, but it left me with 1 question. If everything is done through a Java Applet, how come the site only works with IE?
Admin
Great choices:
Admin
You have no idea how many Danes think Danske Bank is a bunch of monkeys on typewriters. I don't know about Sambo but Danske Bank's online system still only works in Windows using Internet Explorer
Admin
Admin
Being an ex-customer of Sampo Pankki, I've visited their new online bank three times: to check the new functionality (it gave an error and refused to work), to transfer my money to a different bank (two tries, the first one gave an error saying "multifail" and the second try worked). Using Mac OS X / Safari.
Admin
Wrong. It works perfectly well on linux and solaris as well. The only thing that makes trouble is Java 1.6 - stick to 1.5 and it just works.
Admin
It's still just as bad, absolutely nothing has happened. I have friends who have actually been unable to access their web banking stuff from their own computers for months now. They use 64-bit Linux... Apparently some run 32-bit Windows on vmWare just to be able to access Sampo.
Admin
Only on 32-bit. On 64-bit it's still all broken.
Admin
Hehe. And later on some hackers placed a pic of Comical Ali on the Sampo online banking page.
I think I prefer the captcha that my credit union makes me enter to access my online banking. Oh, and it works in Firefox, too. Yippee.
Admin
Suddenly I'm embarresed being a Dane and a developer.
Not that I need to defend Danske Bank (I actually switched away form that bank 10 years ago). Sometimes it seems company names are anonymized like "a certain fairly large california based bank" - at other times they are not like in this case. Is there any good explaination to this (risk of lawsuits or whatever)?
By the way - the bank's danish motto is "Gør det du er bedst til - det gør vi". Which translates to: "Do what You are best at - We do"
Admin
if (RandomErrorNotEnoughRandom == hasEnoughRandomErrors()) { makeMoreRandomErrors(); }
Admin
After buying the other bank why did they want to throw away so much money?
If you buy a product in a real world, like a PC, you don't throw away it's brand new, high speed hard disk and replace it with one that you have lieing around in a draw.
Someone really should have pointed that the other product was better, and replaced their own.
I actually feel sad for Sampo.
Admin
[quote user="Ilyak"If it works, don't touch it"[/quote]
So, do you wait until the jet's engines break down in flight before doing preventative maintenance?
Admin
Yeah, I read that part, but what does that have to do with browser dependency? I can understand the DLLs causing a platform dependency, but my understanding is the Java plug-in for both browsers is pretty straightforward.
Admin
I switched from Danske Bank before I had a chance to try it out myself, however I was told this by a ... (not quite so) happy ... linux user and Danske Bank customer. He also told me they have a different system for which you need an actual memory key in hand in order to access it and THAT works under linux
Admin
I've always thought that Danske Bank would be a great place for developers that care about quality and such stuff ... now I'm not so sure ...
However, the article explains this job-add for Danske Bank: http://www.danskebank.com/da-dk/Job/soeg-job/ledige-job/it/Pages/JOB391974364583333299386890.aspx
I know, it's in danish, and only a very select few can read that, but the gist of it is that they are looking for developers that have an education in computer science, engineering or something like that, or may have several years experience in developing large administrative systems. There are NO requirements for technology-experience, no mentions of platform (mainframe, Java, VB??) nothing ...
Admin
I've been waiting for this story to show up in Daily WTF. It took longer than I expected :-)
Admin
If you are looking for a job, there are plenty of second level technical support positions open in Sampo, Helsinki. Your mission is to act as a bridge between the first level customer support problems and Danish developers. The jobs have remained open since Easter.
Admin
It seems like when the details are public, such as this story, the names are not changed. Its the insider stories from current/ex employees that are changed to protect the WTF perpetrators
Admin
They're not so much buying the bank's infrastructure as it's customer base. Bank's make money by spending other people's money (generally,) and the more clients they have, the more money they have to spend.
Admin
I'm happy I switched. I used to have Östgöta Enskilda Bank, which was a nice old local bank for the province near Linköping. They had a perfect banking solution that worked with Linux and everything. Very nice logos (old weapon and all), overall very pleasant.
Then Danske Bank ate them. IT systems changed, Linux were no longer possible - IE only. Logos and layout changed (as you can see above). I switched bank quickly, and I'm happy for it. :p Even more happy now. :)
(Although my current bank - Länsförsäkringar - also just now switched to something horrible, so I'm bound to change again soon.)
Admin
I just hope someone very high up in management got fired for this.
Admin
We must meet our arbitrary deadline at all cost! Why to business types have to have a strict deadline on every project? I understand if you have a limited budget and can only pay your staff for so long before making sales, but when you have $300 million to throw at the problem in the end, why not just monitor the project's progress then move the estimated completion date and adjust resources on a weekly basis?
There is simply no excuse for a failure this large involving something as important as people's money. Especially any project taking place in this century. We figured out why software projects fail in the 90's and it's time to learn from our mistakes.
Admin
Admin
There was several other WTFs with the system as well. Like several XSS holes due to extensievelink/3gmobilban use of javascript and document.write(). Also, their communication director kept saying "It's not a hole before we have confirmed it's a hole" in public when the XSS holes were being released and only accepting that they "might" have been holes when finally fixed.
Ironically, the best web interface they have is the mobile interface that remains unchanged :) ( http://mobiili.sampopankki.fi/ )
Oh yeah, and they are running SharePoint somewhere in their site...
Addendum (2008-08-05 11:09): So managed to somehow add "link/3gmobilban" (/link/3gmobilbank is the last part of the url to mobile interface) after extensieve, you can ignore it :)
Admin
[quote user="Walleye"][quote user="Ilyak"If it works, don't touch it"[/quote]
So, do you wait until the jet's engines break down in flight before doing preventative maintenance?[/quote]
Bad analogy! Migration is not maintenance. Do you replace a P&W engine with a RR one (which the jet was not designed for) whilst the jet is in flight?
Admin
About a year ago my previous company had (probably still has) Danske Bank as a client, and would send them automated emails containing embeded images.
Admin
This'll all be explained in an upcoming "Policy" article, but the anonymization factor comes down to the source. In this case, all of the information published came from researching news articles and the like. An anonymous Finnish reader pointed me to the story and helped a lot with navigating various Finnish articles (many of which were not technical of nature) to piece together the story.
As for "a certain fairly large california based bank," I almost always know the real company behind it (usually through a dialog with the submitter), but it's redacted because the majority of the information is non-public and is tangential to the story/lesson.
There's little risk of lawsuit for me, as our libel laws burden the plaintiff with proving a statement is maliciously false, but it's a big professional risk for submitters if I name the company. There's only so many people who are that close to a WTF. Redacting the company name and relocating it to "California" creates more than enough plausible deniability. Aside from occassionaly redacting some of the finer details (and, of course, adding in some absurd/humorous hyperbole), the location is about all that changes these days.
Admin
This explains the less-than-optimal reputation Danske Bank has along many of my peers. But atleast the cantena has good food, or so I've heard.
Admin
Hmmm.. you seem be having a slight break with reality. Less coffee maybe?
The manager in charge will be given a 400 million dollar successful completion bonus for getting it out on time, as well as a huge 'redundancy' package. They'll also be moving to another larger corporation which they can screw up even more successfully for more renumeration.
Admin
Having been through a similar corporate situation recently, I can sympathize. The corporation I worked for had a much much larger information infrastructure, better support staff, etc. The new company...well...didn't.
The sad thing is, they didn't even fire the old staff, they just left them in place and put another level of processing OVER them, so the formerly straightforward flow of financial information has become a byzantine nightmare of "Who the hell has my money?"
To top it, the new guys have this massive arrogance which is only barely matched by their incompetence. I dealt with a guy recently who was so proud of his MCAD that he'd actually made it part of his name, (e.g. Bob Smith, MCAD) and he told me flat out that I wouldn't be able to install, or support his code, more less make the changes necessary to update it to our different business unit, like there was something magical there, something that lowly me, with no acronym after my name could never comprehend (Works fine now, btw, but I had to update it to the .Net 3 framework to make it work on our system, and there was some hilarious wtfery that I may one day share that needed to be expunged).
Admin
The whole site seems to be a customized SharePoint app
Admin
Tom Servo, what is a SAMPO?
Admin
Try reading a Dutch article on some page, I'm curious if it works the other way around :)
Admin
I'm not saying you should never move a go-live date, just that making it elastic is not the answer either. In a project of sufficient size, there are a lot of parties involved that need some degree of certainty as to when they'll need to perform certain things. You can't keep calling them up every week to tell them the go-live date has been moved again. You adjust scope, and if that doesn't work, you move the go-live date.
Admin
The County Clerk's office for Westchester County, NY (population ~9 million) is IE-only. Why? I have no idea, but they have things like vbscript code for simple links. For example:
rather than using a standard "<form>" tag and "submit" button, or even a simple "" link.
http://ccpv.westchesterclerk.com/
Admin
You can sort of make out the context of a deutch text by some simular words. But it is not an easy task. It helps to know german as well as norwegian theugh.
Admin
I imagine someone will be nailed to a cross for this fiasco.
Admin
Get nine women pregnant, and you can make a baby in a month. (Phrase it that way and even a manager can understand.)
Admin
Admin
TRWTF is that only 20000 customers left. In a proper world all the big customers would've jumped ship plus at least 10% of the smaller ones and the ensuing barrage of lawsuits should've forced the bank to fold.
Admin
If only we could find a way to outsource management...
Admin
<nitpick>AFAIK, ATMs aren't locked to any one bank in Finland like they are in America/Canada; everybody uses the same machines, regardless of their bank.</nitpick>
Admin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampo
Admin
Of course you don't use one you have in a drawer. For instance, I just got a new computer with an SATA hard drive. I then paid many people to replace it with a solid state drive using a SCSI interface. And limit the transfer speed to about a fifth of what that interface is capable of. I am rather happy with the results- my family no longer wants to use my computer, and it only cost a few hundred thousand extra.
Admin
And to add to that, when dealing with non-technical managers/directors you can easily use technical terms to create confusion about why something is not working (the rear discombobulator is out of alignment, the magic Java beans were defective from the factory, etc). And non-technical types can't really argue because they wouldn't know what they are talking about. But everyone understands a date/time deadline. So if you are the project manager your choice is usually this: