7 ms·

Did they have any rationale for that?

by TwoBit 5y ago

Jtsummers 5y ago
I'm not in finance, but aerospace/defense is similarly change averse. Often things only change when the cost of the old way becomes too great (and even then it's hard) or causes a failure of some sort (security, bad release, missed milestone costing money). I recall at my first job that we had to sit a senior engineer down (in the hierarchy a level or two above the software team) and ask him to flip a switch on a relay board, reliably, every 1/10th of a second to simulate a test scenario. That was the thing that finally persuaded them to ok the purchase of equipment to automate those tests. And this was a year or so after a major, and costly, rework was required due to a real-world system failure (no fatalities or injuries, fortunately) that would have been caught if testing had been more thorough. But testing wasn't more thorough because we simply couldn't actually flip switches fast enough to simulate a wide enough variety of behaviors, so the testing was woefully incomplete and the timing issue at the heart of the failure was sufficiently complex to be non-discoverable in code and design reviews. Literally having to spend several million out of pocket to fix a broken system wasn't enough on its own to cause them to let us improve our testing methods. Worth noting, the cost of the new testing equipment was only in the 5-figure range, not the 7-figure range of the rework.
spacemanmatt 5y ago
Security was their whole rationale given. I had some related thoughts. They may have a strong content filter on their incoming web. I was sending them a CSV but we had to talk about it like it was a proprietary-format Excel document for the sake of those who would eventually be loading it with Excel. My best guess eventually was that FTP was considered the best way to go around their content filter on purpose. Makes negative sense to me.

7 ms·

Did they have any rationale for that?

by TwoBit 5y ago

Did they have any rationale for that?

Jtsummers 5y ago
I'm not in finance, but aerospace/defense is similarly change averse. Often things only change when the cost of the old way becomes too great (and even then it's hard) or causes a failure of some sort (security, bad release, missed milestone costing money). I recall at my first job that we had to sit a senior engineer down (in the hierarchy a level or two above the software team) and ask him to flip a switch on a relay board, reliably, every 1/10th of a second to simulate a test scenario. That was the thing that finally persuaded them to ok the purchase of equipment to automate those tests. And this was a year or so after a major, and costly, rework was required due to a real-world system failure (no fatalities or injuries, fortunately) that would have been caught if testing had been more thorough. But testing wasn't more thorough because we simply couldn't actually flip switches fast enough to simulate a wide enough variety of behaviors, so the testing was woefully incomplete and the timing issue at the heart of the failure was sufficiently complex to be non-discoverable in code and design reviews. Literally having to spend several million out of pocket to fix a broken system wasn't enough on its own to cause them to let us improve our testing methods. Worth noting, the cost of the new testing equipment was only in the 5-figure range, not the 7-figure range of the rework.
spacemanmatt 5y ago
Security was their whole rationale given. I had some related thoughts. They may have a strong content filter on their incoming web. I was sending them a CSV but we had to talk about it like it was a proprietary-format Excel document for the sake of those who would eventually be loading it with Excel. My best guess eventually was that FTP was considered the best way to go around their content filter on purpose. Makes negative sense to me.