I've seen similar inside large financial orgs - what struck me was how there are these huge amounts of people that spend their entire working life inside this alternate IT reality. It's not unlike SAP consultants where their skillset is tied to one company.
Also...these things tend to have fuckin terrible documentation. Good luck figuring any of this out. And you can't google it and your AI is just as lost as you
I was reading the article and got SAP/ABAP flashbacks.
- source code in database: yes
- own IDE for questionable reasons: you bet!
- custom table objects: we got your back.
- strange forks of common python libraries: would you like warnings with that?
> Also...these things tend to have fuckin terrible documentation. Good luck figuring any of this out. And you can't google it and your AI is just as lost as you
I convinced my boss to hire an intern for the summer to do this. They said: "wouldn't internship projects that involved actual coding be more attractive?"
I replied: "Well, they'll be having to do a lot of experimenting to figure things out..."
Isn't Google like this, too? They have their own source control system, their own IDE, their own databases.
It seems like any giant organization eventually develops its own software center of gravity.
Yes, it is, there's a translation table for xooglers too: https://github.com/jhuangtw/xg2xg
The only real difference there (although it is a significant one) is that most of those internal Google tools tended to be very good, often ahead of the external state-of-the-art. That's a very different feeling to a baroque old stack inside a bank somewhere. Maybe the external world has caught up on a bunch of them more recently though which would start to change that.
I suppose it depends what you're optimizing for, but this Bank Python looks like it would be great for enabling productivity in a consistent shared environment with minimal setup required for devs. This looks far better than setting up jupyter notebooks, installing all kinds of pypi dependencies, etc. whatever the equivalent on the outside would be.
lolol. Actually, I find AI has a reasonable chance to figure it out, as long as you point to the right source code. BTW to me these quirks actually can be used as some kind of job security. If it takes a year to onboard someone to do meaningful work, it sure raise the cost of firing.