Could you help me understand the Tech team’s mandate? Aside from member application UI and cybersecurity, the remaining scope appears to center on data management and BI/Dashboards. Is that accurate?
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@ht And don’t forget that your SVP is spineless and will not protect his people by healthy challenging these id--tic release processes because they don’t want to ‘rock the boat’. They will however openly lament the performance of their precious Michigan Wolverines.
Oh, that's easy.
We are told what to do by Product Owners on the business side who set the priority for what gets worked.
We want to make changes to improve systems, make things run more efficiently, and improve the member and employee experience.
We're told to change the color and placement of a radio button so it meets the new Brand standards. So we spend an hour every two weeks discussing what unimportant work gets prioritized this sprint.
This sprint, we're changing the colors on an obscure webpage that no one has visited since 2021 because that's deemed the highest priority item by the PO. Then we spend 30 minutes every day discussing what we did the previous day and what we're going to do today.
We make the changes, test them, push them up, but then the pipeline fails because the codebase hasn't been updated in three years and is using the wrong module version. So we spend two days searching through documentation to figure out how to refactor the project to get the pipeline to pass. What should have been a one-line code change ends up changing 17 files because everything was out of date.
So we get everything working, tested, have the code changes reviewed, and approved. That's where the real fun begins.
Now we're blocked by insane Agile and ITCRM requirements.
Did you document the changes you're making to make on a Wiki? That's wrong, it goes in the Jira story.
Did you put all the details in the Jira story? That's cute, now put everything in ServiceNow.
Oh, you put everything in ServiceNow? You did it wrong because you made your Change Request a Standard when it should have been a Normal. Start over. (Yes, those words are synonyms. No, they aren't the same thing.)
Once we do the ITCRM paperwork that takes longer than the code changes, then we're blocked by needing an SVP who's five levels removed from the project and has no idea what's actually changing to manually review and okay the change.
We wanted to make the change on Thursday, but the SVP was too busy to approve it until Friday at 6pm so that code change to modify the color on the webpage has to be done at 10pm on Saturday because it's member-facing.
You made the code changes, got them reviewed and approved by your tech lead, jumped through the ITCRM hoops, got your SVP to sign off on the change, and stayed up until midnight deploying the change?
Well the pipeline failed in prod because the sandbox and test environments were configured differently. Now you've caused an outage. Now you're on an MI call until 6am on Sunday. On Monday you get fired or placed on a PIP for causing an outage because you didn't know that when you refactored the codebase to use module v11, you should have actually used module v11.0.1 because v11 has an obscure "known issue" that was discussed in a Slack thread in a channel you weren't in.
But let's say you're lucky and everything worked as expected. Now you come in on Monday and have to have all of your work and test evidence put in qTest. Oh, the qTest didn't sync with Jira, so now your story can't be moved to done due to a system issue.
The sprint ends, and the story you were working on for the last two weeks doing code changes, jumping through paperwork hoops, getting SVP approval, and staying up late for carries over to the next sprint, so on paper you did zero work that sprint, so you get put on a PIP.
Then you demo your changes, but the PO decides that she wants the background to be a slightly different shade of blue, so she cuts another story and assigns it to you because you're now the SME of this project.
So yeah, that's what the Technology org does when we're not dealing with our coworkers being laid off and replaced with offshore contractors.
They troll the layoff site and complain all day and make absurd racial and s-xist remarks against any leaders that don’t look like them.
@gw ESG did almost all of that. “Mainframes” lol. Most of what you just sp-t out isn’t managed my USAA employees anymore. ALL software? 😂. You wish. Bank’s mobile app from like 2012 yes was done by internal folks, and was done in such patch work it was failing us daily so we had it redone in by an external team in 2022. (A project that kicked off in 2017.
We’ve know tech was a failure at USAA. That’s why they’ve been reduced to almost nothing in the last decade.
Ask any HR rep. They numbers don’t lie. Ask anyone down in GSD or whatever their called now. The contracts don’t lie.
@OP they don’t even do cyber. So it’s less. 90% of it has been outsourced to real tech companies with employees with real experience.
Asking that question was silly. If you honestly don’t know, you have no business working in corporate America.
Nothing much, we just built the entire website, mobile app, backend systems, servers, mainframes, handle millions of bank transactions per second, maintain internal employee systems and hardware, get called at 2am to resolve production outages, handle complex routing between datacenters, firewalls, keep up with security vulnerabilities, prevent hacking attempts by Russia and China every second, etc.
We're all useless though and we all deserve the layoffs, clearly.
What a strange question. Don't you use a computer all day long? Who do you think maintains all that software? Are you some kind of IT atheist?: "No one wrote the software. It is the nature of software to exist." Lol. What happens when you don't fund Tech? Ask the FAA.
They don’t do anything which why they keep laying them off.
They keep firing them so who knows what they do anymore