This had good points up until the point where it conflated banking software with ‘moving a few numbers around’.
There are vast differences between the pathologies that affect small scale contract web app development as detailed at the start of the article, and those that affect global enterprise development such as is required to build large scale online banking systems. The biggest difference being that many of the things which are ‘imaginary problems’ for the small time web app are very much ‘real problems’ for a publicly traded company with responsibilities to several government regulatory agencies.
And sure, these institutions are just as prone to conjuring imaginary requirements, but it requires considerably more sophistication to tell the difference between ‘something someone in the German compliance office dreamed up to make themselves seem important’ and ‘something that if we get it wrong will result in billion euro fines’ when you’re building a banking system rather than a podcast website.
There are vast differences between the pathologies that affect small scale contract web app development as detailed at the start of the article, and those that affect global enterprise development such as is required to build large scale online banking systems. The biggest difference being that many of the things which are ‘imaginary problems’ for the small time web app are very much ‘real problems’ for a publicly traded company with responsibilities to several government regulatory agencies.
And sure, these institutions are just as prone to conjuring imaginary requirements, but it requires considerably more sophistication to tell the difference between ‘something someone in the German compliance office dreamed up to make themselves seem important’ and ‘something that if we get it wrong will result in billion euro fines’ when you’re building a banking system rather than a podcast website.