Wells Fargo says hundreds of customers lost homes after computer glitch

well, follow the money. why would they sell you a product that makes them less money if they have a material reason to deny it? Think like an insurance company: if you have a technical reason to deny paying a claim, you should absolutely do so, because it means less money for you (the ins. co).

Trying to get two different refis, different houses, different lenders, the original lender kept stringing me along so long that I'd literally found several better deals, selected one, signed & closed before their refi dept responded with a meaningful contact who could actually move forward with a deal. They had my business by default, all they would have had to do is respond promptly, but I had to say "sorry, you lost".

Just myopic. Seems they think if they don't respond, we'll not bother.

Impractical comparison. Software engineers rarely create works where loss of life, or even physical harm, is a side effect of poor workmanship.

> On February 2, 2018, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank barred Wells Fargo from growing its asset base any further, based upon years of misconduct, until Wells Fargo fixes its internal problems to the satisfaction of the Federal Reserve. In April 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States Department of Labor had launched a probe into whether Wells Fargo was pushing its customers into more expensive retirement plans as well as into retirement funds managed by Wells Fargo itself. Subsequently in May 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Wells Fargo's business banking group had improperly altered documents about business clients in 2017 and early 2018.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo

These are just from the past couple of years. Check out their Wikipedia page for many, many more. This isn't even the first time they made serious "mistakes" with mortgages specifically: check out their 2012 settlement. Here's the judgement in just one case:

> On April 5, 2012, a federal judge ordered Wells Fargo to pay $3.1 million in punitive damages over a single loan, one of the largest fines for a bank ever for mortgaging service misconduct. Elizabeth Magner, a federal bankruptcy judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana, cited the bank's behavior as "highly reprehensible", stating that Wells Fargo has taken advantage of borrowers who rely on the bank's accurate calculations. She went on to add, "perhaps more disturbing is Wells Fargo's refusal to voluntarily correct its errors. It prefers to rely on the ignorance of borrowers or their inability to fund a challenge to its demands, rather than voluntarily relinquish gains obtained through improper accounting methods."

Blaming the programmers for these "mistakes" is like blaming bank tellers for the reckless banking policies that caused the 2008 meltdown.

This has nothing to do with "engineering standards". Notice that all these "mistakes" benefit Wells Fargo at the expense of its customers and/or the law. If it was just "shoddy standards", you'd expect a few mistakes to be in favor of the customers...

These "mistakes" proliferate because they make the bank money, and only cost them a slap on the wrist and some small fines. This is Too Big to Fail in action.

This is a very fair point and certainly not all programmers strive for this.

At the same time, in companies where this type of software gets written, the responsibility for delivering a safe product does not rest on the shoulders of programmers alone. "Move fast and break things" is ridiculed by responsible programmers, but outright shunned by responsible team leaders, product managers and CTOs.

No matter how much you care about "craftsmanship", you'll never come up with a well-written program if it's part of an irresponsibly-ran program.

So yes, if software engineers were held to the same standard as civil engineers, people would go to jail. At the same time, it's worth remembering all the other standards of conduct that apply in heavily-regulated fields: companies can be barred from selling a certain product (or type of product) or forced to withdraw them from the market, licensed practitioners may have their licenses withdrawn and so on.

The vast majority of people in every field are producing average or shoddy work. Just the way it goes.

Most people (myself included) have other things to focus on– family, health, finances, hobbies. I’d much rather screw something up at work than something that really matters to me.

Unless there are strong business requirements demanding high quality code, no business is going to pay the costs of it.

No business will ever willingly do the right thing unless someone is holding a gun to it demanding they do so. They simply won't be able to compete against businesses that aren't.

The true craftsmen out there will consistently see themselves passed on for promotions, and receive negative performance evaluations in environments where features introduced to a codebase are treated as far more important than bugs introduced into a codebase. The folks who treat it as a job will quickly find their salaries increase as they migrate into management positions.

Software engineering will probably mostly provide what the market requires and rewards, and for most things where you don't have lives at stake, it takes a lot of cash and process to drive your defect rate toward zero.

Viewed through an economic lens, an economist would say that we have an optimum level of environmental pollution, where the marginal benefit of cleaning it up or preventing it doesn't surpass the marginal cost of tolerating it.

So, I disagree. Work will get done to the necessary standard, and our industry already fetishizes overwork and heroes. I don't think anyone should bothering driving themselves crazy with extreme personal perfectionism when the market doesn't demand or reward it, and the software engineering field doesn't gear itself toward producing those results via process.

This target moves too much in business to be able to efficiently target it.

I surely wouldn't take the time to make something perfect if I knew the business was going to turn around and add another feature that forces me to re-evaluate the thing entirely.

While 400 homes lost is certainly significant, don't forget the millions of homes it accurately kept track of. Imagine the amount of work and resources that would have had to be used to keep track manually and by paper.

Please don't worry about 2 steps back after you've taken several billion steps forward.

I'm pretty sure this happens in most fields that don't spec out absolutely everything in advance. In an ecommerce setting my team had to do this with the checkout logic because the old system was so complex and convoluted. Starting with a fork of a 3rd party platform and then unleashing 10 years of short-term contractor enhancements basically guarantees that no one will have full specs.

They kept it, which I’m not sure they would have done if it was a human teller, but it’s different when you’re dealing with a machine.

For a corporation, every moment is the time to rely on auto-push-button, wage avoiding software.

Corporations are amoral at best.

To say that you won’t switch banks because they’re all just as bad is absurd. That’s just a lazy excuse by a lazy person in my opinion. I’ll take downvotes for my negative post but Wells Fargo screwed me any my family over severely during the recession and it took years to dig out of that mess. Not a single Wells Fargo employee so much as feigned an apology.