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Comment by tialaramex | Hacker News Reader

I'd definitely have gone to banks are terrible at IT rather than rich people.

I am not a rich person, although I'm comfortable, but several of my banks are terrible at IT. Like "We are upgrading our web site so it won't be available until Tuesday" level bad at IT.

Note that wasn't just "Some services won't be available", the whole web site was out of action for most of a day. It's disappointing but understandable if I can't send a random stranger 2500 ¥ at 2am because the bank are upgrading something. But it's straight up crazy that I can't even see my 2018 bank statement PDF because they're upgrading, it's the sort of feature a PHP Blog site can make work.

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Ironically the PHP blog site may have gotten a lot more engineering TLC than the bank’s IT system.

Not necessarily more hours or $$ spent on it, but more care.

> We are upgrading our web site so it won't be available until Tuesday

I envy this sometimes. It takes a lot more work to evolve a system with zero downtime.

Maybe go work for a bank? I think they pay pretty well too (because the work is boring)

Never had any problem like this. I’ve essentially been doing all my banking online for as long as I’ve had any banking to do. So 20+ years or so. Can’t really remember any significant downtime or problems. Biggest problem I’ve had with a bank tech-wise is that my current bank refuses to support Apple Pay. Considering switching banks because of this.

I've never had this problem with my good bank (First Direct) but I had this problem with a bank I use for some routine financial transactions (Santander, currently advertised by celebrities Ant & Dec for some reason) and also with my safe bank (NS&I, a bank owned by my country and thus "safe" in the sense that if it's bankrupt so is my country and therefore that's the least of my problems)

Maybe every other bank is better? I doubt it. For me one bank being unavailable is a mild inconvenience (it so happened I wanted to use Santander to check some records, but most days I wouldn't have noticed) but most people only have one bank, so it being out of action is really problematic, and we live in an era when "you could visit a physical branch" might as well be "You could fly to the moon" for all the practical good it does normal customers.

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