54 karma · joined September 10, 2015
It's 100% unethical to take credit for someone else's work.
The writer of the article needs to retract.
https://support.lastpass.com/help/about-password-iterations-...
They updated their documents since, but last week they had documentation up that said they were HIPAA compliant due to end to end encryption.
In finance technology is seen as a cost center, not a profit center. They want the minimum needed to ship. Early on this results in a lot of tech debt. Later on, fixing the system is too hard and thus they need to hire super smart people to figure out the mess they are in for any code change.
Enforcement actions are INCREDIBLY rare. The penalties are shockingly low. Thus the cost of failure to comply is low, and the businesses are not prioritizing compliance.
My understanding is that companies such as this rely purely on manual testing. Thus it is easy for things to slip through the cracks. Usually they never get hit by penalties or get caught so the pressure to do better is not there.
What would you propose as an alternative?
Then if the regulation changed, someone would grep through the use cases, and see what behavior is occuring/ how to modify the code base to cope with the change in regulations (this occurs a lot). Of course most finance firms don't do this and actually violate regulations all the time. There is literally a gold mine for the SEC/FINRA to go after, but the government is fairly incompetent at mining through the data and holding companies accountable. The reason being that they don't pay enough to hire the talent that would uncover the violations.
Fruit stand 1 is the cheapest, fruit stand 2 is the 2nd cheapest, and fruit stand 3 is the third cheapest.
You want to buy all the apples out there.
The rule is that you have to go to the cheapest fruit stand first, and exhaust their supply before moving onto the next cheapest fruit stand. If you want to go to ALL the fruit stands at the same time you need to tell them you are an 'OK' guy and are really buying fruit everywhere.
Well, someone deleted code and ignored one of the fruit stands. This violated a rule and cost the fruit buyer a lot of money in penalties.
I've seen this at countless finance companies, and from interviewing people across the entire spectrum of finance. It is a rare corner of the industry where you'll find quality engineering. Usually everyone in a finance company thinks they are amazing engineers, and are just plain wrong.
My advice: work smarter, not harder.