There are 3 things I have in mind when reading this:

- it should be so frustrating for a dev to work on a full core banking that is mostly useless and userless except maybe 1h every 3 years.

- if you build a totally different implementation to handle high traffic transaction from third parties that don't operate for days or months, i would expect it to be fragile. Like for example suddenly you receive unicode special chars that you didn't expect in labels and boom.

- last, I think that in most incident cases, the situation is not clear enough to be able to switch to the full different system. Rarely it will be your whole infra but part of it, so there is always the question to what to do in such a case, or if your main infra goes crazy with loops for example, or if you lose control because of a network, aws, infrastructure issue thr problem might be that you have no visibility on what is working and what is not, not necessarily the control to stop the faulty services, etc...

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rjh29 2 days ago | parent [-]

"it should be so frustrating for a dev to work on a full core banking that is mostly useless and userless except maybe 1h every 3 years."

When other banks go down and Monzo stays up, even for 1 hour, that is a massive PR win and will bring in new customers. It's also been used multiple times as of the article (2025), and they are always exposing some users to it for testing.

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greatgib 2 days ago | parent [-]

I don't say that it is not useful, and that it is not a good thing for the company. More than I would be very frustrated to spend my life on that if it was my job.

	▲	Imustaskforhelp 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Offtopic but I remembered one HN comment about where someone was working for an internal app for a company for the fast food/ice-cream or food app in general (or maybe it was for the contractor) I think some people found that job really peaceful when others might've found it more frustrating. To me, I think though the issue isn't the scale or even the internal part of it but rather in this case, there's a difference because its being used infrequently (1 hour) as compared to that other HN comment was still being used quite frequently (it was used every day) Though, I must admit, I don't find it too frustrating. I can be wrong I usually am but, Sysadmin/DevOps/Security engineer does the work as well where sometimes 1 hour can matter much more than months and they do work for months so that they don't get to face that 1 hour issue just because of how devastating it can get, Though Sysadmins do a lot of regular work as well. There are many jobs where they exist for reasons where the employee exists to handle the bad things. You would wish for the bad thing to not happen and the employee might feel like they might not be doing much if the bad thing doesn't happen, BUT when that bad thing happens, You would be happy that they would then be there for you. Maybe not a direct 1:1 comparison but hopefully I can express my point. I feel like there are many jobs in tech, or maybe in the world in general which fall into a similar fashion?