Hahahaha at natwest trying to blame a indian worker!!

NAR

InsideInsurance wrote: »

It is evidently just plain racism to say that the error has happened simply because a coder or sys support person is of a certain race.

That's a massive jump! What has been said on these forums is that the work had been outsourced to India to less experienced staff than what had been doing the work in the UK.

Debt_Free_Chick

Mandelbrot wrote: »

RBS management seem to be bending over backwards to avoid the mud from this fiasco sticking to them (where it belongs).

To be fair, RBS have not blamed an Indian worker and have, indeed, confirmed that the problem arose in the UK (Edinburgh?).

It's (some of) the Media that have taken some of the speculative comments on The Register and reported them, rather than undertake some more diligent - and, dare I say investigative - form of journalism.

pacontracting

Debt_Free_Chick wrote: »

To be fair, RBS have not blamed an Indian worker and have, indeed, confirmed that the problem arose in the UK (Edinburgh?).

It's (some of) the Media that have taken some of the speculative comments on The Register and reported them, rather than undertake some more diligent - and, dare I say investigative - form of journalism.

It's interesting how someone can put a spin on things (RBS I mean). It's true that the mainframe in question does reside in Edinburgh and that the problem arose on that mainframe. What they, then, don't say is that:

1/ The operators of that mainframe can be anywhere in the world.
2/ RBS have operators for that mainframe in both the UK and India.
3/ Someone with the correct authorisation was able, while making a change, to remove all jobs being managed by the CA-7 application from CA (Computer Associates).
4/ People are questioning why wasn't there any Disaster Recovery / Backout / User Acceptance etc - please try to understand what you are talking about before you look foolish.

So what happened:

1/ Someone who was authorised to work on the mainframe made a mistake. Due to lack of experience, that person then made the mistake worse.

In answer to part 4/ above, once you corrupt data, any application or infrastructure resilience you may have in place are typically worthless (exepting databases where a delayed write to a standby database can save you - but you then need an experienced database administrator to be able to recover - inexperience can lead can data loss!).

ChiefGrasscutter

pacontracting wrote: »

4/ People are questioning why wasn't there any Disaster Recovery / Backout / User Acceptance etc - please try to understand what you are talking about before you look foolish.

Sadly one finds invariably that
1. There those who know a great deal about the issue being discussed, usually as a result of their employment. They are therefore banned by their contracts from making any comments on it. So we don't hear from this group.
2. There are those who know a little, either by working for a supplier or though their hobbies. They know that although they understand a lot, there is even more that they don't know and that it is a lot more complicated than can be simply explained in one paragraph. So they don't comment.
3. Finally there are those who know nothing whatsoever about the subject - but believe they know everything , based on some sketchly knowledge about something they think is similar (its not) and that all those trying to actually fix the problem/investigate the crash whatever are a load of idiots.

Not suprisingly we hear a lot from group 3 on all sorts of forums and in the newspapers, on the TV....

InsideInsurance

NAR wrote: »

That's a massive jump! What has been said on these forums is that the work had been outsourced to India to less experienced staff than what had been doing the work in the UK.

Its not outsourced, it is an RBS employee. At no point has RBS said it was an indian person nor what level of experience the person had. Even the Registry's claim only said it was a junior member of staff and made no mention of their relative experience to others that were working on the project.

thelawnet

InsideInsurance wrote: »

As it is an RBS centre the same standards are applied irrespective of where in the world the centre is or where the workers happen to come from and been raised. That is not to say the standards are particularly high or low, thats another question, but the geographical location is irrelevant. It is evidently just plain racism to say that the error has happened simply because a coder or sys support person is of a certain race.

Racism?

Rubbish. It is nothing to do with the colour of their skin.

There are language and cultural differences with offshoring that introduce additional risk that are NOT present onshore in the UK. In addition, offshoring involves dumping, and usually alienating, existing talent who will leave the company with much valuable knowledge that will NOT be handed over to the offshore staff.

The geographical location is not irrelevant.

Banks are obsessed with risk, and one of their assessments when offshoring will be whether or not the additional risk introduced by offshoring (which is absolutely undeniable) is offset by the cost saving.

In some cases the answer is yes, in others no.

When offshoring they will have started with systems that were not mission-critical, systems whose failure did not have immediate financial or reputational risk. That just make sense.

There will be systems in any bank, which quite honestly could just be cancelled without replacement and replaced with Excel spreadsheets or whatever. These will have been the first to be offshored and outsourced.

In this case however the system is absolutely mission-critical and there is a loss in propsect of hundreds of millions of pounds.

We don't know whether or not offshore workers were involved with this, but there's good reason to believe that they were. I don't know how much money they saved by moving some of this team offshore, but I doubt it was significant overall, and the fact that that decision was made by senior management will certainly be weighing on Hester's decision to forgo his bonus of around £1m. Even if this was caused by onshore workers, they cannot say that they were best placed to clean up the mess - of course they weren't, because they replaced experienced, onshore workers with priceless knowledge of RBS' systems, with cheaper, less-experienced offshore workers without that knowledge.

InsideInsurance

The RBS Indian Development Centre has been there for years.

Certainly when I did some work for part of RBSG 5-6 years ago (long before the financial crisis) the capacity was already there and moderately mature for the insurance division and the banking side had been using them for longer than the insurance had.

There are simply differences between cultures. No one culture is better or worse than the next. I agree you have to plan for the differences but certainly how most the tabloid media and people on here are betraying it is that purely the fact it was an indian person is a significant contributing factor. The one P1 issue I ever dealt with was actually caused by a British person and the potential issue had been identified by an offshore developer but dismissed by the UK team as insignificant.

thelawnet

InsideInsurance wrote: »

The RBS Indian Development Centre has been there for years.

The IDC is what it is, but the amount of time it has been established, does not tell us anything about whether or not the CA-7 team is established and experienced or not.

There are simply differences between cultures. No one culture is better or worse than the next. I agree you have to plan for the differences but certainly how most the tabloid media and people on here are betraying it is that purely the fact it was an indian person is a significant contributing factor.

Tabloids/people are not concerned with it being an Indian person, but rather the issue is offshoring. There are many nationalities working in IT in the UK, Australian, Indian, whatever, the issue here is replacing onshore resource, which is certainly not priced by race, with offshore, lower-cost resource.

The one P1 issue I ever dealt with was actually caused by a British person and the potential issue had been identified by an offshore developer but dismissed by the UK team as insignificant.

I'm not surprised. UK teams tend to resent offshore staff. It's not good for the working environment. People are present in the UK paying UK taxes, housing costs etc. (despite its name, RBS has thousands of workers in central London where the cost of living is just stupid), and then they are supposed to treat Indian workers, on a fraction of their salary, thousands of miles away, with little or nothing in common, as peers. All this while they know that the bank would sack every last one of them in the UK, replacing them with ten-a-penny (relatively) Indian developers, if they thought they could get away with it.

It's really not surprising that the UK team dismissed the offshore developer's concern. I think it's entirely natural. That's one of the risks you take - how do you get onshore and offshore to respect each other and work together. A major challenge IMO.

InsideInsurance

You've evidently had different experience to me with internal offshoring capabilities. Certainly there are individuals that can have issues, be dismissive, resent them etc, in the majority of cases with established setups I haven't seen evidence of them being treated with any significant difference with the guy that sits in another office elsewhere in the UK.

Outsourcers are clearly a different matter and there the concerns and resentment are both more common, and in my experience, more justified.

callum9999

thelawnet wrote: »

The IDC is what it is, but the amount of time it has been established, does not tell us anything about whether or not the CA-7 team is established and experienced or not.

Tabloids/people are not concerned with it being an Indian person, but rather the issue is offshoring. There are many nationalities working in IT in the UK, Australian, Indian, whatever, the issue here is replacing onshore resource, which is certainly not priced by race, with offshore, lower-cost resource.

I'm not surprised. UK teams tend to resent offshore staff. It's not good for the working environment. People are present in the UK paying UK taxes, housing costs etc. (despite its name, RBS has thousands of workers in central London where the cost of living is just stupid), and then they are supposed to treat Indian workers, on a fraction of their salary, thousands of miles away, with little or nothing in common, as peers. All this while they know that the bank would sack every last one of them in the UK, replacing them with ten-a-penny (relatively) Indian developers, if they thought they could get away with it.

It's really not surprising that the UK team dismissed the offshore developer's concern. I think it's entirely natural. That's one of the risks you take - how do you get onshore and offshore to respect each other and work together. A major challenge IMO.

You say that as if that's an unreasonable request? I don't judge my friends in real life based on a comparison of their wealth or living standards, I see no reason why that should take place in the business world...

And people keep going on about "cultural differences" - how on earth does that affect a financial system? Of course it may affect a personal relationship, but my (admittedly almost non-existant) understanding of things like automated banking transactions is that they are relatively culture-less? "There's a glitch in Sundays reports that needs looking into", "maybe so but you like Bollywood and I like Hollywood so no, I'm not taking advice off you"?