Thread regarding Bank of New York Mellon Corp. layoffs

DP is useless as far as I could tell but NEXEN seemed to be a HUGE success. Saket used to talk about APIs all the time yet we had no corporates infrastructure to support web APIs. With NEXEN we migrated all our external facing apps to web APIs accessed via the NEXEN front end. The only issue was that we still had most of our internal functionality in the old system and never had a game plan to them to NEXEN which is probably why we never received funding for it. So, we ended up with double the systems to support which really adds up with ethical hack, DR, GF migration, etc.

Of course we were behind 10-15 years, that was one of the points of GF. Most financial companies are still behind. Well, maybe not the newer ones such as Square or Paypal but they just ignore all the AML and KYC requirements so they're pretty far behind in other aspects. And it was lack of management and funding that put us that far behind to begin with. But at least some of the funding we had went toward some high tech AI and machine learning projects.

This is so true. they think they are a fintech but trying to get anything basic done like access is a nightmare

@3bww+19AQQB3Q

Your department is literally 10-15 years behind on updating all the items you listed.

The fact BNYM has just started addressing this in the last 2.5 years with Project Greenfield is a problem. Without a doubt it is costing BNYM more money to address these issues now than it would have if they had a comprehensive plan to address them ongoing.

Sadly, this is norm across most of BNYM business units.

Instead, back in 2014 the focus and tech capital was shifted to NEXEN, Digital Pulse, and an enormous amount of research on blockchain.

All of those failures have contributed to the companies current expense position and have a direct contribution to staff cuts.

Thanks SK! Your vision was the bomb!

bingo

Are you Lester Owens?

I'm not sure about the company as a whole, but for our system moving to GF accomplished A LOT. We retired a dozen EOL win 2k8 R2 servers.
We locked down our server access using HiPAM.
We converted our URLs to standard F5 load balanced URL.
We are using GF VMs/containers with current GTMs and LTMs.
We ensured the GF servers use all up to date software, standard monitoring, app dynamics, tripwire, etc, etc.
We locked down sensitive settings and converted them to SMS form LDAP and config files.
We moved our MQs to new secure appliances that failover nicely and .
We onboarded our application logs to splunk for security and ease of access.
We migrated some of our URLs to active/active and some to active/active/active.
We successfully completed fail over and stay between TPC and TN2 which is HUGE.
There's still a lot of work that could be done but there is no doubt that our applications are FAR more resilient and secure. They are also easier to recover during DR and being standardized will really help as we move to a devops model.
It was absolutely the right thing to do even if it wasn't done perfectly. And we absolutely should continue to enhance GF by things such as migrating applications to utilize TN2, standardizing the build and deploy process, providing cloud services, provide more controlled rollout where we can validate changes before putting the servers in the active pool for all users, etc, etc.

My first day at BNY Mellon, i walked in, met my fellow employees and proceeded to sit at a desk with 2 outdated different size and aspect ratio monitors, a 20+ year old calculator, broken chair and a computer that wouldn't turn on. When the IT department finally got it too work, none of my access was working.

Eight years later, and nothing has really changed. Still have problems getting access for workers, still using outdated equipment, a VDS system that's slow and disconnects for no reason, networks so slow it takes up to 90 seconds to save a simple excel file, webcasts that when you can connect buffer, were not even going to talk about the helpless desk. If this is the simple stuff, how bad is the complex technology.

You spoke the truth. I don’t know how they survive in the industry. Additionally, there are too many people in leadership roles with no leadership skills. Zippo.

The decision to support Bitcoin sounds like a risky proposition for such a cluster f of a company.

So with that being said, how is program greenfield doing? Is that still B.E running that show? Did it ever manage to achieve all of its goals? Did it ever get all those apps moved over from brownfield?

That's mostly TSG issues. And I'm sure most of the problems you had setting up your access was because the massive amount of work setting up IDs and permissions for greenfield was pushed through the same pipeline as normal BAU activity instead of handing bulk requests as part of the GF server commissioning.
Their whole organization is a mess relying on a service model instead of a SOLUTION model. When an application group needs a new MQ, they should have to do a request for an MQ appliance, another request for SAN storage, another request for MQ manager setup, another request for MQ queues and channels, another request for IDs to access the queues, another request for load balanced URL etc, etc. We should go to them and say we want about this many messages of this size going from this app to that app and the experts who do this all the time should work out the details.
Yet their managers are focusing on creating a physical space in India for collaborating like it's 1999.
But I have to say, they've made a lot of progress with standardizing a new secure infrastructure and providing standard monitoring tools, proactive ethical hack tools, etc. Although, again, they should be automatically set up by experts in TSG, not individually requested for the app teams who have to search confluence, MSS, myshare etc to try to determine what's available.

You hit the nail on the head! Life has been so much happier since being layed off from this company.

The abacus works better than their MacBooks!

Webcasts which never worked, my pc would often give messages on not enough memory when doing basic tasks, applications crashed frequently and a helpdesk that I avoided because they could not really help, a process with tons of paperwork to install in production and the hundreds of people who want to have a say but have no decision power or lack knowledge or cannot help. Some people knew what they were doing but were busy trying to keep things running.

Absolutely spot on! Well said!

Yup! Exactly the way I remember the place! A real clown show!

Don't forget the sad claims of corporate poverty when time to discuss bonus and raise or to get a new mouse or headset