So, are we taking bet as to when they in turn suffer an RBS-like massive IT cock-up?
Cost-cutting Barclays bank swings axe on 5,600 IT and ops bods
Barclays will axe about 5,600 IT and operations staffers in 2014 in a massive restructuring effort. The at-risk techies work across the retail and investment arms of the British banking group. The plan is to achieve £1.6bn in savings by scrapping about 14,000 full-time staff over the next 12 months, a move unveiled on Thursday …
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Thursday 8th May 2014 13:22 GMT Pete 2
cockup in three ... two ... one ...
Very soon after all the hackers realise that ...
> The bank promised automation of IT platforms across the Group
... means there aren't actually any people supervising the security systems. And even when an alarm goes off, it'll take some time for whoever's on-call to get their arse out of bed, realise what's going on and escalate the problem to the few capable individuals who are still working there.
But given the speed of financial transactions, will there be any money left by that point?
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Thursday 8th May 2014 16:16 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: cockup in three ... two ... one ...
>And even when an alarm goes off, it'll take some time for whoever's on-call to get their arse out of bed,
When the alarm goes off, an accountant will be alerted to begin the process of collecting bids from service companies who migth deal with it - before accepting the cheapest one in 6-8 weeks
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Thursday 8th May 2014 13:18 GMT Khaptain
Yup, it's nothing more than juggling figures between the budgets lines. Depending on who reports are presented to, figures will magically disappear or appear as required. Showing internal costs whilst omitting outsourcing costs can make a budget look great.. Just make sure to hide those damned outsourcing figures......
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Friday 9th May 2014 23:22 GMT ecofeco
Re: RE: Contractors.
"The you have to hire twice as many contractors to fix the problems created by the "lowest bid" lot you hired to fix the problems created by firing all the permie staff.
No not really. In some cases yes, but more often, the CIO blames everyone else and then hires another contracting company or just keeps churning the contractors and blaming them the whole time which also justifies the labor rates going lower and lower.
The situation remains understaffed but the labor numbers look good.
If you think otherwise then you are living a sheltered life. Nothing wrong with that, mind, you, but the rest of us are getting screwed and screwed hard.
I've got several decades experience and my pay has not kept with inflation while I now have to know 10 times what I did when I started and more and more companies are going the outsourcing route resulting in the above.
You're thinking logically which is outmoded these days. Anything to keep labor from getting uppity is the rule of the day. Including screwing your customers and stockholders.
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Friday 9th May 2014 15:55 GMT kevinm
False Economy
Same thing happened at Lloyds 2 years ago - they got rid of many of their experienced IT guys and had to replace them a year later with twice as many short term contractors.
Interestingly the same CIO Darryl West moved from Lloyds to Barclays a few months ago - maybe they needed an hatchet man.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 13:26 GMT Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse
'Ecky thump!!!!
Crikey... I'd love to see the business analyst or consultancy report that sits behind this re-org as I'm sure it would make for very interesting reading (yes I am being serious); and whilst I have every sympathy for those about to lose their jobs, I also have just about as much for those keeping or inheriting them.
I guess we'll just sit back and watch the fireworks. From a very safe distance.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 13:28 GMT TonyJ
Again...?
What is it with Barclays and removing I.T. staff?
They did a similar thing many years ago early into my career. I still remember driving 2 1/2 hours to one of their remote sites, waiting around 1 1/2 hours for someone to find a code to get into the server room so I could diagnose why a server hadn't rebooted (remember this is pre-lights our remote control days).
One floppy disk ejected later and the server booted.
A server down for almost half a day because there was no one around to eject a disk.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 13:43 GMT Velv
6,400 staff times how many years average service each = an awful lot of SITE knowledge being lost. The one think bean counters never factor into "knowledge" - off the shelf IT stuff is easy, anyone can read google. It's the internal customisations that sting.
brrr, brrr. brrr, brrr.
"Hello, is that Barclay's Stockbrokers? I'd like you to sell my entire holding in Barlays please"
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Thursday 8th May 2014 13:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
Easy Peasy
I too can remember the day a consultant made the maintenance staff redundant on a large 40 year old site. Six months later many were reemployed if they could be found, as the drawings on record bore no resemblance to the site infrastructure in reality. Seen the same thing happen lots of times in other areas, the learning curve for the replacement staff is very slow and you need many more of them.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 13:52 GMT Cookieninja
I'm sorry, but ...
Surely some people here have worked within IT departments where some, or all, of the below apply:
* A lot of "dead wood" loitering about
* Old or obsolete technology being used, that could be dumped (along with staff related to it)
* Systems that could be set up to require less maintenance.
So, maybe, just maybe ... Barclay's really could cope fine without the staff they're offloading ?
Note the "Maybe" ;-) It could be a disaster, I'm just pointing out that it might not be.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 14:05 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I'm sorry, but ...
"Surely some people here have worked within IT departments where some,"
You raise some valid points - but to gather this amount surplus staff and obsolete systems, the first questions that should be asked is - How long has it been surplus and how much money has been wasted over the years, then the management responsible brought to account and shown the door.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 14:32 GMT Anonymous Coward 101
Re: I'm sorry, but ...
There will be much waste and useless staff. The problem is that in a bid to reduce headcount, whole teams will be dumped regardless of the quality of the staff working in them. Thus, Team A will be deemed to be essential and all staff kept on, even though 20% or so of the staff are useless. Meanwhile, Team B is dumped even though most of the staff are high calibre and could be moved to other teams who would be glad to have them.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 14:48 GMT qwertyuiop
Re: I'm sorry, but ...
There *MAY* be a grain of truth in what you say. I've worked in IT for 35 years now and in every organisation I've worked in - public and private sector - some or all of these applied. BUT...
...the problem that Barclays will have is that the second this announcement was made (possibly even before) all the really good people will have retrieved their CV and mailed it to the recruitment consultant or website of their choice. They won't hang around to see if they'll get a payout, they know their worth and they'll be off.
Barclays will make redundancies from whoever is left and it's inevitable that the calibre of their IT department will lurch downwards.
I speak from experience!
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Thursday 8th May 2014 15:25 GMT TopOnePercent
Re: I'm sorry, but ...
Surely some people here have worked within IT departments where some, or all, of the below apply:
* A lot of "dead wood" loitering about
Unfortunately, those tasked with determining who stays and who goes rarely have the talent or ability to understand who is who.
I've worked with people that play a game of speaking with authority on any technical subject such that their managers love them. Unfortunately when you scratch the surface of their "knowledge" you discover it has all the depth of a TOWIE character.
It gets worse still when you examine their code and discover it has the service life & resusability of a condom.
* Systems that could be set up to require less maintenance.
That requires investment and technical know-how. Remember that the people that control the investments/projects almost universally don't understand technology.
* Old or obsolete technology being used, that could be dumped (along with staff related to it)
System decomissioning or replacement tends to be an expensive process. It shouldn't be, but in large burocratic organisations, it almost always is.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 14:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A mistake surely ...
Of course. If profits are down at a bank, support staff have to be cut, while the people at the top need bigger bonuses to motivate them to do better in future.
Oddly, there does not seem to be a scenario in which the people at the top earn less.
I suspect the logic may be that when civilisation finally collapses they will need enough money stashed away to fuel their superyachts as they sail into the Pacific to wait out WW3.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 15:36 GMT TopOnePercent
Re: A mistake surely ...
Why only last month Barclays were saying that they had to bung pay bonuses of 2.4 Billion to retain their top talent .....
Care to guess how much of that would have reached the typical IT staffer?
Its always amazed me how many people bang on about bonuses without understanding that the vast majority of bank IT staff would be considerably better off were overtime paid instead. A bonus is just a means of avoiding paying overtime.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 15:04 GMT Eradicate all BB entrants
This is all thanks to those ...
..... management types who thought turning IT into a full service industry would somehow improve how companies dealt with IT systems. Before it used to be 'if we can get the staff to empty their bins themselves we can get rid of half the cleaners', and now it's 'Outlook will set itself up when launched, now we can get rid of half the IT team'.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 16:12 GMT Peter Gathercole
Re: This is all thanks to those ... @Eradicate...
It's funny that they never do factor in the number of expensive minutes lost having skilled people gathering up and throwing away their coffee cups and other rubbish compared with the cheap minutes of the cleaners.
I'm not trying to belittle cleaners, but there is a 3:1 or more ratio in cost of trained and skilled IT professional vs. (often minimum wage) cleaners.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 15:44 GMT Scott Broukell
Customer Base IT Crowd Source
Customer / IT Skill-Xpert participants must be available on zero-hours contracts and at 24/7 notice to come into their local branch and sort out our IT mess themselves. BUT those 'valued' Barclays customer IT Xperts who would like to sign up to our new scheme will have the chance to win a free set of bath towels every month! Be part of the IT behind our new fabby-tastic banking service today!
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Thursday 8th May 2014 16:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
No fat left, they're going to cut into the muscle.
At least in their UNIX estate, Barclays were already pretty lean, especially on the system admin, midware and common application sides.
In a project called Stretch in the early noughties, they did a major restructuring of a significant majority of their disparate UNIX servers onto a number of large server farms, with common OS and patching strategies to reduce overheads, and the applications packed into moveable workloads that they could transfer between servers relatively easily. This was way before Cloud was an en-vogue buzzword (although snow, mist, rain, dewy, gust, wave and damp were, because they were some of the system complex names used - sorry, private joke for those in the know).
The entire set of farms, several thousand systems images running significantly more business applications, were managed by a team of a few dozen system admins (the number really being decided for reasons of continuity of cover rather than the number of servers).
Of course, about 6 years ago, a lot of the work was moved to India. It's probably all gone to pot now.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 18:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: RE:A mistake surely
No one with any brains is dumb enough to work FOR a major bank....you contract your services to them and hop around as required to avoid the BS. Betcha ass most of the better staff at Barclay's are at pastures new already.
Give it a year or two and go back on a higher rate. Easy :)
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Thursday 8th May 2014 20:19 GMT AOD
Re: Too true
Couldn't agree more. Had an agent calling the other day asking about roles and mentioned some upcoming contract positions at Barcrap that he'd love to speak with me about.
I advised him not to bother and explained that I didn't particularly want to work in a company that adopted such an unprofessional approach to contractual agreements.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 17:29 GMT Steve Button
This Automation thing?
Are they saying they have already DONE the automation, and they are now able to cope with fewer staff because of the great work they have already done? A bit mercenary perhaps, but sounds like good business.
On the other hand, are they going to be tackling all this automation with the staff they have left after the cuts have been made?
Be interesting to see how that one works out.
I predict a spread eagle.
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Thursday 8th May 2014 22:04 GMT Anonymous Coward
I was made redundant from a role (at Barclays) I hadn't done for 9 months, but because of internal re-org was underway I couldn't be transfered to my new role. So because SAP thought I was doing a job that was redundant, not what I was actually doing, I was offed.
Apparently the project went to pot when I was put on gardening leave.....quel surprise
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
