still expected to take away about £1.7m
Just how bad do you have to screw up before you don't walk away with such a payout?
Go Pester someone else: TSB ditches CEO over bank's IT meltdown
Paul Pester has been booted out of TSB's top office after months of criticism over his handling of the IT chaos that hit the bank this year – but is still expected to take away about £1.7m. The CEO's departure follows another systems meltdown over the weekend, when a planned four-hour downtime ended up leaving some customers …
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 11:30 GMT LucreLout
Re: still expected to take away about £1.7m
Just how bad do you have to screw up before you don't walk away with such a payout?
Unless you've brokent he law, it seems its impossible to screw up badly enough that the golden parachute is not wheeled out. Disgraceful.
And they wonder why my career ambition is to be the failing CEO of a FTSE 100 company. It is literally money for nohting. For less than nothing.
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 18:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
'Worse thing is, another company will probably employ him to do exactly the same thing'
Most useless CEO hires come out of golf clubs / old boys circles:
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"Stories which grossly inflate pay for the CEOs of failing companies have become the norm. The rationale is that high level of compensation helps make corporations more competitive and productive. There is little evidence that this is actually true, but this does not prevent companies from giving executives obscenely high rates of pay, all the time working hard to scrape back pay and benefits from lower-level employees. The compensation boards who decide on this are often made up of CEOs from other companies who, to nobody’s surprise, share the belief that CEOs are worth millions."
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https://www.rte.ie/eile/brainstorm/2018/0724/980685-should-your-employer-get-rid-of-managers/
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 14:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: still expected to take away about £1.7m
It's a much better deal than the 100K annual contract being offered to fuck up government systems for Brexit: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/17/home_office_seeks_brexit_tech_boss_doesnt_splash_the_cash/
I'd be willing to completely screw up someone's IT for anywhere upwards of 500K per annum
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 14:19 GMT anothercynic
Re: still expected to take away about £1.7m
There's nothing to stop him from declining the £480K 'historic' bonus... If his contract states that his compensation is in line with 'in lieu of notice', then fine. They could put him on gardening leave for the notice period, and then no-one would be complaining.
That said, contract provisions for colossal failures like this one should become more... common. Being told that 'if you so utterly screw up that you damage the reputation of this institution, you'll lose all of this' should be enough impetus not to screw up, but then again, any savvy senior exec would refuse to sign such a contract.
It's a rock-and-a-hard-place situation. I'm not saying it can't be changed, but it'll be hard to sell to any new C-suite exec...
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Wednesday 5th September 2018 08:30 GMT LucreLout
Re: still expected to take away about £1.7m
Being told that 'if you so utterly screw up that you damage the reputation of this institution, you'll lose all of this' should be enough impetus not to screw up, but then again, any savvy senior exec would refuse to sign such a contract.
That'll be the paying for talent myth. Here's the thing. The vast majority of FTSE 100 CEOs NEVER lead a second one. So, if its talent we're paying for, why is it that they can't find an equivalent or better job?
Could it just possibly be, that it's simple troughing and nothing to do with talent? That they had the political ability to get to the top of a greasy pole, but that is actually the only skill they really have, and that every equivalent company already has several staffers in reserve who hase mastered that same skill?
Sure, you do find the odd one where a change in leadership produces remarkable financial results, but that's fewer then 5% of even top flight CEOs.
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 11:18 GMT Pete 2
Get what's coming
> Paul Pester has been booted out of TSB's top office after months of criticism over his handling of the IT chaos that hit the bank this year – but is still expected to take away about £1.7m.
Let us all hope the money is paid into his TSB account. And that there is a "hitch" which means he can't access it for a very long time.
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 11:23 GMT andymcp
On the plus side....
At least this was around a planned 'upgrade' so people had notice of when doom may darken their banking ability.
Some just fall over without any scheduled intervention. Enter stage left First Direct, who today currently seem unable to deal with online banking either through the app or website. Balances, sure. Move money around? Er.....no.
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 11:36 GMT Joseph Haig
Re: On the plus side....
At least this was around a planned 'upgrade' so people had notice of when doom may darken their banking ability.
I am (for the moment) still a customer and I found out about the outage via Twitter on Friday afternoon. I consider this to be less 'notice' and more 'afterthought'. People might be a bit more understanding if they had not done exactly the same last month. It is almost as if there is an end-of-the-month batch job that is broken.
If it were genuinely a 'planned' outage then perhaps they could have not done it on the last day of the month, being pay-day for a lot of people.
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 12:32 GMT Giovani Tapini
Re: On the plus side....
Project managers are obsessed with delivering things at the start/end of month, regardless of necessity.
This is usually in direct inverse correlation with the usage of said system and critical processing windows (e.g. everyone's automated and manual bill payments and salary credits etc)
I would anticipate that they have relatively quiet windows of opportunity outside month end and dependencies on monthly financial reporting should be dealt with in software/process not change windows...
I got my programmers to put software switches in for this sort of eventuality so I could pre-deploy the very big changes, and use a very short quiescence to flip switches and restart services etc. rather than attempting to apply changes to hundreds of servers in a timeline with the added consequence of doubling the timeline in the event of a backout.
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 11:56 GMT Pete 2
Re: Dreaming
> Or did I dream it?
I think it was probably a dream. The only time I have ever seen something approaching this was in the run up to Y2K. IIRC provision had been made for client companies to even simulate the payments they would be making through the banking system (at least in some limited fashion).
Even the fullest of full regression testing that I have seen has always failed as soon as it has to receive external inputs or transact business with external systems.
This is always going to be a problem for banking systems since they are so completely interconnected. I assume that is one reason why they have so much otherwise obsolete systems and software - nobody has the foggiest idea how it works and they are all too scared to try and change it!
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 12:10 GMT yoganmahew
Re: Dreaming
@Pete 2
"This is always going to be a problem for banking systems since they are so completely interconnected. I assume that is one reason why they have so much otherwise obsolete systems and software - nobody has the foggiest idea how it works and they are all too scared to try and change it!"
Yes, but:
1. The failures are not in the external interfaces to other banks. They are between the bank and itself. This should be entirely predictable.
2. This is a new system! They should know exactly how it works! And it's no dinosaur legacy uptime monster with five nines reliability. It's the cloud mate, where 4 hour scheduled outages each month are required?! What happened to "no planned downtime"? When did that die as a thing? What about five nines? 4 hours a month is 99.45%, even with rounding that's not three nines... Is this really what we have to look forward to? My fridge is going to be down for a minimum of 4 hours a month, but the outage may extend until tuesday?
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 12:05 GMT fajensen
Re: Dreaming
I once worked on a project who actually procured a huge SUN Blade Server ("My Preciousss" to the Build-BOFH) to finish the running of build, install and regression tests for several versions of a custom Linux Distro on about 40 different targets overnight.
There were web pages for each project, target device and whatnot showing the results of the builds. They had like 6 people employed just to keep the tests running.
I'd say that pretty good software was produced there. Today, one could pop most of the heavy lifting into in the cloud running it on a 'pay-per-build'-basis, so there are no good excuses, really.
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 12:40 GMT Giovani Tapini
thats not neoliberal
that has been the case forever, although the exact number of digits of remuneration has changed as currencies and culture dictate.
As I recall there were money lenders in the bible behaving not unlike some modern bankers. Mill owners in the industrial revolution, plantation owners... this is not unique even to financial services.
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 12:56 GMT Anonymous Coward
Build a test environment
I worked for a company once (much smaller that this) and when they rolled out a big software upgrade I wrote a test environment to demonstrate that their fancy new database couldn't handle the customer environment once they got past the demonstration stage. I showed it to the managers and they were not impressed - "that will never happen" they said ... and six months later the customer complaints started rolling in. I work elsewhere these days.
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 14:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Interface problems with TSB migration
May 2018: “If you had taken due notice of our concerns regarding the migration of customers onto Proteo4UK, which were coming directly from members working on the project and involved in the testing , TSB's IT fiasco could have been avoided.” ref
April 2018: “Are @TSB developers seriously coding live changes in production? I've found loads of ugly debugging logs in the code which are being spat out in the browser console. I don't dare to imagine what mess they have in the back-end.” ref
Dec 2017: ‘Proteo4UK is running “in a very active mode” out of two new data centres in the UK. In case of a disaster in one of the centres, all critical services will switch “with no interruption or loss of customer data, transactions or services”’ ref
June 2017: “Welcome to the Banco Sabadell Open API .. Our API is RESTful, we use JSON format and OAuth 2.0 authorization." ref
June 2015: “Banco Sabadell acquires Banco CAM: leveraging a cloud computing strategy” ref
March 2015: “Management track-record: IT Know-how Proteo4 Roadmap” ref
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Tuesday 4th September 2018 17:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Really fing annoying...
...that an engineer i know made a tiny mistake not following request for change process, broke a service that was notice and fixed by another engineer before the working week so no down time he still got fired. Yet you can bring a banks IT system to its knees, keep your job and then when finally asked to leave (so not fired) you get paid over £1mill to do so.
Fucking annoying.
Maybe we should all just be failin CEOs.
Its like what Graham Lineham said on Richard Herrings podcast "I could go to American and consistently fail in TV but make more money than I do being a success in the UK"
Biting the hand that feeds IT
