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The UK Post Office should have insisted on an open source system
(www.bbc.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2025
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Crucial code doesn't exist, all code is disposable mess that tries to mimic a real world process; and it sounds like the post office fucked up by not even knowing how their own processes work in practice.
Their best option here would be to revert to pen and paper until they figure out how the hell they actually make money.
In the meantime, fire the board and exec team for not meeting their most basic fiduciary duties.
I did consultancy work as part of renewing and replacing ancient software systems for an insurance company, and it's amazing how little people actually know about how their own business processes are actually supposed to work.
Orgs are in the position where everyone who built a system is gone, and all the current people who work there defer to the system for how the processes work, without actually properly understanding the rules. And so the system itself becomes the arbiter of correctness.
This is obviously horrible because it ends up where nobody dares to touch the current system in case they break it in some way nobody understands.
We ended up speaking to people across the whole business to painstakingly work out what the rules really were, putting together a new system and effectively "dual running" that side-by-side with the old system, so we could compare outputs and make sure they were the same. In some case they were different, and in some of those cases it was actually because the old system was actually wrong, but nobody noticed!
It's a mess.
Someone defined the process at some point though, and often it's documented. I've worked at several banks and large financial institutions and have had plenty of people tell me "I don't know how X works" but never "Nobody knows how X works".
I currently work at a bank and I'm yet to encounter anything that someone couldn't at least send me documentation for, however apocryphal.
The problem here is that it's fairly clear that the post office allowed Fujitsu to both define and implement the processes such that they are not compelled to provide the blueprint for them as part of the contract and they are now held to ransom over it.
This is the kind of colossal fuck up that heads should roll for, no less so as it is happening in the shadow of one of the biggest corruption scandals in British history.
I agree that it's a huge fuck up, my comment wasn't in defence of the post office, just a related story :)
Whenever I have delivered code for a client it has always been in a way where the client has complete ownership of the code and can maintain it themselves later (or ask a different company that isn't us to come do it) because that's the only sustainable approach, and all companies should absolutely demand that all work done for them is done this way.
Oh I wasn't implying you were! My ire is directed entirely at RM for their mismanagement.
100÷. I used to work for a bank and the lending team didn't even know how to calculate loan repayments. They just deferred to what the core banking system did.
The core banking system was written in a proprietary language in the 70's and machine translated into another (slightly newer) proprietary language in the 90's. At the time I wouldnt be surprised if management was patting themselves on the back for a modernisation job well done. Just get the computer to do the conversion, right? The sales guys of the new platform assured us they could migrate everything automatically and we always trust a sales guy!
Of course the machine translation is like reading machine code so very difficult to understand / follow / change. The developers working on it were in maintenance mode and everyone was afraid to touch it incase some calculation broke.
The point is that it's exactly what you described - the users were trained to push buttons and trust the system output without actually knowing what they were doing and if it was correct.
Pretty sure the bank recently got fined for compliance breaches as well. It's not because anyone there was bad, they just had no idea how anything was meant to work
isn't that how you get a tech cult?
like ComStar or the Cult Mechanicus?