At the same time we’re talking about AI replacing developers we also see cases like this of organizational technical incompetency.
How does one square those two realities?
It's weird to me how it often seems like the US and China are the only countries capable of mega-scale tech infrastructure like this (and even then, only in some industries). Can you imagine Wal-mart's website going down for multiple months?
I think a lot of companies (especially in Europe) have not internalized that, yes, you actually do need to expend apparently exorbitant amounts of money on highly-paid engineers if you want your tech to actually be good. Many countries, including the UK, are simply not wealthy enough to do it at scale. They produce plenty of engineers, but most of the ones capable of holding complicated stuff together probably end up working for US companies that can pay them market rates.
M&S outsourced over half of its IT team to Tata Consultancy in 2018. Looks like they are now reaping what they sowed
I don't believe most (pre-internet) retailers should be building and operating their own sites. They already run core supply chain, distribution, and certain other apps (e.g. rostering and so on, accounting and payroll), but they probably shouldn't even be running some of those either.
> “There is no change to our strategy and our longer-term plans to reshape M&S for growth and, if anything, the incident allows us to accelerate the pace of change as we draw a line and move on.”
I wonder if people like this ever hear themselves talking.
Holy shit why don't they just set up a Shopify
How can it take 3-4 months to get an eCommerce site back online? I assume you could redeploy everything from scratch in less time if you have source code and release assets. With backups and failover sites I can’t think of any world where this would happen?