About once a year my bank full fills they legal obligations and asks me a bunch of questions, mostly revolving about my need for cash. One of the final questions is "Why do you need to withdraw cash?" There's a bunch of reasons listed, guesses of some lawyer or banker as to why a person might need cash, e.g. "give to my kids", "pay my friend back a loan" and then there is the "Other, please fill in the text box". That is the one I use, every time, because they do not expect my answer, even if they blood well should. Every time I answer: "Because I do not trust you to keep the payment system running 24/7/365, and again this year you have prove my scepticism correct".
We keep pushing for more and more digital, always online solutions, but I'm an SRE. I know that we can not have 100% uptime, not for anything. Yet more and more solutions are designed without that in mind. There are no backups. When the digital solution fail we are screwed, because the systems are designed backwards. The digital, online version is the add-on, not your only option.
I don't blame the developers. I blame business people, politicians and managers for releasing ill conceived systems who's flaws are obvious to any technical minded person. I blame developers for a host of different problems, mostly related to not being able to code.
We keep pushing for more and more digital, always online solutions, but I'm an SRE. I know that we can not have 100% uptime, not for anything. Yet more and more solutions are designed without that in mind. There are no backups. When the digital solution fail we are screwed, because the systems are designed backwards. The digital, online version is the add-on, not your only option.
I don't blame the developers. I blame business people, politicians and managers for releasing ill conceived systems who's flaws are obvious to any technical minded person. I blame developers for a host of different problems, mostly related to not being able to code.