On some level, you gotta give 'em credit for trying.
A couple of years ago, they tried to recruit me into a platforms/SRE role for their consumer banking services. There seemed to be a pretty clear desire to Modernize All The Things! to do things the way Google/Facebook/etc. do it.
Story time! Years ago, I was a contractor writing (a small piece of) software for DBS. It was probably a couple of hundred lines of Java, and I probably delivered it by emailing a zip file to someone. I don't recall their code review standards being particularly ... existent.
Mine was a relatively small project with them.
There were other teams at my firm working on larger projects at DBS. Another story! A new employee joined my firm, and - on his first day - was sent to join one of these teams onsite at DBS. His day ended at 9pm /on his first day of work/. He gave notice on day two.
My experience as an outsource partner with them 9 years ago. DBS only employed Project Manager and outsourced all their technical stuff.
Yes the working hours is very long.
The DBS UX is absolute garbage. Their android app is extremely slow, and is full of (probably?) iOS patterns. It's almost like they decided to implement their own cross-platform framework, but poorly. (I apologize in advance if they are in fact using someone else's cross-platform framework, but poorly.)
Oh, and their web internet banking doesn't allow pasting passwords, because that's how we do security in 2021.
I've written software for them in the past. I... wouldn't say they have high standards. At least when I was working on systems like this (many years ago), a worrying amount of code was written for them by overworked contractors like myself.
Only if you've never seen it before. The word "accessibility" is incredibly inaccessible to non-native speakers and native speakers with learning disabilities or dyslexia. There's some double characters in there but which ones? Also it sounds like there's an a or "uh" sound in there but somehow it's all "i"s except one is an "e"? "a11y" is four letters (well, two of them are digits but who's counting?) and clearly refers to one particular concept.
Likewise "i18n" (internationalization/internationalisation) and "l10n" (localization/localisation) avoids confusion of whether it's "ize" or "ise", which is literally the problem those concepts try to solve.
I can somewhat excuse "k8s" with "nobody can remember how kubernetes is spelled let alone pronounced" (Germans insist pronouncing the "kuber" part the same way "kyber/cyber" is pronounced in other Greek loanwords, with a German "ü" umlaut) but I admit that one is a stretch and "visual puns" like "k0s" ("minimal", you see?) and "k3s" (the digit 3 looks like half of an 8 so it's "lightweight", right?) are a bit beyond the pale for me.
You specifically called it out as being "inaccessible" (ie, difficult to understand) to non-native speakers (of English).
Also, "a11y" looks too much like the English word "ally". That, IMO, is more likely to cause reading difficulties, particularly with non-native speakers and people with dyslexia.
I've always understood tech debt to be the shortcuts we take along the way to ship fast(er). A global variable here, a hardcoded constant there, that copy-pasted-slightly-modified function instead of adding a parameter.
Fixing those things seems qualitatively different from the maintenance examples.
I've tried Eclipse Che (listed in the article), and it's pretty good. I'm looking forward to Che switching its editor to Eclipse Theia, which promises to be "the VS Code experience in the browser".
