I think the right analogy would be that 400 people just barely avoided foreclosure because of a bug. It might have already happened and nobody heard about it because neither Wells Fargo nor the homeowners had any reason to publicize it. (Or neither were aware of it.)
There are stories about people who stopped paying their mortgage and got away with it because the mortgage had been resold several times and there wasn't clear paperwork about who owned it. But these may be urban legends.
I guess you don't realize that closing costs on a home are between 2 and 5% of the purchase price?
There's something called the "the five year" rule, which is generally considered the amount of time it takes to recoup the closing costs of a home purchase [1]
Now add the price of two relocations - moving into the house and moving out of the house.
These folks are like if they net anything more than a few grand on this.
i work for a bank. my coworkers are mostly not very competent. also sometimes when we move to a new system we don’t get the actual business logic. we just reverse engineer it from the data. the people who knew how it worked were laid off a long time ago
Government style bureaucracy with MBA management culture, heavy risk management, and constant growth by acquisition.
Some roles pay very well, but are inflexible and boring. I knew a guy making $180k as a contractor to be a storage engineer. His entire job was fulfilling SAN zoning requests. He ended up bootstrapping a startup just to stay sane.
Yeah there’s a thousand vice presidents at my location that make 160k which in TX is a high wage. they don’t have high productivity compared to a real tech company. it’s all manual bureaucratic work.
I had a grand-uncle was a bank Vice President. His main responsibility was reading the obituaries of about 25 papers and making sure relatives didn’t open the safe deposit boxes before probate.
Not sure of salary, but his schtick was 12 month leases of black Cadillacs, so it was pretty good. :)
they haven’t adopted silicon valley style hiring practices so a good resume is all that matters. interviews are a 10m HR screen and a 45 minutes interview by a hiring manager that hasn’t been in the ditches in 10 years. All my coworkers came from a staffing agency like Infosys or Accenture. Contract to hire. I think their resumes were all fake.
>when we move to a new system we don’t get the actual business logic. we just reverse engineer it from the data.
I'm pretty sure this happens in most fields that don't spec out absolutely everything in advance. In an ecommerce setting my team had to do this with the checkout logic because the old system was so complex and convoluted. Starting with a fork of a 3rd party platform and then unleashing 10 years of short-term contractor enhancements basically guarantees that no one will have full specs.
well my team builds the software to please regulators so all the original specs were signed off by legal and regulators. the next generation of each project simply fork lifts that data and massages the logic until it matches up
With a company like Wells Fargo that's moving from scandal to scandal I wonder when is it enough and we should just close the company? They repeatedly have demonstrated that they are not able to engage in ethical business practices.
Ok. How about we forgive every outstanding mortgage they hold? They're so big, they can take a hit, right?
What's that? They don't hold many mortgages? They sell them all upstream? Then why are they foreclosing? But it's a good point that they have such easy access to the secondary market. How about we cut that off, too?
Maybe they are too big to fail overnight. But we can do it in bites. Diminish one piece of their business at a time. Eventually (sooner than you think) they can be trimmed back to a manageable size. But we should start right away. With their track record, each new infraction should result in the death penalty for some piece of their empire.
Then again, we don't need the government to punish them. We just need account holders to close their accounts. If people are not willing to do this, why should the government that represents those people get involved? One reasonable thing that the government could do is require WF to pay the refinance fees for anybody who wants to move their mortgage (or even the servicing of their mortgage) away from WF. Then people can impose a personal penalty on WF without any cost to themselves except the time and effort to go through the process. If we are fed up enough, we could even require WF to buy down the refi to the same interest rate. But that would only benefit recent mortgages who should have known better to begin with.
"Then again, we don't need the government to punish them. We just need account holders to close their accounts. If people are not willing to do this, why should the government that represents those people get involved?"
Because we have decided that it's easier for everybody if we set standards for businesses so we can trust them to act ethically. When you go to a restaurant you generally can be confident that you won't get poisoned. So if you are a Wells Fargo customer you should be able to trust that you don't get screwed over.
It's not realistic to put the burden of monitoring business practices on the individual person. If you ever have dealt with buying a house or medical stuff you should know that understanding the transactions completely would probably be a full time job. That's why we have regulations and laws so people can spend their time more productively.
>"It's not realistic to put the burden of monitoring business practices on the individual person. If you ever have dealt with buying a house or medical stuff you should know that understanding the transactions completely would probably be a full time job. That's why we have regulations and laws so people can spend their time more productively."
I think the point the OP is making is that when the regulatory regime fails to protect customers by taking action against a company with such frequent and glaring violation there is something that can be done as a last resort - voting with your feet.
Clearly regulators haven't instilled any real fear into this toxic dump of a bank.
WF doesn't hold the deed, they merely service the mortgage for a cut of the interest rate. They send the letters, keep track of the taxes and insurance, enforce the foreclosures, etc. They're nothing but a third party. The actual mortgage is held by, generally, holders of mortgage backed securities and/or the US Government via Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
it is interesting that even with all these scandals that account holders haven't punished wf. The accounts fraud was in sept 2016, and looking at their annual report for last year, they increased revenue, increased total deposits, and increased consumer and small business deposits.
Maybe that's less growth than they would have gotten.. but it's definitely not a penalty. Just a complete failure by consumers to hold the bank accountable.
HSBC was literally knowingly laundering cartel money and funding mass murder and got a wrist slap for it. Banks literally drove the global economy into a tailspin with greed and the US taxpayer got the privilege of bailing them out and paying bonuses to the executives. Some minimal protections were put in, but even those were too much for them so they're having the Republicans roll them back for them. America is a country that has ceased being a functioning democracy or society based on actual capitalism. It sure is nice to think about the good ol' days though right?
I'm a Wells Fargo account holder. I haven't closed my account. I don't really see a reason to. The other big banks are just as amoral, and they would screw their customers in a heartbeat if they thought they could get away with it. The main difference between Wells Fargo and other banks is that Wells Fargo got caught.
I wouldn't consider a local bank or a credit union, because I like being able to find a branch anywhere in the country, and small/local financial institutions are not exempt from bad behavior either. They also tend to have significantly inferior online banking and mobile apps.
Closing my account would just mean moving from one amoral giant bank to another.
Do you really need a branch anywhere in the country? My credit union has ATMs everywhere which is good enough for me. I go to a branch maybe once per year if at all.
I'm with the parent on this... I switched from BoA to a local bank after having a fantastic customer service experience getting a mortgage there, and wanting to support local instead of megacorps.
No online check sending, no mobile check deposit, very few ATMs, doesn't accept Zelle, and doesn't integrate with Mint (Mandatory 2FA issues). I miss the BoA features and regret the move.
My credit union (Baxter) has all of these. I think it's still good to avoid the big guys but I guess you have to check if your local bank or credit union is suitable for you.
Is it no so in America, that you can use any ATMs without fees? For example, in the UK, I can use my Nationwide card in a machine outside Barclays. I've only seen one that charges, a standalone one in a club.
I’m with a bank that has one physical branch and I’ve never seen it. The few things you can’t do online you can do through the mail, and they reimburse my ATM fees anywhere.
I haven't had a local branch for my credit union in over 13 years. I get money from any ATM I want and my bank reimburses any fees. My credit union is owned by it's members which doesn't give it perverse incentives to screw ourselves over. I've been able to scan my checks from home since before most big banks had mobile apps. We've gotten emergency loans from them expedited on a Friday afternoon to cover surgeries. Good banking does exist, you just have to take the time to actually look for ones built on values instead of greed.
They aren't supposed to be anymore. Dodd-Frank requires banks to have a living will for unwinding in case of crisis. Wells Fargo's was approved last year.
I assume it'd never be triggered from above due to "a series of scandals" as long as operations remained viable.
That's only the case because the electorate has allowed the financial industry to purchase market failure from our politicians through deregulation and reluctance to trust-bust.
Monopolies that are too big to fail are the natural end state of laissez-faire capitalism -- but we don't have to accept that. We can insist that our government break up monopolies.
That 20k per foreclosure is probably not going to even cover Wells Fargo's legal expenses following this. They're going to be sued not just for the loss of value/equity caused by a foreclosure but for the ongoing costs of loss of a home - possibly more expensive shorter term housing, the credit damage of a foreclosure (and increased costs due to that), legal expenses, possible loss of employment due to having to move or having no stable home, etc.
What Wells Fargo did was take people already on the edge and throw an anvil at them.
More like it took people already over the edge, and didn't throw them the rope to pull them back. These were people already going down in foreclosure, who didn't get special assistance. Very bad, but not an anvil.
True, foreclosures need to be initiated. What should a bank do about a mortgage thats 3 months delinquent? Should they just stop collecting?
If its possible that they can reasonably modify the loan to terms that make repayment feasible, they should as it's a win-win, not because they are contractually obligated to in any way. But if given what they know about the property and the borrower's income, there is no feasible way to mod the loan, prudence requires that they foreclose.
This "bug" mistakenly put people in the wrong category.
Right, so, instead of helping people back from the edge of the cliff, they shoved them off.
The answer to your question seems to be that they should examine the account and offer a loan modification if certain conditions are met. They failed at this for these people. That other people aren’t eligible for modification and would be foreclosed on regardless is not relevant here.
Banks don't care about such lawsuits...after 4 years they'll settle while agreeing that lawyers take the largest slices of the pie. Cost of doing business.
In my experience, mortgage originators rely on box-checking to get mortgages to pass. They make no decisions; it's an amoral, automatic process which happens to be much less efficient than it could be as the industry clings to the idea that homebuyers need to talk to someone on the phone and the people in seats are actually necessary.
Around 2013, WF Mortgage denied me a refinance on a property. It was my primary home (high-rise condo) when I bought it, then it became a rental. The reason for the denial was, my condo unit was in the same building as a hotel (downtown in a city), so it was labelled a "condotel". This was a shock to me. After researching condotels, I explained that the definition did not fit my property, but it didn't matter to WF. This was frustrating to me because WF originated the original mortgage when I purchase the property in 2007, and I never missed a payment. The refinance would lower my payment significantly due to lower interest and a large chunk of the principal that I paid down. They did not care at all. They all but told me to fuck off and stop calling them. It was like they wanted anti customer loyalty. I used Quicken Loans for the refinance--no problems.
well, follow the money. why would they sell you a product that makes them less money if they have a material reason to deny it? Think like an insurance company: if you have a technical reason to deny paying a claim, you should absolutely do so, because it means less money for you (the ins. co).
This is not logical. WF now makes nothing from the financing of the place rather than simply less than originally. They should understand that there's a market and someone else will do the refi.
That probably works if customer has no other choice. Not familiar with how the numbers work here but it seems like if the customer refinances with another company then there is money left on the table and they just lost out. Also presumably they just burned a bridge with that customer for future financial activity.
Wells Fargo most likely would only make money on the origination and other fees associated with the refi. The vast majority of mortgages are sold to the Fannie/freddies and Wells Fargo doesn't make a dime off the interest. So it would definitely benefit them to do the refi.
While I don't disagree with your sentiment, I think WF would have done the refi if it met their criteria. The reason: they make a lot of money on new loans (refi or otherwise) due to the loan origination fee. In my case the fee was going to be about $1,500 for a ~$90,000 loan. Since mortgage originators usually process the payments, I assume they get some compensation for ongoing loans. However, my understanding is most mortgage originators don't "hold" the loans. They sell them off, so to speak, to be used as a part of an investment product (e.g. a CDO). Funny thing is, you might invest in a small part of your own home loan via a mutual fund (or pension fund). How screwed up is that! That's the real rotten thing about the industry. No skin in the game.
If you or anyone you know lost a home because of Wells Fargo’s error, reporter Deon Roberts would like to hear from you. Contact him at deroberts@charlotteobserver.com or (704) 358-5248.
I've found companies that hold mortgages tend to do that sort of thing -- they really don't get the concept that Steve Jobs & others promoted that 'someone is going to eat your business, so we'd better cannibalize it first'.
Trying to get two different refis, different houses, different lenders, the original lender kept stringing me along so long that I'd literally found several better deals, selected one, signed & closed before their refi dept responded with a meaningful contact who could actually move forward with a deal. They had my business by default, all they would have had to do is respond promptly, but I had to say "sorry, you lost".
Just myopic. Seems they think if they don't respond, we'll not bother.
I'm chronically ashamed by the degree of tolerance to shoddy work in our field.
If software engineers were held to the same standard as civil engineers, people would go to jail. I empathize humans make mistakes, but I've also known programmers who just don't care about striving toward perfect, bug-free code. In some cases it's just a job not a passion, in others they're overworked and learned it doesn't pay to go slowly and correctly.
Kudos to all of you true craftsmen out there who do take care and pride in the quality of your work.
In this case, you could loosely say that foreclosure was a direct result of the software bug. Suicide would be an indirect result. Where if a bridge were to collapse, then death would be a direct result.
Your example with cars would only make sense if a software bug put a driver in direct danger without giving them time to be responsible and mitigate the danger. In almost all situations, even with modern technology in cars, it's the driver's responsibility to drive/steer/brake to mitigate the danger.
How many pieces of software exist in this world where there is zero chance of even a catastrophic bug causing harm to humans? I would bet most of the existing pieces fit this description. Now apply that question to works of civil engineering, and you have a different picture.
Dumping risk into individuals isn’t something to celebrate. If companies face the consequences of bad software, they’ll have to implement processes that actually promote software quality, not find random ICs to crucify.
GP is essentially proposing that us programmers should become the low-level fall guys.
Moreover, the tone of the comment is incredibly condescending. It's all well and good to promote criminal accountability because I'm such an excellent "craftsman"... Until I go to prison because I couldn't foresee that there's a race condition on line 56,394 when the internal clock is off by a nanosecond.
There can also be a large discrepancy between how easy a bug is to spot in advance, and how stupid it makes you look after the fact. Plenty of people on HN were bashing "stupid" mistakes leading to security vulnerabilities in recent months and years, even though those bugs we missed by many smart people.
Really the only way to deal with this is to try to use tools that make it impossible to make certain classes of bugs. But that's really not an individual choice but an institutional one.
> Plenty of people on HN were bashing "stupid" mistakes leading to security vulnerabilities in recent months and years, even though those bugs we missed by many smart people.
There are examples of subtle yet fundamental bugs that escaped notice for decades, often under the watchful eyes of some of the smartest, most experienced engineers in the industry:
Another thing people are missing in the misguided comparison to "civil engineering" is that programming is several orders of magnitudes more complex than building bridges. It's much harder to design fault-tolerance, and your routine can completely blow up due to subtle bugs like the above.
Wells Fargo has a very long and well-established history of making "mistakes" in their own favor that harm their customers and/or break laws. These "mistakes" are typically non-technical in nature, have nothing to do with engineering standards, and in several cases appear to be a matter of deliberate bank policy:
> On February 2, 2018, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank barred Wells Fargo from growing its asset base any further, based upon years of misconduct, until Wells Fargo fixes its internal problems to the satisfaction of the Federal Reserve. In April 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States Department of Labor had launched a probe into whether Wells Fargo was pushing its customers into more expensive retirement plans as well as into retirement funds managed by Wells Fargo itself. Subsequently in May 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Wells Fargo's business banking group had improperly altered documents about business clients in 2017 and early 2018.
These are just from the past couple of years. Check out their Wikipedia page for many, many more. This isn't even the first time they made serious "mistakes" with mortgages specifically: check out their 2012 settlement. Here's the judgement in just one case:
> On April 5, 2012, a federal judge ordered Wells Fargo to pay $3.1 million in punitive damages over a single loan, one of the largest fines for a bank ever for mortgaging service misconduct. Elizabeth Magner, a federal bankruptcy judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana, cited the bank's behavior as "highly reprehensible", stating that Wells Fargo has taken advantage of borrowers who rely on the bank's accurate calculations. She went on to add, "perhaps more disturbing is Wells Fargo's refusal to voluntarily correct its errors. It prefers to rely on the ignorance of borrowers or their inability to fund a challenge to its demands, rather than voluntarily relinquish gains obtained through improper accounting methods."
Blaming the programmers for these "mistakes" is like blaming bank tellers for the reckless banking policies that caused the 2008 meltdown.
This has nothing to do with "engineering standards". Notice that all these "mistakes" benefit Wells Fargo at the expense of its customers and/or the law. If it was just "shoddy standards", you'd expect a few mistakes to be in favor of the customers...
These "mistakes" proliferate because they make the bank money, and only cost them a slap on the wrist and some small fines. This is Too Big to Fail in action.
Edit: This comment should have been attached to the parent comment. Sorry about that. I don't expect any internal changes at Wells Fargo, just commenting they are concerned about their image on this issue.
Wells Fargo is certainly worried about how the revelation of all of these anti-customer actions might hurt their bottom line. Thus its "Re-Established" brand campaign[1]. Most companies just change their name when they want to "Re-Establish". I'm not sure it is such a good idea to spend a lot of money telling people that you were a bad actor and now, trust us, things are different.
Don't confuse "public image management" with actual concern. They've been willfully misbehaving for decades, still do so today, and made a ton of money off it. Multiple generations of WF senior managers got nice bonuses from illegal / "mistaken" fees, "mistakes" in servicing mortgages, misleading their customers, etc.
Seems like these kind of "mistakes" are thoroughly ingrained into their corporate culture by now.
So they also threw some money into a campaign to improve their public image. Makes sense for them. They've also evidently continued their practice of making "mistakes" in their own favor.
On the flip side, the software tradition of As-Is licensing with no liability for anything going wrong is probably a major factor in the high dynamics and growth in the field of computers. I would agree with those that think technology improvements outside of computers has basically stalled and believe the lack of a safety-first philosophy in the computer field is largely the reason it has and continues to advance at a rapid rate.
> Kudos to all of you true craftsmen out there who do take care and pride in the quality of your work.
This is a very fair point and certainly not all programmers strive for this.
At the same time, in companies where this type of software gets written, the responsibility for delivering a safe product does not rest on the shoulders of programmers alone. "Move fast and break things" is ridiculed by responsible programmers, but outright shunned by responsible team leaders, product managers and CTOs.
No matter how much you care about "craftsmanship", you'll never come up with a well-written program if it's part of an irresponsibly-ran program.
So yes, if software engineers were held to the same standard as civil engineers, people would go to jail. At the same time, it's worth remembering all the other standards of conduct that apply in heavily-regulated fields: companies can be barred from selling a certain product (or type of product) or forced to withdraw them from the market, licensed practitioners may have their licenses withdrawn and so on.
> I'm chronically ashamed by the degree of tolerance to shoddy work in our field.
The vast majority of people in every field are producing average or shoddy work. Just the way it goes.
Most people (myself included) have other things to focus on– family, health, finances, hobbies. I’d much rather screw something up at work than something that really matters to me.
I’d much rather screw something up at work than something that really matters to me.
That's OK right up until the point screw-ups materially impact other people's lives. I mean noone cares about some cheesy website sure, but these are people's homes.
While I don't quite appreciate your sentiment, I do appreciate your honesty. What you say is quite true, and most people are unwilling to admit that in public. However, if most people internalized the fact that your POV is pretty much the norm I think many folks would be much better off. So again, thanks.
Here's the thing, though. If it weren't for government regulations holding civil engineers to a higher standard, they simply wouldn't produce the same quality.
Unless there are strong business requirements demanding high quality code, no business is going to pay the costs of it.
No business will ever willingly do the right thing unless someone is holding a gun to it demanding they do so. They simply won't be able to compete against businesses that aren't.
The true craftsmen out there will consistently see themselves passed on for promotions, and receive negative performance evaluations in environments where features introduced to a codebase are treated as far more important than bugs introduced into a codebase. The folks who treat it as a job will quickly find their salaries increase as they migrate into management positions.
This sounds to me like placing too much of a burden on individuals. In general, when dealing with people of at least average competence, when things go wrong, I blame process, not people.
Software engineering will probably mostly provide what the market requires and rewards, and for most things where you don't have lives at stake, it takes a lot of cash and process to drive your defect rate toward zero.
Viewed through an economic lens, an economist would say that we have an optimum level of environmental pollution, where the marginal benefit of cleaning it up or preventing it doesn't surpass the marginal cost of tolerating it.
So, I disagree. Work will get done to the necessary standard, and our industry already fetishizes overwork and heroes. I don't think anyone should bothering driving themselves crazy with extreme personal perfectionism when the market doesn't demand or reward it, and the software engineering field doesn't gear itself toward producing those results via process.
>but I've also known programmers who just don't care about striving toward perfect, bug-free code
This target moves too much in business to be able to efficiently target it.
I surely wouldn't take the time to make something perfect if I knew the business was going to turn around and add another feature that forces me to re-evaluate the thing entirely.
While 400 homes lost is certainly significant, don't forget the millions of homes it accurately kept track of. Imagine the amount of work and resources that would have had to be used to keep track manually and by paper.
Please don't worry about 2 steps back after you've taken several billion steps forward.
When the result of a decision is to kick someone out of their damned home, why the hell isn’t it someone’s job to read that family’s file cover-to-cover before pulling the trigger? That is NOT the time to rely on any auto-push-button software.
Good for you and you should celebrate when you finally close your account. I’ll go so far as to say that anyone who willfully banks with Wells Fargo has blood on their hands. This is an immoral company.
To say that you won’t switch banks because they’re all just as bad is absurd. That’s just a lazy excuse by a lazy person in my opinion. I’ll take downvotes for my negative post but Wells Fargo screwed me any my family over severely during the recession and it took years to dig out of that mess. Not a single Wells Fargo employee so much as feigned an apology.
This 'glitch' feels like a stretch. People were going to lose their homes so they would have followed up with the bank, so there would be support staff, escalations, and multiple departments and chains involved to fix any genuine glitch, so is Well Fargo saying that their entire process failed?
For instance if a billion dollars lands in your account, do you think there will be no process to fix the 'computer glitch'?
This affected my sister's friend supposedly. He's been living with her and her family for the last few months. Nice guy, but it is a bit awkward having this stranger show up whenever she stops by with the rest of her family.
If you or anyone you know lost a home because of Wells Fargo’s error, reporter Deon Roberts would like to hear from you. Contact him at deroberts@charlotteobserver.com or (704) 358-5248.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadThey kept it, which I’m not sure they would have done if it was a human teller, but it’s different when you’re dealing with a machine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/business/economy/25gret.h...
There's something called the "the five year" rule, which is generally considered the amount of time it takes to recoup the closing costs of a home purchase [1]
Now add the price of two relocations - moving into the house and moving out of the house.
These folks are like if they net anything more than a few grand on this.
[1] https://moneyning.com/housing/the-five-year-rule-for-buying-...
Some roles pay very well, but are inflexible and boring. I knew a guy making $180k as a contractor to be a storage engineer. His entire job was fulfilling SAN zoning requests. He ended up bootstrapping a startup just to stay sane.
Not sure of salary, but his schtick was 12 month leases of black Cadillacs, so it was pretty good. :)
I'm pretty sure this happens in most fields that don't spec out absolutely everything in advance. In an ecommerce setting my team had to do this with the checkout logic because the old system was so complex and convoluted. Starting with a fork of a 3rd party platform and then unleashing 10 years of short-term contractor enhancements basically guarantees that no one will have full specs.
Mark Baum: "That's not stupidity. That's fraud."
Jared Vennett: "Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal, and I'll have my wife's brother arrested."
What's that? They don't hold many mortgages? They sell them all upstream? Then why are they foreclosing? But it's a good point that they have such easy access to the secondary market. How about we cut that off, too?
Maybe they are too big to fail overnight. But we can do it in bites. Diminish one piece of their business at a time. Eventually (sooner than you think) they can be trimmed back to a manageable size. But we should start right away. With their track record, each new infraction should result in the death penalty for some piece of their empire.
Then again, we don't need the government to punish them. We just need account holders to close their accounts. If people are not willing to do this, why should the government that represents those people get involved? One reasonable thing that the government could do is require WF to pay the refinance fees for anybody who wants to move their mortgage (or even the servicing of their mortgage) away from WF. Then people can impose a personal penalty on WF without any cost to themselves except the time and effort to go through the process. If we are fed up enough, we could even require WF to buy down the refi to the same interest rate. But that would only benefit recent mortgages who should have known better to begin with.
Because we have decided that it's easier for everybody if we set standards for businesses so we can trust them to act ethically. When you go to a restaurant you generally can be confident that you won't get poisoned. So if you are a Wells Fargo customer you should be able to trust that you don't get screwed over.
It's not realistic to put the burden of monitoring business practices on the individual person. If you ever have dealt with buying a house or medical stuff you should know that understanding the transactions completely would probably be a full time job. That's why we have regulations and laws so people can spend their time more productively.
I think the point the OP is making is that when the regulatory regime fails to protect customers by taking action against a company with such frequent and glaring violation there is something that can be done as a last resort - voting with your feet.
Clearly regulators haven't instilled any real fear into this toxic dump of a bank.
Maybe that's less growth than they would have gotten.. but it's definitely not a penalty. Just a complete failure by consumers to hold the bank accountable.
https://www08.wellsfargomedia.com/assets/pdf/about/investor-...
But at least the fed is putting a cap on their growth now: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-wells-fargo-fed/fed-o...
I wouldn't consider a local bank or a credit union, because I like being able to find a branch anywhere in the country, and small/local financial institutions are not exempt from bad behavior either. They also tend to have significantly inferior online banking and mobile apps.
Closing my account would just mean moving from one amoral giant bank to another.
No online check sending, no mobile check deposit, very few ATMs, doesn't accept Zelle, and doesn't integrate with Mint (Mandatory 2FA issues). I miss the BoA features and regret the move.
Wrong. Many credit unions are in a co-op shared network.
https://www.co-opfs.org/Shared-Branches-ATMs
I assume it'd never be triggered from above due to "a series of scandals" as long as operations remained viable.
Monopolies that are too big to fail are the natural end state of laissez-faire capitalism -- but we don't have to accept that. We can insist that our government break up monopolies.
What Wells Fargo did was take people already on the edge and throw an anvil at them.
If its possible that they can reasonably modify the loan to terms that make repayment feasible, they should as it's a win-win, not because they are contractually obligated to in any way. But if given what they know about the property and the borrower's income, there is no feasible way to mod the loan, prudence requires that they foreclose.
This "bug" mistakenly put people in the wrong category.
The answer to your question seems to be that they should examine the account and offer a loan modification if certain conditions are met. They failed at this for these people. That other people aren’t eligible for modification and would be foreclosed on regardless is not relevant here.
Around 2013, WF Mortgage denied me a refinance on a property. It was my primary home (high-rise condo) when I bought it, then it became a rental. The reason for the denial was, my condo unit was in the same building as a hotel (downtown in a city), so it was labelled a "condotel". This was a shock to me. After researching condotels, I explained that the definition did not fit my property, but it didn't matter to WF. This was frustrating to me because WF originated the original mortgage when I purchase the property in 2007, and I never missed a payment. The refinance would lower my payment significantly due to lower interest and a large chunk of the principal that I paid down. They did not care at all. They all but told me to fuck off and stop calling them. It was like they wanted anti customer loyalty. I used Quicken Loans for the refinance--no problems.
well, follow the money. why would they sell you a product that makes them less money if they have a material reason to deny it? Think like an insurance company: if you have a technical reason to deny paying a claim, you should absolutely do so, because it means less money for you (the ins. co).
If you or anyone you know lost a home because of Wells Fargo’s error, reporter Deon Roberts would like to hear from you. Contact him at deroberts@charlotteobserver.com or (704) 358-5248.
Trying to get two different refis, different houses, different lenders, the original lender kept stringing me along so long that I'd literally found several better deals, selected one, signed & closed before their refi dept responded with a meaningful contact who could actually move forward with a deal. They had my business by default, all they would have had to do is respond promptly, but I had to say "sorry, you lost".
Just myopic. Seems they think if they don't respond, we'll not bother.
If software engineers were held to the same standard as civil engineers, people would go to jail. I empathize humans make mistakes, but I've also known programmers who just don't care about striving toward perfect, bug-free code. In some cases it's just a job not a passion, in others they're overworked and learned it doesn't pay to go slowly and correctly.
Kudos to all of you true craftsmen out there who do take care and pride in the quality of your work.
Impractical comparison. Software engineers rarely create works where loss of life, or even physical harm, is a side effect of poor workmanship.
I would be shocked if out of hundreds of foreclosures, there were no suicides.
Everything I use today seems to have some micro processor thing in it.
Cars can run into things and typically this causes damage and can cause loss of life, as an example where bugs can kill folks.
How many pieces of software exist in this world where there is zero chance of even a catastrophic bug causing harm to humans? I would bet most of the existing pieces fit this description. Now apply that question to works of civil engineering, and you have a different picture.
Moreover, the tone of the comment is incredibly condescending. It's all well and good to promote criminal accountability because I'm such an excellent "craftsman"... Until I go to prison because I couldn't foresee that there's a race condition on line 56,394 when the internal clock is off by a nanosecond.
Really the only way to deal with this is to try to use tools that make it impossible to make certain classes of bugs. But that's really not an individual choice but an institutional one.
There are examples of subtle yet fundamental bugs that escaped notice for decades, often under the watchful eyes of some of the smartest, most experienced engineers in the industry:
https://ai.googleblog.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about...
Another thing people are missing in the misguided comparison to "civil engineering" is that programming is several orders of magnitudes more complex than building bridges. It's much harder to design fault-tolerance, and your routine can completely blow up due to subtle bugs like the above.
> On February 2, 2018, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank barred Wells Fargo from growing its asset base any further, based upon years of misconduct, until Wells Fargo fixes its internal problems to the satisfaction of the Federal Reserve. In April 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that the United States Department of Labor had launched a probe into whether Wells Fargo was pushing its customers into more expensive retirement plans as well as into retirement funds managed by Wells Fargo itself. Subsequently in May 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that Wells Fargo's business banking group had improperly altered documents about business clients in 2017 and early 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo
These are just from the past couple of years. Check out their Wikipedia page for many, many more. This isn't even the first time they made serious "mistakes" with mortgages specifically: check out their 2012 settlement. Here's the judgement in just one case:
> On April 5, 2012, a federal judge ordered Wells Fargo to pay $3.1 million in punitive damages over a single loan, one of the largest fines for a bank ever for mortgaging service misconduct. Elizabeth Magner, a federal bankruptcy judge in the Eastern District of Louisiana, cited the bank's behavior as "highly reprehensible", stating that Wells Fargo has taken advantage of borrowers who rely on the bank's accurate calculations. She went on to add, "perhaps more disturbing is Wells Fargo's refusal to voluntarily correct its errors. It prefers to rely on the ignorance of borrowers or their inability to fund a challenge to its demands, rather than voluntarily relinquish gains obtained through improper accounting methods."
Blaming the programmers for these "mistakes" is like blaming bank tellers for the reckless banking policies that caused the 2008 meltdown.
This has nothing to do with "engineering standards". Notice that all these "mistakes" benefit Wells Fargo at the expense of its customers and/or the law. If it was just "shoddy standards", you'd expect a few mistakes to be in favor of the customers...
These "mistakes" proliferate because they make the bank money, and only cost them a slap on the wrist and some small fines. This is Too Big to Fail in action.
Wells Fargo is certainly worried about how the revelation of all of these anti-customer actions might hurt their bottom line. Thus its "Re-Established" brand campaign[1]. Most companies just change their name when they want to "Re-Establish". I'm not sure it is such a good idea to spend a lot of money telling people that you were a bad actor and now, trust us, things are different.
[1]https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180507005415/en/Wel...
Seems like these kind of "mistakes" are thoroughly ingrained into their corporate culture by now.
So they also threw some money into a campaign to improve their public image. Makes sense for them. They've also evidently continued their practice of making "mistakes" in their own favor.
This is a very fair point and certainly not all programmers strive for this.
At the same time, in companies where this type of software gets written, the responsibility for delivering a safe product does not rest on the shoulders of programmers alone. "Move fast and break things" is ridiculed by responsible programmers, but outright shunned by responsible team leaders, product managers and CTOs.
No matter how much you care about "craftsmanship", you'll never come up with a well-written program if it's part of an irresponsibly-ran program.
So yes, if software engineers were held to the same standard as civil engineers, people would go to jail. At the same time, it's worth remembering all the other standards of conduct that apply in heavily-regulated fields: companies can be barred from selling a certain product (or type of product) or forced to withdraw them from the market, licensed practitioners may have their licenses withdrawn and so on.
The vast majority of people in every field are producing average or shoddy work. Just the way it goes.
Most people (myself included) have other things to focus on– family, health, finances, hobbies. I’d much rather screw something up at work than something that really matters to me.
That's OK right up until the point screw-ups materially impact other people's lives. I mean noone cares about some cheesy website sure, but these are people's homes.
Unless there are strong business requirements demanding high quality code, no business is going to pay the costs of it.
No business will ever willingly do the right thing unless someone is holding a gun to it demanding they do so. They simply won't be able to compete against businesses that aren't.
The true craftsmen out there will consistently see themselves passed on for promotions, and receive negative performance evaluations in environments where features introduced to a codebase are treated as far more important than bugs introduced into a codebase. The folks who treat it as a job will quickly find their salaries increase as they migrate into management positions.
Software engineering will probably mostly provide what the market requires and rewards, and for most things where you don't have lives at stake, it takes a lot of cash and process to drive your defect rate toward zero.
Viewed through an economic lens, an economist would say that we have an optimum level of environmental pollution, where the marginal benefit of cleaning it up or preventing it doesn't surpass the marginal cost of tolerating it.
So, I disagree. Work will get done to the necessary standard, and our industry already fetishizes overwork and heroes. I don't think anyone should bothering driving themselves crazy with extreme personal perfectionism when the market doesn't demand or reward it, and the software engineering field doesn't gear itself toward producing those results via process.
This target moves too much in business to be able to efficiently target it.
I surely wouldn't take the time to make something perfect if I knew the business was going to turn around and add another feature that forces me to re-evaluate the thing entirely.
While 400 homes lost is certainly significant, don't forget the millions of homes it accurately kept track of. Imagine the amount of work and resources that would have had to be used to keep track manually and by paper.
Please don't worry about 2 steps back after you've taken several billion steps forward.
For a corporation, every moment is the time to rely on auto-push-button, wage avoiding software.
Corporations are amoral at best.
I do. I’ve beeen gradually winding down my account, and will soon feel even better than I did when I got rid of Comcast.
Check out the Credit Unions in your area. They’re usually great!
To say that you won’t switch banks because they’re all just as bad is absurd. That’s just a lazy excuse by a lazy person in my opinion. I’ll take downvotes for my negative post but Wells Fargo screwed me any my family over severely during the recession and it took years to dig out of that mess. Not a single Wells Fargo employee so much as feigned an apology.
For instance if a billion dollars lands in your account, do you think there will be no process to fix the 'computer glitch'?
If you or anyone you know lost a home because of Wells Fargo’s error, reporter Deon Roberts would like to hear from you. Contact him at deroberts@charlotteobserver.com or (704) 358-5248.