[heurisko]

2008: "The UK-based IT department of the fifth largest bank continues to dwindle as more jobs go overseas... This round of cuts, starting in June and lasting 12 months, involves up to 250 permanent IT roles and 200 contractors from the bank's technical delivery division, responsible for software development and design." [1]

2018: "Timeline of trouble: how the TSB IT meltdown unfolded". [2]

It's probably more complicated than that, but perhaps not much more complicated.

[1] https://www.itpro.co.uk/197982/lloyds-tsb-cuts-more-uk-it-jo... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jun/06/timeline-of...

[makomk]

That probably has very little to do with it. The immediate cause of all the problems was that Lloyds TSB was forcibly split up in order to try and increase competition and the Lloyds half kept the IT department, and when the TSB half tried to move over to the existing IT platform of their new parent company everything broke.

[lmm]

True as far as it goes, but "everything broke" as a predictable result of poor decisions they made, such as moving everyone over in one go.

[908B64B197]

It's funny how there's always a cheap offshored bodyshop involved in these stories yet it's never their fault. Cue in the 9$/hour indian coders working for Boeing.

Here's the thing I've learned over the years: Never touch offshored code. Always go for a complete re-write. Don't add features to it, don't refactor it, don't extend it. Just re-write. In my experience it's the best approach.

I know guys who made it their whole business to go and completely re-write projects from scratch after offshoring efforts failed.

[varispeed]

There was also a heavy enforcement of IR35 in the banking sector, so that substantially reduced the access to talent pool.

There was also a tightening of posted worker regulations, so that banks couldn't ship workers from overseas as a source of cheap talented workforce.