It's auditing, nobody that is good at doing anything goes to auditing, unfortunately its one of those jobs. I haven't interacted with any auditor that actually understood all they were auditing, some are better than others but the average is worse than almost any other job description I have dealt with.
If you care about this stuff you need to in-house auditing and do your own audits with people who care. Then get certified by an external auditor for the paper.
You can start very lightweight with doing spec driven development with the help of AI if you're at a size where you can't afford that. It's better than nothing.
But the important part is you, as a company, should inherently care.
If you rely on an auditor feedback loop to get compliant you've already lost.
Nobody really tries to get technical people to do the work.
Like cool, it's a great idea and would potentially produce positive results if done well, but the roles pay half the engineering roles, and the interviews are stacked towards compliance frameworks.
There's very little ability to fix a large public company when HR is involved
Maybe it should be treated like on-call duty and have the load spread between existing engineers on some kind of schedule, maybe with some extra comp as incentive because it's boring and will take more effort/time in the "easy case" compared to pager duty.
Maybe that's just a goid moment to review your _policy_. About a half of our compute is exactly that, and we just don't have to do this sort of backups, that'd be silly.
We don't deal with the military though, only fintech (prime brokers and major banks, funds) some government. Plenty of certifications (have someone all site all year round),!no silliness.
But companies don't care. They don't want compliance for feel goods, they want compliance because their partners require it. They do the minimum amount required to check the box
Caring about security and comparing about some of the arbitrary hoops you have to jump through for some of these compliance regimes don’t always overlap as much as you’d expect.
I’ve been at companies where we cared deeply about security, but certain compliance things felt like gimmicks on the side. We absolutely wanted to to do the minimum required to check that box so we could get back to the real work.
You should check out the banking industry sometime if you'd like to interact with a competent auditor.
Compliance gets taken quite seriously in an industry where one of your principal regulatory bodies has the power to unilaterally absorb your business and defenestrate your entire leadership team in the middle of the night.
I've seen this up close. The regulatory bodies as a rule are understaffed, overworked and underpaid. I'm sure they'd love to do a much better job but the reality is that there are just too many ways to give them busywork allowing the real crap to go unnoticed until it is (much) too late.
Because they’re put there as a box ticking exercise without ever being given the power or resources to be able to do damage or negatively impact the bottom line of the big rule breakers. It’s just supposed to maintain the appearance of doing something without ever supporting these activities for real. For the most part they are a true Potemkin village. If the risk is diffuse (just some average Joe suckers will lose money) I wouldn’t hold my breath that anyone is controlling for real.
Usually on a Friday night. If you see a bunch of rental cars hanging out near a bank HQ on a Friday afternoon, get all your money out before the doors close. FDIC is about to wreck shop.
They do it on a Friday so they can work through the weekend and reopen the bank on Monday as a branch of a different bank which is solvent, so I wouldn't worry too much. I'd be more worried about putting my money in a fintech not regulated by FDIC or NCUA (though many contract with a "real" bank so that your money is still protected).
That’s fine for your checking account which FDIC likely covers. But if they merge it into another bank and you have a payroll account there with 2MM sitting in it, you can have a real problem. People use JPMC, with all its fees, for a reason.
The industry is paid to provide a fig leaf for shady practices. Everyone knows what's going on, no one is going to do anything about it unless governments step in and give regulators more resources and more teeth, and "errors" lead to prosecutions and jail time.
None of those are likely.
This is the industry that missed Enron, WorldCom, Wirecard, Lehman, and many others.
