Quote from: ShadySue on July 05, 2013, 15:43

Quote from: dingles on July 05, 2013, 15:17

I think it has to do more with a dated system then incompetent staff. All the recent changes and ingestion may be too much for their system. For some reason when I think of their servers I see a bunch of band-aids all over it...hmm that might make for a good stock image

Incompetent staff at the top who didn't know when to call for a complete rewrite.

That never happens because management will never accept the cost. It's always "just one more" patch, temporary change, bug fix, and a promise to clean it all up later.   With everything that's happened at IS lately, the site code probably looks like the plumbing under Manhattan. 

This typically continues until the software people just burn out and leave, and then things get even worse because the new guys don't know the history and don't fully understand the implications of changes they're told to make.

Been there, done that.

Their unwillingness to update the system is a telling sign.  Why invest money in a company with no future?

Rockin my ... I was actually hopeful cause this happend all day long. So basically they gave me a double payment of Getty earnings and are now going to subtract it. $690.83 in my case.

the sky is falling the sky is falling!!!

For Istock, the sky is most definitely falling. Their revenue, due to the price reductions, is falling off a cliff. They are gambling that, if they take three steps back, they might hopefully be able to make a step or two forward in a few months time. Can't see it happening myself.

I do get the impression that Istock management have somehow been recently released from the constraints of quarterly Getty targets. Only because the business was probably dying on it's arse though.

wonder if Yuri is getting the sweats ....

Being an IT person, believe me when I say it's management and not the IT people. Their thinking is strictly sales minded and not the tech end that's needed to provide their wild wish lists. In IS's case, the ship is sinking. It wasn't the IT dept that made the decision to join Getty in the first place or any of those special weird image classifications they've created. However, if the IT dept is incompetent, that's another story.

Being an IT person, believe me when I say it's management and not the IT people. Their thinking is strictly sales minded and not the tech end that's needed to provide their wild wish lists. In IS's case, the ship is sinking. It wasn't the IT dept that made the decision to join Getty in the first place or any of those special weird image classifications they've created. However, if the IT dept is incompetent, that's another story.

I believe you 100%. Just look at the Symbiostock threads to see what just one IT whiz can achieve in a matter of a few weeks. I don't know if the IS ship is sinking and I DO know that their system sucks. And, apparently, no IS decision maker cares. It is pathetic and so sad to watch 

if they had to reach the point where they block all payments and make the news public it must something BIG and nasty !

either they've been hacked and millions of $ stolen, or in one way or another they've lost big money from a software screw up.

There is a good basic rule for posting on the internet: Read, Think, Post. Consider the first two for a change.

Being an IT person, believe me when I say it's management and not the IT people. Their thinking is strictly sales minded and not the tech end that's needed to provide their wild wish lists. In IS's case, the ship is sinking. It wasn't the IT dept that made the decision to join Getty in the first place or any of those special weird image classifications they've created. However, if the IT dept is incompetent, that's another story.

I imagine their IT department is just like most other departments in most other companies - a mix of a few excellent people and a few idiots with most being fairly average and perfectly capable of putting in a decent day's work. 

I've also seen large companies dealing with legacy IT environments that weren't designed for the purpose they now fulfil, and it's painful.  I've been the person wasting hours a day just to try and keep a system ticking over, which left me no time to work on improving anything, and no-one else in my team was tasked with improvement either.  The IT teams need to be given time and money to repair/replace them, and often they're not.

One company I know actually put a 6 month hold on ALL new releases, so the existing IT infrastructure could be modernised and made much much more efficient, and testing systems brought up to date/put in place and all that other good stuff.  iStock's IT could probably use something similar, but at the moment the focus is on front-end change change change to bring in new customers (or bring back old ones) and as long as iStock's leadership keeps pushing that line, the old IT systems will continue to creak on held together with sticky-tape and blu-tack.

It's a bit chicken and egg - they need money to invest it IT, they need revenue to rise again to bring in that money.  Which comes first?  Personally I'd bite the bullet on short term profit and sort the infrastructure, but most companies are run by the huge pressure to make more money NOW so the leaders can't/won't make that call.

Quote from: Ron on July 05, 2013, 15:35

Doesnt matter if you pay per week or month, as long as you get paid when due.

You have summed it up beautifully Ron.  It is surprising to me that anyone, even the most ardent fanboy or Istock management shill could defend their negligence and incompetence with OUR money, at this point.

Yes,  that is something I dont get either.

Quote from: jcpjr on July 05, 2013, 22:35

Being an IT person, believe me when I say it's management and not the IT people. Their thinking is strictly sales minded and not the tech end that's needed to provide their wild wish lists. In IS's case, the ship is sinking. It wasn't the IT dept that made the decision to join Getty in the first place or any of those special weird image classifications they've created. However, if the IT dept is incompetent, that's another story.

I believe you 100%. Just look at the Symbiostock threads to see what just one IT whiz can achieve in a matter of a few weeks. I don't know if the IS ship is sinking and I DO know that their system sucks. And, apparently, no IS decision maker cares. It is pathetic and so sad to watch 

Thats the nail on the head, I am sure you can stick a few geeks in a room and they will come up with a brilliant system, unfortunately the idea will never get through the boardroom for various reasons. Unfortunately all the wrong reasons.


Edit: Silken Photography said it all

That brings it back to my comment of incompetent staff. Wrong data imports can screw up things immensely and if the system is not capable of a running a back up or reversing the error, then you are in trouble. I have worked with an extensive database of printers when working as a Project Executive at Xerox, at some point someone made an error and the database for one of our customers got corrupted. It was no laughing matter as a simple back up was not possible. Undoing the error was a manual job and that takes a lot of time and headaches to get a database back to its previous correct state.

It sounds like you are very experienced with incompetence, so you must be right.

I just gave you a normal reply. I am sorry if I hurt your feelings. Why the personal attack?

Maybe I got something wrong but you are calling out people you don't even know as being incompetent. Why would you do that? And you flavor it with a story from your personal experience where you demonstrated some incompetence. Fine, we are all incompetent in what we do at times. No need to call out anyone for making a mistake, so don't start it when you don't want it back.

Despite all the other shortcomings and iStock often not matching expectations in many aspects, I don't agree with calling anyone incompetent if it comes to processing PP payments. In more than 90% of the cases recently, PP earnings were processed before their due time. Now there is a one time delay and someone screwed up something, so what? If other processes at iStock worked with >90% reliability, it would certainly be an overall improvement.