upperdeane
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Post by upperdeane on Nov 2, 2019 10:05:41 GMT
Is it just me as well missing the Fully Matched Order emails? Nope its both myself and Mrs aju as well, not too much of an issue when one is playing "catch the best rates if you can" game but it would be nice if they had a "your loan has completed early" email as well for people like me but I can catch those with higher auto lend rates than current. Not easy to see which one closed out though but that's another story. pomma did report Rs was aware of an issue a few messages above. Mind you the answer does suggest the new products are ok but I can't comment on those as the 1Y is my angle at present with better rates I feel just have to keep cool head to get them!. I called RS yesterday regarding the lack of emails for early repayment or loans being matched in the 1 and 5 year markets. They confirmed it was an issue and it was introduced when the new products were introduced. Aparrently their technical team are aware of the issue and are looking into it but they currently have no date for a fix. The only suggestion was to log in and chack your account manually for the moment. Very frustrating.
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Post by bernythedolt on Nov 2, 2019 12:14:28 GMT
Who have they employed as their software engineers, Laurel & Hardy?
This is mind-numbingly poor change management and software integration.
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aju
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Post by aju on Nov 2, 2019 12:40:54 GMT
Who have they employed as their software engineers, Laurel & Hardy? This is mind-numbingly poor change management and software integration. Yep its a constant theme sadly and one would have thought the big 3 at least would have better handle on QA than perceptions seem. I cannot comment on the 3rd of the biguns but RS has not been any better or worse in my eyes than Zopa has since I started with them a year ago - RS that is. from experience over the last 2 year with Zopa though I feel Zopa has a much more experienced CS team than the RS one and that's always a good place to start from, in my view. I've always felt that myself having been a developer and designer in my previous life I was perhaps always being a bit more critical than most but I think you are so on the button it is worrying sometimes. The face of of a company is their web presence so what demons are under the hood we cannot see? Mrs Aju and myself were compensated handsomely for under the hood errors we uncovered when Zopa was making somewhat of a pigs ear of things 18 months or so ago - things have stabilised and I find less if any errors in our data more recently. My data sets for RS are less comprehensive whilst I get used to its many foibles/differences but I don't doubt that mistakes one sees in the front end are generally a good indicator of errors that you can't see immediately in the back end processes. Good QA should not be an island within any one part of a company but increasingly in this arena it can tend to seem more of an after thought especially when fires are igniting at a faster rate than the fire brigade can cope with - that does seems to be the case in RS Web presentation at present I feel.
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Post by bernythedolt on Nov 2, 2019 16:54:58 GMT
Who have they employed as their software engineers, Laurel & Hardy? This is mind-numbingly poor change management and software integration. Yep its a constant theme sadly and one would have thought the big 3 at least would have better handle on QA than perceptions seem. I cannot comment on the 3rd of the biguns but RS has not been any better or worse in my eyes than Zopa has since I started with them a year ago - RS that is. from experience over the last 2 year with Zopa though I feel Zopa has a much more experienced CS team than the RS one and that's always a good place to start from, in my view. I've always felt that myself having been a developer and designer in my previous life I was perhaps always being a bit more critical than most but I think you are so on the button it is worrying sometimes. The face of of a company is their web presence so what demons are under the hood we cannot see? Mrs Aju and myself were compensated handsomely for under the hood errors we uncovered when Zopa was making somewhat of a pigs ear of things 18 months or so ago - things have stabilised and I find less if any errors in our data more recently. My data sets for RS are less comprehensive whilst I get used to its many foibles/differences but I don't doubt that mistakes one sees in the front end are generally a good indicator of errors that you can't see immediately in the back end processes. Good QA should not be an island within any one part of a company but increasingly in this arena it can tend to seem more of an after thought especially when fires are igniting at a faster rate than the fire brigade can cope with - that does seems to be the case in RS Web presentation at present I feel. Errors in the user interface do indeed raise the question of the integrity and reliability of the whole. Only yesterday somebody posted of an order he placed at 5.4% actually being matched at 5.5%, ahead of people waiting in that queue. I myself have found orders sitting at 0.1% below the reinvestment level I'd set. And why is a fix taking so long? How difficult can it be to generate a notification email when a loan is repaid (early or otherwise)? As a software engineer myself many years ago, I'd have been ashamed if I couldn't nail such a tiny embuggerance inside a day or two!
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aju
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Post by aju on Nov 2, 2019 19:09:13 GMT
Yep its a constant theme sadly and one would have thought the big 3 at least would have better handle on QA than perceptions seem. I cannot comment on the 3rd of the biguns but RS has not been any better or worse in my eyes than Zopa has since I started with them a year ago - RS that is. from experience over the last 2 year with Zopa though I feel Zopa has a much more experienced CS team than the RS one and that's always a good place to start from, in my view. I've always felt that myself having been a developer and designer in my previous life I was perhaps always being a bit more critical than most but I think you are so on the button it is worrying sometimes. The face of of a company is their web presence so what demons are under the hood we cannot see? Mrs Aju and myself were compensated handsomely for under the hood errors we uncovered when Zopa was making somewhat of a pigs ear of things 18 months or so ago - things have stabilised and I find less if any errors in our data more recently. My data sets for RS are less comprehensive whilst I get used to its many foibles/differences but I don't doubt that mistakes one sees in the front end are generally a good indicator of errors that you can't see immediately in the back end processes. Good QA should not be an island within any one part of a company but increasingly in this arena it can tend to seem more of an after thought especially when fires are igniting at a faster rate than the fire brigade can cope with - that does seems to be the case in RS Web presentation at present I feel. Errors in the user interface do indeed raise the question of the integrity and reliability of the whole. Only yesterday somebody posted of an order he placed at 5.4% actually being matched at 5.5%, ahead of people waiting in that queue. I myself have found orders sitting at 0.1% below the reinvestment level I'd set. And why is a fix taking so long? How difficult can it be to generate a notification email when a loan is repaid (early or otherwise)? As a software engineer myself many years ago, I'd have been ashamed if I couldn't nail such a tiny embuggerance inside a day or two! Perhaps its a bit bold of me but I'm guessing that all hands are on the pump at the moment and perhaps a few emails missing is not exactly the top focus of the day/week/month etc. Which in itself is worrying as well. If the designs and integration documents were well tested before anyone touched some code then I'm guessing it won't be long if they are using the managers favorite "Agile" approach then sometime next year perhaps. What always amused me with the new iterative agile approach was that management always over-ruled wesk design and development teams and wanted stuff delivered much faster and bugger the consequences. I got into a lot of arguments when we had proved to the speedy ones that the designs were flawed but never actually won - the old 80/20 rules reigned. supreme. Thankfully I got well out of that game after |I delivered most of what I was in control across the world to a team in mumbai, I took the kings not long after I got bored telling rather than doing. Thing is we constantly told the upper echelons that the receivers were getting 10% of our knowledge and would probably not be able to cope and pass it on where they would pass on 10% and before one knew it they would have 1% of knowledge in the systems and we would all have been superannuated or whatever grand name they had at the time. The kings shilling was enough for me and i've never looked back. What's very amusing is that the powers that be took another 10 years and serious flack from the customer base to start to consider moving most of it back to the Uk and I believe the CS services are all being advertised as Uk based these days. One still gets an overseas call centre at out of hours times or a back if lines are busy during the day.
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Post by bernythedolt on Nov 2, 2019 20:47:53 GMT
Having moved CS back to the UK, it sounds like there's a job waiting there for you any time you're ready aju!
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Nov 2, 2019 22:10:25 GMT
Yep its a constant theme sadly and one would have thought the big 3 at least would have better handle on QA than perceptions seem. I cannot comment on the 3rd of the biguns but RS has not been any better or worse in my eyes than Zopa has since I started with them a year ago - RS that is. from experience over the last 2 year with Zopa though I feel Zopa has a much more experienced CS team than the RS one and that's always a good place to start from, in my view. I've always felt that myself having been a developer and designer in my previous life I was perhaps always being a bit more critical than most but I think you are so on the button it is worrying sometimes. The face of of a company is their web presence so what demons are under the hood we cannot see? Mrs Aju and myself were compensated handsomely for under the hood errors we uncovered when Zopa was making somewhat of a pigs ear of things 18 months or so ago - things have stabilised and I find less if any errors in our data more recently. My data sets for RS are less comprehensive whilst I get used to its many foibles/differences but I don't doubt that mistakes one sees in the front end are generally a good indicator of errors that you can't see immediately in the back end processes. Good QA should not be an island within any one part of a company but increasingly in this arena it can tend to seem more of an after thought especially when fires are igniting at a faster rate than the fire brigade can cope with - that does seems to be the case in RS Web presentation at present I feel. Errors in the user interface do indeed raise the question of the integrity and reliability of the whole. Only yesterday somebody posted of an order he placed at 5.4% actually being matched at 5.5%, ahead of people waiting in that queue. I myself have found orders sitting at 0.1% below the reinvestment level I'd set. And why is a fix taking so long? How difficult can it be to generate a notification email when a loan is repaid (early or otherwise)? As a software engineer myself many years ago, I'd have been ashamed if I couldn't nail such a tiny embuggerance inside a day or two!
All the time I've been with RS, they have had problems with the reliability of sending emails.
I would defend RS and say that sometimes develoment tasks which are simple to state (e.g., "generate a notification email") are in practice considerably more complicated than they seem because of all manner of technical reasons. For instance, in this case, it may be that repayments are processed on an system which is separate from the centralised system through which RS send their emails, and which probably does not have knowledge of your email address anyway, so it's not just a matter of a program saying "process the repayment and then send an email to the lender". I'm guessing, but you get the idea.
On the other hand, repayment emails used to work, so until recently RS clearly did have in place whatever was needed to make them work.
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Nov 2, 2019 22:34:47 GMT
Errors in the user interface do indeed raise the question of the integrity and reliability of the whole. Only yesterday somebody posted of an order he placed at 5.4% actually being matched at 5.5%, ahead of people waiting in that queue. I myself have found orders sitting at 0.1% below the reinvestment level I'd set.
There is definitely a bug concerning the rate of manual orders.
By way of illustration, I placed a £10 order on Max at 9.3%. Throughout the UI it appeared as 9.3%, but by comparing the Full Market views I could see it went on the market at 9.5%. There's nothing special about those numbers: I went high because there isn't much other activity up there.
I'll bet this and the other reported anomalies are all related.
EDIT: This only seems to happen on the new markets. A 9.3% order on 5 Year appears on the market correctly.
EDIT: The higher you go, the bigger the error. A 6.0% order appears at 6.0%; a 7.0% order appears at 7.1%; a 9.3% order appears at 9.5%.
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Post by bernythedolt on Nov 2, 2019 23:28:17 GMT
Errors in the user interface do indeed raise the question of the integrity and reliability of the whole. Only yesterday somebody posted of an order he placed at 5.4% actually being matched at 5.5%, ahead of people waiting in that queue. I myself have found orders sitting at 0.1% below the reinvestment level I'd set. And why is a fix taking so long? How difficult can it be to generate a notification email when a loan is repaid (early or otherwise)? As a software engineer myself many years ago, I'd have been ashamed if I couldn't nail such a tiny embuggerance inside a day or two!
All the time I've been with RS, they have had problems with the reliability of sending emails.
I would defend RS and say that sometimes develoment tasks which are simple to state (e.g., "generate a notification email") are in practice considerably more complicated than they seem because of all manner of technical reasons. For instance, in this case, it may be that repayments are processed on an system which is separate from the centralised system through which RS send their emails, and which probably does not have knowledge of your email address anyway, so it's not just a matter of a program saying "process the repayment and then send an email to the lender". I'm guessing, but you get the idea.
On the other hand, repayment emails used to work, so until recently RS clearly did have in place whatever was needed to make them work.
What you are describing is the ubiquitous distributed systems architecture where multiple platforms interact. As you say, one system (eg. loan processing) can recognise the need for an email to be generated and notify another separate system (eg. client interface) to carry out the detail of that function. This is standard stuff these days and all the necessary protocols are in place to handle the message flow. I wouldn't exonerate RS quite as quickly as you (but I'm less forgiving having spent an entire career in IT!).
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Post by bernythedolt on Nov 2, 2019 23:34:12 GMT
Errors in the user interface do indeed raise the question of the integrity and reliability of the whole. Only yesterday somebody posted of an order he placed at 5.4% actually being matched at 5.5%, ahead of people waiting in that queue. I myself have found orders sitting at 0.1% below the reinvestment level I'd set.
There is definitely a bug concerning the rate of manual orders.
By way of illustration, I placed a £10 order on Max at 9.3%. Throughout the UI it appeared as 9.3%, but by comparing the Full Market views I could see it went on the market at 9.5%. There's nothing special about those numbers: I went high because there isn't much other activity up there.
I'll bet this and the other reported anomalies are all related.
EDIT: This only seems to happen on the new markets. A 9.3% order on 5 Year appears on the market correctly.
EDIT: The higher you go, the bigger the error. A 6.0% order appears at 6.0%; a 7.0% order appears at 7.1%; a 9.3% order appears at 9.5%.
Interesting stuff. It is worrying that their internal algorithms are not functioning in sync with their user interface. This kind of basic stuff should have dropped out in system testing before the new system got rolled out. There clearly weren't very exhaustive tests conducted!
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Post by bernythedolt on Nov 3, 2019 0:37:33 GMT
Stonk, I tested a little more and was able to replicate your findings on Max. Lots of 0.1% and 0.2% differences. I even placed an experimental £10 on the 10% point - the current ceiling imposed on that market by RS - and it got listed at 10.2%. I love exploring boundary conditions! I reckon we unpaid system testers deserve a Christmas bonus from RS.
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Stonk
Stonking
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Post by Stonk on Nov 3, 2019 1:58:00 GMT
Stonk , I tested a little more and was able to replicate your findings on Max. Lots of 0.1% and 0.2% differences. I even placed an experimental £10 on the 10% point - the current ceiling imposed on that market by RS - and it got listed at 10.2%. I love exploring boundary conditions! Ceilings are there to be broken through; boundaries to be stepped over.
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aju
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Post by aju on Nov 3, 2019 8:11:19 GMT
Having moved CS back to the UK, it sounds like there's a job waiting there for you any time you're ready aju ! Mrs aju might have something to say about that when it interfered with her impromptu shopping trips. To be fair though i wouldn't have any spare time to devote to real work anymore.
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upperdeane
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Post by upperdeane on Nov 6, 2019 12:55:24 GMT
Still no early settlement emails. I logged in this morning to see a fairly large 5 year loan I got at nearly 7 percent several months ago had settled yesterday. Had I not logged in I wouldn't have known. Very frustrating. My reinvestment settings from 5 year redirect to 1 year, so hoping for a >5 percent loan surge on the one year soon.
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pomma
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Post by pomma on Nov 7, 2019 15:22:16 GMT
Still no early settlement emails. I logged in this morning to see a fairly large 5 year loan I got at nearly 7 percent several months ago had settled yesterday. Had I not logged in I wouldn't have known. Very frustrating. My reinvestment settings from 5 year redirect to 1 year, so hoping for a >5 percent loan surge on the one year soon. Just asked RS for an update and they say ...
"Apologies for not being able to provide you any further updates on this issue. We have been advised by the website development team that they are working on it and they will endeavour in fixing it. However, I am unable to advise you on the progress for this matter.
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