artnoiKBTG is the tech arm of Thai bank KBank. Its mission is to help propel KBank with technologies, e.g. developing apps for the bank’s customers, ATM software, or the bank’s internal software.
Its premiere product is KPlus, KBank’s mobile banking app. KPlus is known for having nice UX, fast, and overall the best and the most reliable among Thai mobile banking apps.
As the bank’s retail customer, I think highly of KPlus - most of my banking is done through the app. Let’s just say it’s why I thought KBTG must have been really good at software engineering, and is a legitimate tech company owned by a bank.
This blog post will attempt to debunk that, using my 3-month real world experience, and why I had to leave there in a hurry.
Note that this blog only represents my own view and experience, and there’s a high chance that KBTG still had some few competent people left working for them that I had not interacted with.
I joined KBTG in Oct 2023 as a software engineer. My intuition during the interview with other KBTG employees raised a lot of red flags for me (I thought the interviewers seemed dumb technically).
But I accepted the offer any way.
The first day was orientation, and one of senior executives welcomed us with some narcissistic theme that went something like:
“.. we’re one of the best tech companies in the entire SE Asia. We now have 1.5k employees (or something), but we aim to recruit more people and pushed that count to 2500, so that we can be the best in SEA”..
A 65 year old senior executive at one of SEA’s best tech companies
I kid you not, so they think they are “the best” because they have many people working for them.
It’s like saying the Thai government is one of the best government in the world, simply because they employ up to 2 million people, or NK’s Korean People’s Army has the most combat poweress due to their towering number of personnel. (Coming back to think about it, I’d say this kind of thinking matches the speaker level of awareness)
The fact that they thought adding people will get them closer to their goal of being at the top also sounds weird. Sure, if they only acquired competent people and not bozo engineers or managers.
They also keep telling us new joiners that they only have “the best of the best” people working for them, that everyone here is incredibly talented, despite their bar being set very low.
They may argue that they provide some learning benefits in the employment package, but I have to tell you this: they only have very beginner courses. I feel like they are very cheap when it comes to employee learning resources. But you’ll see why once you reach further down in this blog.
I was assigned to an all-new-joiner squad working on some upcoming app product. It’s a very simple app - more like a front-end for databases and bank’s legacy core banking software.
I learned that there are 3 tiers of SWEs at KBTG - a normal one (e.g. me), “advanced”, and senior. I was the only normal engineer (not advanced, not senior) in the entire squad.
Other squad members joined together and worked together before. They all came from the same place (another Thai bank), and they came here because their followed their manager. I later heard from a friend that their previous workplace was purging old, incompetent engineers, replacing them with younger, more competent new joiners.
I also learned that the project we’re working has been developed by an outsourced company for 2 years already. In late 2023, around 25-30 SWEs were working on the product, which was still in beta.
So an outsourced company had been working on KBTG products for 2 years, and in 2023 KBTG hired more people, including me, to ship this product within their release timeline because the outsourced teams lack the resource to launch this apparently very simple app in time.
The first time I took a look at it, I was cursing whoever wrote that piece of junk software.
I’m not to say that my code is any good, but it sure was better than theirs.
Their code is super bad - it follows a very stupid interpretation of “Clean Architecture”, where they focused on the wrong part about the pattern (they did not even read the book).
One of them cared so much about keeping the function body short, so he splited a complex function into 5, all of which were not reused at all and resulted in fragmented code that I have to move up and down the files to understand.
In short, it was not clean at all. The only clean part about the project’s code is code directories.
What’s worse than the stupid pattern is the outright buggy code written by the so-called “advanced” and senior KBTG devs. These devs don’t even know the difference between encoding and encryption.
The code never cared about concurrency bug. After 2 yearts in development, no repositories had any databse transactional control code.
They cared so much about code coverage, yet they only wrote tests for happy cases.
This results in bugs in every sprint demo, and I suspect most of them is due to the concurrency problems.
Not code structure
They are also obsessed with microservices. And I have yet to found another system that had done microservice this wrong.
They some how managed to build microservice system without any of the usual benefits from the pattern.
They build highly coupled services, they always want to create new stupid useless services, and they did not at all care about problems in distributed systems. They never discuss read skew, write skew, mutexes, or consensus.
The result is an abomination of a system that’s highly unreliable, difficult to debug and impossible to verify performance.
What really ground my gears there was the people I worked with. Most of them have “advanced” or senior titles, but none of them would fit my personal standard for senior devs.
Of all the devs I work with here, only 3 were considered competent
All of them had no interest in having ownership of their code. They only focused on delivering their buggy, barely-working code at the end of the sprints.
They never mentioned the word “tech debt” too, so it’s only normal that the sprint demos usually had more failures than success.
All of them that I worked with are what we call “cargo-cult developer” - a grouping of SWEs who only do something because someone told them it’s good, without any small critical thinking efforts.
This is why they couldn’t tell that their code is shit and not “clean architecture” at all. They never thought about it - some of their senior just came up with this stupid shit and they all said yes.
They also lack problem solving skills. One of the “advanced” idiots ALWAYS snapshot the error message and sent it to me to ask what caused the errors, and those messages are very simple and straightforward that had they had any normal human brain they should be able to figure it out already (stuff like file not found or port already in use).
Another area that will highlight their lack of intelligence is how they setup the test environments. The outsourcers, who had been working on this product for 2 years, thought it was a bright idea to setup development environment such that the proudction SQL constraints are to be disabled in test environment.
They said they did so because “development velocity”. My squad members also thought this was right.
Yes, they fucking skip NOT NULL and other foreign key constraints in their test environment, so they would not have found bugs which would slow them down. I’d always told them that this is bad, because query bugs will for sure unexpectedly surface in production.
With broken dev database, developers had to write a version of the code that operates without foreign key constraints, proper row ID, and another version for production databases.
Some of them did not even bother to notice that code written to work on development environment is very likely to be broken on production.
And, you guess it, they ALWAYS had database constraint-related bugs when testing in SIT-like environments. This constraint issue, coupled with their low intellect, kept the outsourced company to deliver the product due to these bugs.
They are hell-bent on stupid code reviews, where stupid shit like naming, alphabet order, and other cliche, cargo-cult stuff.
They don’t follow any style guides, instead, they made up their own rules based on their (possibly) JavaScript backgrounds.
They always wanted to force their stupid, useless convention on me, pointing to their style guide reference. If their style was any good or logical, I’d not complain one bit.
Even worse is when they reject mys PR citing their stupid rules like interfaces should be in alphabetical order, while their recently merged PRs also clearly violated this rule. They did not reply to my comment pointing out that this is so useless even they themselves forget to see it because it serves no real purpose.
When I told them that some of their rules are outright violates Go convention, they ignored it, citing efforts.
They used to reject my code that follows Google and Uber Go style guide, which is the one they said they followed. When I told them that this is not right according to Google, or Uber style guides, they simply said “oh, we have our own rules” and continue to name files like JavaScript, which led to buggy GitLab runner from case-insensitive server filesystem.
These people had no idea that they are bad devs, despite having worked in software for more than a decade. If you go to their LinkedIn profile you’ll see that they brag about how they know “CRUD”, “PostgreSQL”, “REST API”. One of them even spells Go (Golang) differently 5 times in their resume.
Yes, they are that stupid, but they think they are worthy of being called senior.
This Thai bank is well known for harbouring incompetent companies. It’s a very large bank, and most employees got to work here because they knew someone here.
The BA I worked with was very incompetent - ALL business requirements I got always had some errors that needed to be amended (of course I was the one who found out the BRD was shit).
Let’s say the BRD had 10 lines. 8 of them was wrong. We worked in 2-week sprints, and my BRDs usually stayed invalid for a full week. This is because the BA took days to resolve one bad bullet point or line in the BRDs.
The worst thing about this is the business-side employees who knew little SQL, but knew it enough for their managers to let them design SQL schemas. This led to the worst SQL tables and business logic I’ve ever seen.
Our project owners also come from this side, and they don’t think anything like in tech companies. They sound and act like bank employees, always implementing stupid internal processes, focus only on “delivery”, which, most of the times just meant the front-end works.
This is why our equally stupid outsourced devs had been “delivering” this project for 2 years, yet nothing works. The secret is that these outsourced devs only did demo with mocked back-end. I just can’t fathom the stupidity of every one of them here.
Even the incompenent devs knew that the business employees were idiots.
KBTG advertises itself as “Thailand and ASEAN leading tech company”.
In reality, it’s just KBank subsidiary with a lot of incompetent people. They manage, run, and think like a large bank. Their culture is even more conservative than my brokerage’s, which is my first job.
The CEO usually brags about how KBTG is so great, full of talents (going so far as to say everyone working here is top talent).
He emphasizes how KBTG is actively doing AI development, while in reality, I’ve yet to see any employees, code, emails discussing about AI, nor any other cool tech stuff that he sells daily to the press.
The company does not even want to improve. They want everything to be the same. They don’t develop talents, they simply horde talents hoping that it will cure their organization’s collective stupidity.
I once respected all SWEs - I used to think that 80% of devs are smart people, and the rest being the lucky dumbsters or “script kiddies”.
Joining KBTG changed that view. I now think SWE is just like any other professions.
I also hate working in very large corporations like KBank now.
These companies are too big to fail, and they have so many people. Because they are too big to fail, they know they don’t need to do everything in a smart way. They can just throw their weight around and get profits.
This Thai bank wouldn’t go bankrupt because an app is toilet material, or if the app never launches. There’s simply no need for the org to be well optimized, or dismiss incompetent people. Some of them don’t actually do anything.
This is why I left KBTG: I don’t want to be familiarized with idiocy and incompetence. I don’t want to think that the shit they do is “good enough”.
I don’t want to endure seeing the least intelligent professionals I’ve ever seen circlejerk themselves to dry deaths.
With all of the things I saw, I just couldn’t stay. I have a feeling that if I stayed, my own brain cells would simply rot from interacting with these people.