DST was always known as a sweatshop with poor management, and abusive management. Nowdays some of the stunts the managers pulled would be considered "hostile work environment" and there would be lawsuits filed. DST could have been a much bigger and more successful company. However DST insisted on hiring and promoting people who were not qualified. DST worshipped youth - but age brings better experience and vision. Did DST ever consider hiring a manager from Microsoft, Facebook, Google or Yahoo? You know the programmers at DST could have designed FACEBOOK in their spare time and it would have been a DST product. But nobody was allowed to think creatively. Ebay could have easily be written in Cobol. It was started by a bored programmer. But no incentive or reward for thinking about new product lines. Or new business ideas. Just the same old, same old nightly processing.
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Liar. It was not always a sweatshop. When I started all insurance was free, vision free, parking free. It was the ast CEO and the 2008 recession that screwed us.
Ha! Sure Ebay could've been written in Cobol but with the waterfall development model it never would've seen the light of day. Fast iteration is a critical component of the early web that was enabled by tech like perl, mysql, cheap unixes, etc and few people sitting around building stuff.
Heck, TA2000 was sort of like a startup in it's day. It was software as a service before that was even a thing. Not enough credit goes to those early guys who went out and sold the idea and built the company. It was really quite an acheivement.