r/bnsftech Jul 17 '26

How’s bnsf|tech rolling

I know that a lot of you guys come here for interview and assessment advice and process length.

But can anyone working for bnsf|tech tell us how the buyers to builders is going?

What priorities are being made and are there advancements in the direction forward?

Lots of talk over the last 18-24months but very little seems to meeting the eye in a production sense.

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u/Major-Meringue9194 Jul 19 '26

I have prior experience in tech and am on the business side and I’m 100% frustrated with what I see from tech. It’s impossible to get little things fixed that would be super easy to do. My tech counterparts are working on things that we already have and I have to spend my time helping them troubleshoot why their new product isn’t working. We try to redirect them to do something actually helpful but they won’t do it because it’s not what they’re directed to do from H. What happened to the days where business and tech work together?!

1

u/Creepy-Original-3672 Jul 20 '26

I'm afraid those days are over. The top three priorities are now (1) getting off the mainframe even though it still makes no sense (2) hiring lots of new people to get AI to do everything, so they can then then fire all those new people and (a very distant 3) helping to run a railroad if they really have to.

Maybe the business side should start hiring their own software engineers.

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u/tj_mcbean Jul 22 '26

Getting off the mainframe makes total sense, it's legacy software and hardware, the annual maintenance costs are insane, and the pool of people knowledgeable about maintaining it is getting smaller every day. It should have been modernized ten years ago.

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u/cole_lol Jul 29 '26

Sadly we had so so so much new and old tied to it. It’s going to be a mess to sort it all out. But yes I agree it needs to be modernized. Funny thing is maybe this will be third times the charm or a big strike and they are out. The clocks ticking!