What kind of company is Initech?

Initech is ostensibly a software company, but I don't think it could really exist. I'll take your points one at a time.

1. Initech hires computer programmers that "update bank software for the 2000 switch"

   This would fit either a bank/credit union, or a software consulting company.

2. Initech has access to "the credit union software"

   Again, this would fit both. Programmers at a consulting company absolutely need access to the source code in order to make changes.

3. Initech has access to "the credit union mainframe"

   Access to the mainframe pretty much eliminates "consulting company." I happen to work as a programmer at a bank through a consulting company. There's no way any bank or credit union is going to give access to a consultant to run unchecked code on any system where it could cause harm.

4. Initech's accounting department notices when the money goes missing

   This also eliminates "software consulting company" from consideration. A consulting company has their own accounting department that would track expenses and income for their own activities, not those of their customers. The bank or credit union would notice the money goes missing, not Initech.

5. Initech has a "Corporate Accounts Payable" department (although at least one transcriber disagrees with me and thinks it's "Corporate Councils Payroll")

   This doesn't offer much information. "Accounts Payable" is a common accounting term that any company would use. Any kind of loan or purchase on credit would be recorded under accounts payable. A banker would refer to it as a loan, but an accountant (or accounting software) might still call it by the more generic term.

6. Initech has a "Logistics" department

   This could go either way. A bank would have a logistics department, but so might a consulting company that worked for a bank.

7. Initech has engineers who lack people skills sufficient to interface directly with their customers.

   Any company with an IT department has those. In programming, a "customer" might be anyone who uses our software. They can be internal or external to the company. In my department we call the quants and bank officers who use our software to make investment decisions our customers. Other departments write software for actual bank customers (people with checking or savings accounts). Many of us don't talk directly with our customers. Instead we communicate through a project manager or other intermediary.

Given all of this, I think your guess of "subsidiary of a large financial corporation" isn't far off. I think #4 would still eliminate a subsidiary company though. It's unlikely that the same subsidiary would handle both software development and accounting for the parent company. So in summary, Initech appears to be some kind of amalgam of a bank and a software consulting company that doesn't exist in the real world.

I used to work at a software company that created products to run mid to high-end credit unions. (Taking care of pretty much all software needs.) It was also rumored to serve as the inspiration for Office Space, though I would imagine this is a rumor at many companies.

1. Initech hires computer programmers that "update bank software for the 2000 switch"

   I'm pretty sure some adjustments were made and tests were performed, just like they were everywhere.

2. Initech has access to "the credit union software"

   The company I worked for had complete control of the code running on client systems.

3. Initech has access to "the credit union mainframe"

   Our clients would allow us to log on to their mainframe systems. Some clients would restrict what we could see, but most just let us see everything. At the time I worked there, many to most clients would keep a modem line available at all times that we could use to log in. Everything was logged, so if you changed something you would probably get caught, but you could do it.

4. Initech's accounting department notices when the money goes missing

   The company I worked at wouldn't have had any reports like that, but the credit unions would generally do a nightly balancing and if something was off, we would CERTAINLY hear about it, usually even before business opening. (So the needed transactions could be reversed/fixed/etc). Having Initech notice probably makes the plot easier to follow, however.

5. Initech has a "Corporate Accounts Payable" department (although at least one transcriber disagrees with me and thinks it's "Corporate Councils Payroll")

   No idea here. I suspect this was required by the plot once you had Initech being the one that notices the money is missing.

6. Initech has a "Logistics" department.

   Most any company can have one of these. The place I worked certainly had people working on logistics.

7. Initech has engineers who lack people skills sufficient to interface directly with their customers.

   We did not work directly with customers, but this was less because of a lack of people skills and more because engineer time cost more than customer service time and most issues could be resolved without programmers getting involved. Often on-call situations resulted in programmers interacting directly with customers, however.

For several years I worked for a consulting company developing software for what's called a "correspondent bank" - i.e., an intermediary that processes transactions on behalf of other banks. Customer banks are called "respondent banks".

It's possible that Initech did something similar. I could make the following observations:

• Our customer (the correspondent or 'host' bank) would balance transaction totals to ensure that everything added up correctly. We as the consulting company did not have access to production data and did not perform this task.

• We generally did not work directly with software from RBs (our customer's customers), but we did work directly with other systems in-house with our customer, some of which were commercial off-the-shelf products; for example, message queueing and/or GL accounting or core processing systems.

I always thought of Initech as a financial transaction intermediary that did custom implementations on either end of the connections they were facilitating. This could be, for example, Credit Union to Credit Card company or Credit Union to Check Clearinghouse, etc... Not 100% sure as I've never developed software that close to financial transaction processing, but it seems feasible to me.

I worked at Intel at the time and the similarities were so great that I assumed Initech = Intel. Not specifically, but a play on words with a company everyone knows that they figured had the same undesireable cubicle culture. I figured they made the line of work different to not get sued.