
The Reliability of Enterprise Applications - yarapavan
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3374665
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sbuttgereit
"Enterprises sometimes base their buying decisions only on the required
business functionality, however, and tend to overlook the application's
overall reliability."

Only sometimes?

As someone that has worked in that field for around 25 years, that's a very
generous phrasing. I think another way to look at it is that the soft costs
that accrue over time and are the result of technical issues are often times
just invisible or under appreciated by those most involved in making decisions
(certainly at the low end) and by the dynamics of the system selection
consulting engagements at the middle and (perhaps) higher end.

Also, its fairly frequent that the people in the enterprise technology
department, the people that should really help to navigate these issues,
suffer a couple problems themselves. One they tend to be defensive, overly
demanding on these counts, and simply seen as a roadblock... conversely you
also find IT management far under-qualified to participate in this, too. Sure
there are many very really solid professionals out there... but I think it's
only "sometimes" you find the right coincidence of business and technical
understanding of the full picture, including longer term cost of ownership.

[ADDITION] Of course, it's not just poor hapless enterprisey/businessey types
that sometimes have problems with the long game in technology....
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21782156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21782156)
I think is the same basic message and hits the nail on the head in principle.

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jcadam
It's pretty demotivating to have "leaders" who ignore every technical expert
in their organization jumping up and down, waving their arms, shouting "Don't
buy that!"

Happens all the time, though.

~~~
rednerrus
I just went through this and more than half of the team has quit since.

~~~
Unsimplified
What do you think most compels these people to force thru their buying/highlvl
decisions despite strong technical pushback?

Ego defense? Desire to participate in the actual work to seem they know what
they're leading? Tunnel visioning that they are the CXO in charge of biz and
devaluing engineer input in biz-connected decisions?

