

"Enterprise software" is a social, not technical, (problem) phenomenon - edu
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2005-April/000772.html

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tx
Nice post. My advice for any college grad is to stay away form this stinky
industry. I wasted two years out of college on billing systems with 1,500
Oracle tables with endless dumbest PL/SQL data-pumping procedures and dumbest
data entry client software written in VB.

And nobody really cared about quality or efficiency. No algorithms, nothing
even remotely interesting from a technical standpoint. Only schedule, "feature
list" and annoying salespeople who kept selling features we did not even
built. I hear that VB got replaced by Java now. And that is true: to keep
those piles of shitty code running clients had to buy "service contracts".

We had a guy whose full time job was to write report generators. Ugghh...

It's not "software". It's "software porn".

~~~
michaelneale
>It's not "software". It's "software porn".

Its not that interesting ;)

I think VB is replaced by C# and ruby (if the rails enthusiasts succeed in
getting it into the enterprise). Don't underestimate the amount of cobol still
running though.

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ratsbane
So true.

It actually does matter, though.

I know it matters when I see a 10-year-old kid sleeping on the floor of an
office because his mom has to work until 1am because some awful enterprise
software doesn't work right.

I know it matters when I see two friends and partners a small business split
up and start suing each other because poor accounting software led them to
think they were cheating each other.

It's too important to ignore.

It's too important to leave to the second-rate programmers who don't care
enough to do something important like real science.

~~~
michaelneale
well if people keep insulting everyone with broad brush strokes, nothing will
change.

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arhar
I'm going to provide a voice of discontent here ...

Although I agree with the author, for the most part, there's a flip side as
well. There exists GOOD enterprise software. Difference between good
enterprise software and open source software is enterprise software HAS to
work. For open source software, it's "cool if it works."

Of course, I'm horribly overgeneralizing open source software (kind of the
like the author does with enterprise software), but hear me out. A valid
analogy would be enterprise software is an adult, as it does things out of
necessity, and doesn't care about looks, code elegancy, fancy algorithms,
etc... And open source software is the cool kid on the block, who doesn't
really need to do anything, but does it for the coolness factor.

Sometimes with pretty bad results. For example - back in 2004, we here at
large Dilbertian financial company that I'm working nights to escape have
tried using Groovy. It worked pretty well, and we were happy.. until we went
to production. It was then we discovered that Groovy had a memory leak, and
our mission-critical application hung every day during crunch time.

Moral of the story? This kind of thing is NOT tolerated among enterprise
software (at least where I work)... and that memory leak in Groovy hasn't been
fixed in a couple of years, and I don't know if it has been fixed at all,
actually... I haven't checked Groovy in a while.

~~~
alex_c
"enterprise software HAS to work"

That's where the author (and myself) disagree, I guess. Enterprise software
SHOULD work, but there's no reason to believe that it does any better than
other software.

The moral of the story for me is to test everything before it gets put in
production (wasn't Groovy brand-new in 2004?) There's no reason to assume
open-source software works, and there's no reason to assume enterprise
software works. Even if it's used by hundreds of thousands of businesses with
no problems, there might still be a problem with your specific setup, whether
it's open-source or enterprise.

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mojuba
Brilliant. Someone should have spoken out on this after all.

The flip side is development of this kind of software. Is "enterprise
software" so useless that it attracts only second-rate developers? What first-
rate hackers would have done given such a task to automate bureaucracy?

~~~
edw519
Actually, you have it backwards. I am aware of several enterprise ERP packages
that were originally written by one or two hackers in a garage. Brilliant
people. The original AMAPS, now Fourth Shift was written by one guy. MMC,
Compufact, Dataworks by 2 guys. The now defunct ASK MANMAN package was written
by a married couple. So was QAD. (These kinda remind me of the couple who
started Cisco.) They all sold thousands of installations, for tens or hundreds
of thousands of dollars each. They were so successful that, inevitably, the
hats came along. The brilliant people have moved on, and what was left is what
you see now.

