Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B • Hacker News Board

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#131

Post by hindsightbias » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:09 PM UTC

"ADP tech chief Stuart Sackman says his company is under constant attack globally and is hoping to encrypt more of its data using the new technology. A sixty year customer of IBM, ADP currently runs its largest domestic payroll engine on the systems, calculating 20 million paychecks per pay period, while also running its money movement, tax filing systems and cloud-based software suite on versions of the Z-series mainframes."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2017/07/17/ibm-seeks...

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#132

Post by da02 » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #68

threeseed wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you actually tried what you are saying ? Because it's a nice idea just completely unrealistic. Software engineers who are not just technical but SMEs as well as having excellent skills in stakeholder engagement are incredibly rare. And most of them know how good they are and are contracting at, you guessed it, around 300k/year. Talented engineers are usually quite savvy when it comes to money. Also for most proj…

> Have you actually tried what you are saying ? Because it's a nice idea just completely unrealistic. I've been in places where it's done. In fact, I've been involved for a long time in a public sector environment with three key systems, one of which is a central claims adjudication system, and two of which are accounting and tracking systems that interface with it, performing similar functions to each other but for…

Was this at the city, state, or federal level? Or in another country?

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#133

Post by djrogers » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #127

I have payroll issues with IBM still. They overpaid me when I left, then they got my end date incorrect and wanted more back than they deserve. This has been ongoing for 7 months, they can't seem to figure it out... just check the email logs, if they had any... They sent it to collections some time ago, now trying to get them to negotiate a payoff rather than dealing with IBM Employee "services"

Whoa, doesn’t your state have an agency that handles that stuff? I was terminated once by a company that claimed they went bankrupt, so I filled out one form with the labor commission (had to in order to claim unemployment benefits - I was 22 and had no savings), and they got ALL up in my former employers business and straightened it out quickly with no extra effort in my part.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#134

Post by Toast_25 » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

hindsightbias wrote: post #131

"ADP tech chief Stuart Sackman says his company is under constant attack globally and is hoping to encrypt more of its data using the new technology. A sixty year customer of IBM, ADP currently runs its largest domestic payroll engine on the systems, calculating 20 million paychecks per pay period, while also running its money movement, tax filing systems and cloud-based software suite on versions of the Z-series mai…

As someone working in ifosec, i loathe how vague that article is about what exactly is going on in the chips.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#135

Post by jamiepenney » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:17 PM UTC

rhizome wrote: post #116

zaroth wrote: post #23

Not having ever worked on anything like this, the death knell for these projects must be the inability to ever reduce functionality into a reasonable core set. Basically the 80/20 rule but where there are practically an infinite number of edge cases that stretch the project on indefinitely? You could serve 80% of the payroll burden with software that cost $10m. 90% coverage costs $100m. 98% costs $1,000m. And 100% co…

Basically the 80/20 rule but where there are practically an infinite number of edge cases that stretch the project on indefinitely? Zeno's Featureset

That's the perfect way to put it! Definitely going to steal this for later use.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#136

Post by british_india » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

Didn't IBM switch to getting a majority of their developers from India?

Enough said.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#137

Post by giarc » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:21 PM UTC

So it doesn't have to be this way.

I work for Alberta Health Services, we have 120,000 employees across the province. There are likely 5 separate unions plus out of scope staff (management). This organization was created after the merger of 5 separate health care organizations all with separate systems etc. They over time rolled everyone into the same pay system and I didn't hear about a single person missing their pay. The federal government transition has resulted in tons of people being not paid at all, being paid too little or being paid too much.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#138

Post by mannykannot » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:24 PM UTC

happyopossum wrote: post #130

goodroot wrote: post #77

As a Canadian who has worked at IBM, I'm not surprised that this didn't find success. In IBMs defense, I don't believe our public sector has the experience or aptitude required to act as a supporting interface for a job of this scale. With that being said, IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good software products. They were an unwise choice from the get-go. IBM is a successful fin…

> IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good products. Whoa, what? Sure, some of their achievements are in their past, but that claim really overlooks a ton of history.

In this context, the only history that matters is that which speaks to its current ability to good work. I don't follow IBM closely, but the impression I get is that its current reputation is spotty.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#139

Post by mseebach » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:26 PM UTC

zaroth wrote: post #23

Not having ever worked on anything like this, the death knell for these projects must be the inability to ever reduce functionality into a reasonable core set. Basically the 80/20 rule but where there are practically an infinite number of edge cases that stretch the project on indefinitely? You could serve 80% of the payroll burden with software that cost $10m. 90% coverage costs $100m. 98% costs $1,000m. And 100% co…

> You could serve 80% of the payroll burden with software that cost $10m. 90% coverage costs $100m. 98% costs $1,000m. And 100% costs $∞

I read something in a trade journal probably probably about 15 years ago, that really stuck with me: When businesses buy big software solutions (I think the article was about ERP systems), they should prepare to adjust and change their processes (within reason, of course) and not just insist that the software be modified endlessly to suit every little ossified process and preference. Not just because it's very expensive, but because the resulting system will be brittle and incompatible and taking advantage of further developments.

Too many buyers of software would benefit immensely from taking a good, hard look at those remaining 20% and making some hard decisions about what is actually important. Sure, for a government payroll system, there is limited room for movement, but I'd suspect that the majority of the long tail are people on weird, custom contracts and the correct solution is actually to hire a room full of clerks to handle these in Excel - and/or applying political pressure on the hiring parties to get their contracts adjusted to fit standard payroll schemes.

Re: Canada to Scrap IBM Payroll Plan Gone Awry Costing $1B

#140

Post by djrogers » Thu, Mar 01, 2018, 9:27 PM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #138

happyopossum wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IBM isn't a successful technology company with a proven record building good products. Whoa, what? Sure, some of their achievements are in their past, but that claim really overlooks a ton of history.

In this context, the only history that matters is that which speaks to its current ability to good work. I don't follow IBM closely, but the impression I get is that its current reputation is spotty.

Only huge failures make the news. CBC doesn’t run a feature on a successful software implementation.