Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Enterprise Software Sucks

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 570 posts

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#431

Post by unethical_ban »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #20

I think this gets it wrong. The real reason enterprise software sucks is that enterprises have complex and unique workflows and would prefer to buy software that they can fit to their workflow rather than change the workflows of their profitable business with tens of thousands of staff who will need retraining. If you look at all of the most successful software of all time they are the complete antithesis of the Unix…

I don't think it's either/or. You make a good second point.

We have ServiceNow where I work. It is, in a way, SUPER customizable for tons of workflows... if you don't mind your workflow/work request being labeled a "shopping cart" with a "checkout".

Meanwhile, my team has an internally built request system. Bottle/SQLite (later converted to mssql). Built it with three people in three months with feedback from actual users (requests and fulfillment). It is so good, other team who were forced onto SNow were and still are jealous.

There are some downsides to maintenance, and it still doesn't have the API we wish it had, but damnit if it isn't 100x the form they built out for us in SNow.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#432

Post by andrei_says_ »

MarcScott wrote: post #364

I worked at a school that used the Frog VLE. There was a big push for us to use it for student assessment. I tried, I honestly did. 1. I used it to set homework assignments. 2. .py files were blocked and students couldn't upload them. 3. They submitted code as .txt instead. 4. I'd click on my class to view submissions, it showed the top 5 submissions. 5. I'd click on a submission and it would download. 6. I'd view th…

I work in a corporate environment and I also write software -- both external and internal tools. My intolerance to unnecessary pain is one of the main driving forces in creating software-based tools.

The amount of pain inflicted on employees by enterprise solutions of various kinds is immeasurable. As a developer, I squirm witnessing so much unnecessary work and discomfort associated with simple tasks.

For example, even in 2020, managing expenses is so painful that employees consider not expending their spending.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#433

Post by curryst »

dividido wrote: post #367

I write enterprise software for fortune 100 companies. If I put myself in the user’s shoes and had an alternative, I’d most likely uninstall what we built and jump ship. But they can’t. It’s an internal app and the user is forced to use it. I try and fight for what’s right but if I had a dollar everytime I heard “ we aren’t google/amazon” , “only xx people will use it”, “we are just doing this to get off the old tech…

When I worked at a Fortune 500 company, even finding someone capable of creating a good UX was difficult. We used ServiceNow for our CMDB, and since Infra "owned" that, our customizations were done by SysAdmins that were "repurposed" into devs through the course of like a month long training with ServiceNow, despite them having never done any development.

The result was that our ServiceNow pages were horribly long to load. The "devs" complained that it was because ServiceNow's database was slow, and said ServiceNow said they couldn't make it any faster. I did like 30 seconds of digging and found out that every. single. Javascript request. was made synchronously. The reason it took 7 seconds for a page to load was because it had to execute a series of like 15 HTTP calls to get data to load the page, and each one was waiting for the one before it. The library they were using even exposed the methods with a name something like `synchronousGet`.

I don't think ServiceNow could have possibly returned results fast enough for that to not be painful. The requests had to go over WAN, there was like 100ms of latency just on the network connection. Even if ServiceNow's response was instant, we're still talking about a couple of seconds to execute that many requests.

My takeaway was that at most Fortune 500 companies, the perks aren't generally great (pay is lower than a lot of tech companies, the perks are generally few) and it's hard to get fired. So those who excel will move on to greener pastures with better pay/perks, and low performers are difficult to get rid of. Through attrition, you gradually end up with an employee base mostly made up of those who can't or won't move elsewhere, who do silly things like design architectures that are fundamentally incapable of HA, or writing webapps with entirely synchronous Javascript. Not that there aren't exceptional people within those organizations, however the IT department is defined by the majority, not by its most competent member.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#434

Post by jake-low »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #406
cnst wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, to be clear, this has nothing to do with "classroom". The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used. Displaying 5 results per page is a bug, not a feature. Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. The same could go on to the rest of their "features". (My biggest pet peeve is date formatting — just give…

> just give me ISO8601 dates, please; HackerNews, you, too! Strongly seconding. It's an annoying UX antipattern, especially as it loses precision over time ("28 minutes ago" is fine, but "yesterday" or "5 days ago" or - even worse - "2 years ago" is not; having the date specified to hours or minutes is actually useful, especially in context of a site with international audience). Doubly so on HN, which doesn't even b…

Definitely agree about the loss of precision. It's also a problem for machine readability and SEO. The solution I like is using the HMTL5 element for semantic markup of timestamps. If you do something like this:

    2 minutes ago
Then you get what in my opinion is the best of both worlds: machine readable timestamp in the datetime field, human-friendly detailed timestamp as a tooltip (the title field shows when you hover over the element), and relative time as the default display. Bonus points if your React component or ERB template or whatever switches from relative time format to absolute for the inner text when the timestamp is older than a day or so.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#435

Post by scarface74 »

rlucas wrote: post #429
true_religion wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did blackberry do so well in email?

For me and for a number of email "power users" whom I know, Blackberry strictly dominates iPhone email experience. Stipulated, it definitely depends on personal preferences and workflows as to what you personally prefer. But it is pretty incontrovertible that Blackberry was a finely-honed email tool with departures from that core use case being pretty tightly defined around the things you do ancillary to email (setti…

BlackBerry couldn’t read many attachments let alone edit them. Modern smart phones can run a decent version of MS Office.

The BlackBerry Email client definitely didn’t have a method of integrating third party storage providers like Dropbox which was definitely a thing by 2011.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#436

Post by en-us »

Scoundreller wrote: post #294
shadowgovt wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got to be a fly on the wall in an organization meeting where we realized our third-party UI vendor had no roadmap for internationalization. That was an uncomfortable day. ;)

Heh, I know of a major health record software that can’t handle time zones. So the hospital system has its instances sharded that way. Once you cross a time zone, your records are much harder to access.

Is this the same major EHR vendor that tells its customers to shut the system down and go to backups during the DST fallback hour?

There were many potential patient safety issues due to mishandling of times during that hour and the suggestion to just use the backup worked because it happens at 1 AM when little is going on other than emergencies which simply have to to manage with read-only access during that time.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#437

Post by nvarsj »

scarface74 wrote: post #404
rapind wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keyboard. Touch sucks for writing.

I’ve never had any trouble with typing on a touch screen just as fast as my old Blackberry. Especially if you have autocorrect.

This does not compute. I am a fast typer on all mediums, but a touch screen is just so slow compared to physical. I think I got around 80 wpm on my blackberry, there is no way I could do that on a touch screen. And iPhone autocorrect is terrible with any sort of tech jargon - frequently causing manual corrections.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#438

Post by Scoundreller »

en-us wrote: post #436
Scoundreller wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, I know of a major health record software that can’t handle time zones. So the hospital system has its instances sharded that way. Once you cross a time zone, your records are much harder to access.

Is this the same major EHR vendor that tells its customers to shut the system down and go to backups during the DST fallback hour? There were many potential patient safety issues due to mishandling of times during that hour and the suggestion to just use the backup worked because it happens at 1 AM when little is going on other than emergencies which simply have to to manage with read-only access during that time.

No, but it is an interesting problem. If something is done every 4 hours at standard times, do you shift all standard times by an hour so it’s still every 4 hours or have a gap of 3 or 5 hours for that task.

I kinda like the idea of regular scheduled downtimes of stable systems, just for real experience on downtime procedures.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#439

Post by flarg »

cnst wrote: post #380
MarcScott wrote: post #364

I worked at a school that used the Frog VLE. There was a big push for us to use it for student assessment. I tried, I honestly did. 1. I used it to set homework assignments. 2. .py files were blocked and students couldn't upload them. 3. They submitted code as .txt instead. 4. I'd click on my class to view submissions, it showed the top 5 submissions. 5. I'd click on a submission and it would download. 6. I'd view th…

And, to be clear, this has nothing to do with "classroom". The problem is people design these things without any sort of actual testing in actual conditions where the software is supposed to be used. Displaying 5 results per page is a bug, not a feature. Having restrictions on filetypes is a bug, not a feature. The same could go on to the rest of their "features". (My biggest pet peeve is date formatting — just give…

I'd disagree a little, the problem is not testing, it's building the software in the first place when it doesn't solve a real problem.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#440

Post by x0x0 »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #432
MarcScott wrote: post #364

I worked at a school that used the Frog VLE. There was a big push for us to use it for student assessment. I tried, I honestly did. 1. I used it to set homework assignments. 2. .py files were blocked and students couldn't upload them. 3. They submitted code as .txt instead. 4. I'd click on my class to view submissions, it showed the top 5 submissions. 5. I'd click on a submission and it would download. 6. I'd view th…

I work in a corporate environment and I also write software -- both external and internal tools. My intolerance to unnecessary pain is one of the main driving forces in creating software-based tools. The amount of pain inflicted on employees by enterprise solutions of various kinds is immeasurable. As a developer, I squirm witnessing so much unnecessary work and discomfort associated with simple tasks. For example, e…

I agree with everything you say, except the last bit.

You can't believe people aren't aware that concur is a pita and hence it reduces expense valid expense submission...

Post reply on HN