Why Enterprise Software Sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#511

Post by gnicholas » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 5:08 AM UTC

filleduchaos wrote: post #508

gnicholas wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate? There’s no need to put magnets in baby clothing, and there is some risk to doing so. Why do it then? Also, zippers take 3 seconds to do...if you don’t have 3 seconds to zip up the kid, you probably don’t have time to change the diaper underneath...

Magnetic closures are usually enclosed in seams, and address a very real need (ease of one-handed or even two/three-fingered operation). Zippers are an actual hazard for baby skin and also tend to take more hands to reliably do/undo than the typical parent trying to manage a screaming, possibly wet baby (or babies!) has available. Even if you're sticking with more traditional fasteners, snaps and Velcro are way more…

Interesting perspective, thanks for sharing! We find zippers to be great, especially the ones that start at the feet. Never found them to be a hazard for skin, through thousands of openings and closings. Also, snaps are definitely the least sensible option for us, since there are so many of them on each outfit. We never buy those, and the ones we've received are used much less than the zippered ones. Glad you've found something that works for you and your baby.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#512

Post by cipher_system » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 5:25 AM UTC

Aeolun wrote: post #491

andrei_says_ wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Managing expenses is only a pain because my company doesn’t trust me when I tell them I spent $20 on a meal. And have to give them both a digital, and then physical (signed!) receipt.

It's annoying and could probably be made easier, but these things are required by law. Also, not everyone can be trusted and it's not easy to tell.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#513

Post by ridaj » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 5:31 AM UTC

mbesto wrote: post #450

ridaj wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user experience based on consumer fe…

> No, this does completely get it right. Enterprises thought they needed all the control and security features of Blackberry until the iPhone came along and made the UX gap unsustainable. Enterprises thought they needed on-premise hosting of Exchange, Office and SharePoint instances under their control for email and productivity, until GSuite came up with a better, less configurable user experience based on consumer…

I think you and I are saying the same thing. I'm not saying Slack makes Msft irrelevant. Just that Slack makes better UX which is why they're managing to make sales outside of IT traditional channels - because once users have the power to do it, they choose something else than what IT gives them. Same with iPhone. It got so bad that in many companies, people started using them in breach of corporate preference for official systems.

Just today I met with someone who carries two laptops for work: one that is enterprise-IT sanctioned to access internal resources and is super restricted; the other one to do actual work. How does he work with two laptops? SDcards. In 2019.

The fact that all the craptastic enterprise UX is holding on so well in terms of the $ amount indeed is the observation: enterprise services for the most part do suck. I don't think, and I didn't say, that it's always a winning commercial strategy to focus on UX when it comes to enterprise. Based on available evidence, I too would conclude that focusing on giving middle managers a power trip of control options looks like the better strategy, UX be damned.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#514

Post by goodcharles » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 5:48 AM UTC

samayylmao wrote: post #499

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…

Have you ever used Instructure? My university uses it (I'm a student). It's really great on the student side and from what I've seen really flexible and easy to use from the teacher's perspective too.

Strongly disagree. Recently took a graduate level database management course, and using Instructure was one of the hardest parts of the course. Poor information flow, too many places to have to check for notifications, tasks, and basic information.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#515

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 6:29 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #98

investinme wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody hates Photoshop. In fact it's one of the most loved software out there. I'm a developer and a Photoshop user and love it. The Unix philosophy would be a disaster for a image editing software (ImageMagick much?) Once a developer who spent all day in VIM & co was honestly arguing with me that Photoshop should be a command line app. I filled that under "shit developers say" and "delusional".

It's strange that someone who spends all day in Vim (which is not an acronym, by the way), an editor driven by keystrokes rather than the command line like ex or edlin, would prefer a command-line Photoshop. I'm not saying you're lying but maybe they misspoke or you misremembered. A keystroke-driven Photoshop might be something like Blender. I think netpbm is more Unixy than ImageMagick. I've had good experiences wit…

[deleted]

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#516

Post by Aloha » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 6:31 AM UTC

kragen wrote: post #140

investinme wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not saying you're lying but maybe they misspoke or you misremembered. No, that dev never did any serious image editing. He was just full of himself and of the "superior UNIX philosophy", the thought that there might be domains where that doesn't apply just never crossed his mind (image/audio/video editing being a major one)

Vim does not use the Unix philosophy. It is an Amiga program ported to Unix, designed along the lines of Emacs, which also does not use the Unix philosophy. You would think he would have noticed that his text editor was a domain where he wasn't applying the superior Unix philosophy. I'm not convinced that the Unix philosophy doesn't apply to image and video editing, but certainly we haven't seen an example (aside fro…

How is vim significantly less unix like than vi? The user interfaces are near identical and vi is very unix in philosophy and originated on unix.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#517

Post by Aloha » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 6:33 AM UTC

swalsh wrote: post #115

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…

Sometimes I wonder, what if we just fundamentally took a new approach the OS. Today at the root of your operating system is the file system. It would be interesting if the file system was changed to essentially the concept of a simple object store. In much the same way we have "standard file formats" today, we could move to something like a "standard class". Objects would be a first class citizen in the OS. I think t…

This sounds vaguely like OS/400/system i

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#518

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

xyst wrote: post #494

TeMPOraL wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, my co-worker and I have evaluated a dozen different tools big and small, including Jira and that Jetbrains thing. And we still can't find a system that would meet our needs, which I think are simple: - Model tasks as DAGs, not as lists. I.e. I want to work with a dependency graph (JetBrains thing sort of can do that with task relationships, but the UI isn't oriented towards exploiting it). - If that's too mu…

What's the point of nested subtasks? I hate creating subtasks as it is, but now I have to create this nasty tree of sub-subtasks? Almost seems like "micro-tasks" at this point.

Breaking down work into steps. Not all top-level tasks are truly of equal size.

Micro tasks are good.

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#519

Post by lstamour » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 6:53 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #510

jake-low wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"when you hover over the element" On the website I'm looking at Google Analytics for right now, fewer than 35% of the visitors are from devices where "hover" means anything...

Well, it would require JS, but you could turn it into a button to show/hide an HTML tooltip or additional displays of the time. That iOS supports a mouse (in accessibility settings) or an Xbox controller but doesn’t properly support an “abbr” tag... it was acceptable in 2007 when we were happy to see the phone load nytimes.com with all its columns. It’s feeling very out of date in 2019, when 12 years later we’re adding downloads and “desktop safari” but we never finished the “desktop-equivalency” parts of the HTML5 spec. It would be amazing if Apple ported some of their iOS native components to web components or to enhance HTML5 elements. The farthest we’ve gotten so far are keyboard search button hints, if I recall correctly. Which is really quite disappointing, that an app made for jQuery UI would work as well as an app from today if you flatten and modernize the design, and add a bit of offline caching...

Re: Why Enterprise Software Sucks

#520

Post by Aeolun » Sat, Oct 12, 2019, 7:05 AM UTC

cipher_system wrote: post #512

Aeolun wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Managing expenses is only a pain because my company doesn’t trust me when I tell them I spent $20 on a meal. And have to give them both a digital, and then physical (signed!) receipt.

It's annoying and could probably be made easier, but these things are required by law. Also, not everyone can be trusted and it's not easy to tell.

No, but there are solutions that involve giving people a fixed amount of money every month for these small expenses (or a fixed amount per day for longer business trips).