Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think • Hacker News Board

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#171

Post by jimnotgym » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:40 AM UTC

thisisnico wrote: post #36

ivalm wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At the same time, I guess you have to be at a company of a certain size for it to be relevant to your life... But that perhaps proves the point - HN is very starup focused That’s pretty dismissive. I work at a company with ~80B in revenue, I never interacted or heard of SAP in work context. In fact it is only incidentally that I’ve heard of them previously. There are hundred of thousands of engineers working in com…

There are also alternate vendors of ERP. Microsoft Dynamics NAV for example. At my current shop I manage INFOR VISUAL ERP.

...Microsoft Dynamics GP, Microsoft Dynamics AX, all entirely different products for different sectors. Then there is Netsuite, Sage (lots of different products), SAP Business One (small SAP), Oracle ERP, JD Edwards...plus 1000 niche providers who are often migrating to NAV rather than their own product. It may be a shock to a FAANG, but the ethos is very much, 'move slow and don't break anything'. 10 year old versions still supported, that sort of thing. Another reason Windows is popular in enterprises is that ERP clients written in VB6 (or whatever) still run on Windows 10!

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#172

Post by juped » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:43 AM UTC

Kinrany wrote: post #38

juped wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sales and marketing.

There seems to be more people doing sales/marketing than software engineers (though I don't have any numbers). Why aren't they picking up the bills?

There's few, if any, people who can sell these things to a new audience, and they're all picking up their own trillion dollar bills.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#173

Post by downvoteme1 » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:44 AM UTC

fovc wrote: post #88

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

Coming from the opposite direction (mgmt consulting for big corps -> startup), I was very familiar with the ERP concept, but am still super confused by the ERP market. Every so often I look for an ERP for our company, but am always disappointed by the options. It seems there's an uncanny valley between Quickbooks and SAP, but maybe the issue is just one of discoverability. We've slowly stitched together an assortment…

I have been doing ERP consulting for about a decade now and I tend to disagree. I think we have a lot ph ERP options now in the paid space apart from just Quickbooks and SAP. You need to pick and choose based upon what is the most complex operation for a company- be it multi currency financials, complex supply chain or some other parameter. Then you can pick from lowest complexity to highest in the following manner

* Quick books

* Sage

* Dynamics / NetSuite

* JD Edwards / Infor / Manhattan

* Workday

* Oracle EBS / SAP

Each of those on the same line are similar in features and complexity.

This is obviously not a complete list - just the ones I have dealt with.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#174

Post by asadlionpk » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:45 AM UTC

anonytrary wrote: post #77

imgabe wrote: post #46

Not just software, but everything. Look around you. Everything around you was made somewhere. The example I like to use is shower curtain rings. Those plastic or metal things that hold your shower curtain onto the rod. Somewhere, there's a factory that makes those. The person who owns that factory is probably rich. My first job out of college was working for a company that makes tilt-tray sorter systems. These are gi…

When I have kids, I'm gonna play a game with them where we look at random stuff and try to make up how it got there, and then compare that to how it really got there. I bet if you did this consistently with kids during their formative years, it would be a great way to teach them about the world and the economy. My parents just had a huge book room with encyclopedias that I was expected to pick up and read.

That actually sounds like a good idea. Favoriting this for later.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#175

Post by jimnotgym » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:45 AM UTC

cambalache wrote: post #34

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, u…

I worked at an $8bn multinational and we ran the whole operation through SAP from quote to cash... and we really liked it. It was consistent, and the 'ugly' green-screen style data entry is wonderfully efficient. I hear this all the time though, about all ERPs. It is all about how you use them.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#176

Post by ck_one » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:49 AM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

SAP is a German company so here everybody knows about it. There is even a startup strategy called "unbundling SAP" where you pick one feature of SAP, do it 10x better and target a smaller but still huge market. Examples for such companies are: Personio (500M valuation), Cellonis (2.5B valuation)

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#177

Post by fphhotchips » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:50 AM UTC

cambalache wrote: post #34

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, u…

Workday is in the process of doing this. I wish them all the best, but I can't help thinking that we're just replacing the old goat with a new goat.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#178

Post by JoshuaDavid » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:52 AM UTC

hnick wrote: post #124

MattGaiser wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The challenge we faced (for the two days we tried to hack together a solution) wasn’t so much the OCR but the fact that we couldn’t standardize the form as we were onboarding people with the documents from other banks. Our requirement was that the the software would need to read the number of separating lines in the table and output accordingly. Maybe it can do this, idk. I was an intern at the time. We were using te…

I worked somewhere that did something similar. Their product would scan and extract data from documents. Even working with the banks and companies who produced the documents, there were very stringent requirements (like identifying marks on pages to tell what document type we are looking at, pages being fed in the correct order, etc). Plus the ability to handle degraded, damaged, or bad copies. It's apparently one of…

90% automated is sometimes 90% as good as fully automated. It's not always the case, there are cases where hitting that 100% enables you to do things that were just not possible at all before, but sometimes it is. Recognizing those cases where a 90% solution is a 90% improvement at a 10% cost is a valuable skill.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#179

Post by emerongi » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:53 AM UTC

neilwilson wrote: post #159

cambalache wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Want your mind to be blown even more? I worked for a multinational company, I would not be surpised that this company is among the top 10 SAP customers worldwide. Well, everybody hated hated hated SAP, it was a huge hindrance instead of any help.Any use beyond of a "dumb" database was a huge PITA, and I am not fully convinced that all in all it helped more than damaged the business. It was clunky, unintutive, slow, u…

Same with accounts generation. Almost certainly most operations accounts and tax filings could be fully auto generated from their bookkeeping - if the bookkeeping was good enough. You could do that by constraining the bookkeeping and adding some intelligence to the reporting. So why do bookkeeping firms like Xero stop at basic bookkeeping? Because they sell via accountants - who make a lot of money piping data from o…

For basic bookkeeping, yes, you can generate all the needed reports and tax filings from the books. I'm in Europe and I've had a couple of companies where I had no accountant - I just entered all the transactions in the software and it generated all the necessary filings for me. Payroll is also auto-generated, taxes handled etc.

For complex accounting and analysis you still need accountants and business analysts. It's a different type of job in that case though: instead of handling the common cases, you handle the edge cases that the software is unable to deal with.

Re: Patio11's Law: The software economy is bigger than you think

#180

Post by MandieD » Wed, May 13, 2020, 6:53 AM UTC

rb808 wrote: post #76

_bxg1 wrote: post #7

I remember reading this article about SAP a few months ago, and it just blew my mind: https://retool.com/blog/erp-for-engineers/ Here was an entire market segment I'd never heard of, and just the market leader is worth $163B . And on top of that, the technology is so totally alien to anything I'd ever heard of before. It's like an alternate-history kind of thing. Like if we discovered a continent somewhere in the Pac…

The crazy thing is for most of the world people use Windows and SAP and firewalled intranets and no external email. Apple laptops and free access to the internet and SV culture is a tiny minority of what the world's computing looks like.

I’m nominally a DevOps engineer at a really big Germany-based auto parts (among other things) manufacturer, specializing in Azure and Kubernetes.

My real job many days is helping devs make peace with our various web proxies - even the special, relatively open, non-SSL-intercepting “dev proxy” requires CNTLM, which just celebrated its eighth anniversary on its current build. And of course, my little darlings take dependencies on it for things for which the masses absolutely not have access to it.