Concur's backend is typical of a slow moving industry that works with old awkward systems like airlines. It's a shitshow of business logic and 20 year old legacy code that would be a long expensive nightmare to rewrite for little actual profit so no manager would ever approve of such an endeavor. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mess of queries involved with this search such that trying to do a real sort of the results would require a significant degree of rewriting and touching scary code with huge amounts of bureaucratic review in order to be DOD compliant, so it gets labeled as "good enough" even if the current state drives some developers crazy.
Software horror show: SAP Concur
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Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#42This is a clear indication that the user is not the customer. The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out. This happened to the phone handsets when iphone arrived. So, future investors - look at the startups that address the user problems, not the client problems, even though the latter are paying.
> The first time someone arrives at the scene catering to the users, the whole industry will be wiped out.
I find it a little hard to see to be honest. Team members might push to use Slack over some other chat solution because they spend all day using that -- I've seen that happen and work. How often do you do expense reports that you're really going to nag the company to buy your favorite solution?
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess the author suggests, why not at least do SORT BY country THEN BY city_name or something like that. Which might be nice, I suppose.
It's only possible if the address field is not single Text field :)
True, but it's not even sorted naively as a single string.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#44This is the least of SAP's crimes against software. Pretty much everything SAP builds is janky and awful like this. If you're lucky, "minor" UX problems like these are the only thing you have to deal with, but in the vast majority of cases, that's not going to be the case.
Where I work, I also have to use a SAP system for expense reports. I can't even tell you what it's called, but the interface is basically just directly from SAP GUI(except embedded, very poorly, into a website) and every single interaction you perform results in a sync query to the backend, freezing the UI until you get a response.
The worst part is that no one really cares. SAP doesn't care. The users/companies that are stuck with SAP don't really care, or at least if they do, well, no one is going to spend valuable dev time on building their own internal expense registration platform(or whatever) just to fix something that sucks to use, but otherwise "works".
I also have to register my hours, being a consultant, and this also happens via some SAP system. One thing my current project manager told me recently is that the description field that we have to use to describe what work we did is just invisibly cut to 40 characters on the backend. I can freely type a whole essay describing what I did, but the pm reviewing will just see 40 characters.
Assuming that any sort of thought goes into most of SAP's software is like trying to reason about an insane person's behavior. It's completely pointless since there is no reason involved.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#45I hate submitting expenses probably as much as the typical engineer, but Concur seems “no better, no worse” than the typical dumpster fire of these systems. I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature. I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state , happi…
Used to use concur in a past life, now expensify. There's not even words for how much better expensify is.
It wasn't _that_ bad for a lot of entry types, but for me what made it a constant problem were hotels. It wanted a daily rate and number of days. Yet our rates were different day by day, and it made you do a separate tax entry. So you're having to BS a close enough "daily rate" and adjust the tax field of a specific day to adjust for any single penny rounding errors. Then there were resort fees or other things, which it would also make you call out but I think it even had a fixed number of "extra fees" input boxes.
For a set of a few non travel expenses it was only a bit worse than any system ought to be. For travel it was practically unusable and for reasons that actually butchered your report
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#46Even Google Calendar does this. If I'm adding an event an hour from now, why does the Location auto-complete list show locations that are impossible to reach in time at the top of the list? Is it not more likely that I would be booking an event near to my either my current location or my home?
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#47Is this topological sort ? So, it's a hard solved problem. Because, for example, postgresql order by doesn't allow it by default.
> Is this topological sort ?
No, neither what it is doing or what it ought to be doing is a topological sort. What it is actually doing seems like “return all matching the stem without any sort [or sorted by ID or some other non-relevant value].”
The various things the user suggest are all sorts by fairly simple functions, not the kind of dependency ordering at issue with a topological sort. Choosing the best one to use as a default might be hard, but they aren’t the kind of complex things you can’t implement as a simple order-by once you are set up for it.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#48I hate submitting expenses probably as much as the typical engineer, but Concur seems “no better, no worse” than the typical dumpster fire of these systems. I will say that it does have good integration between the company card transactions and the expense reporting feature. I am more mystified than the author at why my 75-mile range electric car offers a default sorted list by full street name, then by state , happi…
Used to use concur in a past life, now expensify. There's not even words for how much better expensify is. It wasn't _that_ bad for a lot of entry types, but for me what made it a constant problem were hotels. It wanted a daily rate and number of days. Yet our rates were different day by day, and it made you do a separate tax entry. So you're having to BS a close enough "daily rate" and adjust the tax field of a spec…
You can enter each day manually now, with fees. It’s been this way for at least 7 years.
That’s how long I’ve been filing expense reports with concur for hotels.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#49A few years ago, we were building somethings to integrate with multiple expense and invoice management systems. Concur's odata based APIs were by far one of the worst integration experiences I had. (Even worse than integrating with dot net SOAP APIs from AXIS and Java)
You could see that some of the older APIs were well documented and thought out and the new versions were considerably worse. What we realized was that the earlier versions were built prior to SAP acquiring Concur.
Re: Software horror show: SAP Concur
#50I was forced to use an SAP product at an old job about 15 years ago.
Unfortunately, I find it completely unsurprising that any SAP.* product is a dis-organized mess of a kludge, with no rationality evident anywhere.
Oh, and the CIO who foisted that pile of cr*p upon my organisation? She moved on shortly after SAP was implemented -- undoubtedly to foist SAP on some other poor unsuspecting org. I sure hope her SAP stock has tanked.