131–140 of 184 posts
>Assume that bad technical decisions are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.
It could be generalized:
>Assume that acts or behavior you don't understand are made rationally, for reasons that are not apparent.
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Workers need to stop giving corporation access to their credit card. That is an even simpler solution.
I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead. A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.
This only adds up to a substantial benefit if you’re doing major international travel (carefully) or handling big-ticket hardware purchases on your card. Meals and travel is almost certainly a net loss.
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It's an allegory OP is making to express their disdain for anecdotal correlation, illustrated here by the absurdity in which the story of a solution architect making a mistake based on a single case, is itself an anecdotal correlation …the purpose of which is perceived to paint an entire class of people (solution architects) as reactively decisive with incomplete information.
Well, I did talk about one specific solution architect. One that got the fundamental basics of ERP systems wrong. And part of the problem was his superficial, at best, understanding of ERP systems and underlying processes. The last part is ehat said solution architect has in common with the vast majority of commenters under this submission.
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Well, I did talk about one specific solution architect. One that got the fundamental basics of ERP systems wrong. And part of the problem was his superficial, at best, understanding of ERP systems and underlying processes. The last part is ehat said solution architect has in common with the vast majority of commenters under this submission.
Nice, i was trying to get into the motives of the "snow is white equals Joseph Stalin" commenter. Not a condemnation of your statement.
I didn't take it as such. And you really helped, because was a total loss with OP's comment...
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Name one serious alternative for SAP, if you need a real ERP system?
Depends on the industry,Oracle Netsuite is similar to SAP. A lot of construction/professional services use Deltek Vantagepoint. Also Mircosoft Dynamics comes to mind.
MS Dynamics seems to have some good ideas when it comes to field services (I never worked with that, so). INFOR is rather good when it comes to project management and project driven manufacturing and planning. So, pick your poison, because no system will satisfy all you wishes, but the decent ones will satisfy almost all your needs, one way or another.
One of the big benefits of picking SAP is the huge pool of people with relevant experience, from developers over users (from simple employees over key users to super key users) all the way to those "controversial" consultants. And that across almost all industries, countries, regions and functions.
I don’t understand the disdain here in Hacker News for enterprise software. Every now and then this type of post would show up, decrying how terrible the user interface is or how awful looking the fonts are and how they can program the same functions in 1000 lines of code and support thousands of users. These companies have revenue in the billions. They have enabled large companies, since before many of us were born.…
I work in this industry, though I work almost exclusively with non SAP related stuff.
On one hand, the problems being solved are complicated and for some products, there are decades of embedded domain knowledge, and they have a lot of products, and can basically do anything any kind of business needs to be able to do, and integrate it somehow with other parts of the system.
On the other hand... large parts of it are absolutely horribly engineered. ABAP is a programming language that makes me recoil in disgust. What it is is the result of polishing the same turd for several decades, seemingly without one person or group ever trying to think about the direction or bigger picture for the whole stack(which is just impossibly large at this point, and like a tentacle monster from another dimension).
It does work, but mostly because people have been hammering out the kinks for thousands of person-years. As for the things said about the consulting industry.. they are definitely true.
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The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that German engineering is something they want. In automobiles, industrial equipment, electronics, software, etc. you can sense when Germans were involved. I've accepted that it's something I'll never understand, and that they probably feel the same way about American designs. Same planet, different worlds.
In terms of software you are probably right, since we are behind in so many areas and education for jobs about creating software is not the best. About cars: Do you mean things like the VW scandal? Or do you mean actually shoddy engineering in cars? I think the reputation for engineering stems from darker times.
VW scandal is different - it's what you get when you set unreasonable and actually conflicting requirements.
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I think you have the incentives backwards here. When you use your own credit card for company expenses, you can rack up tons of personal benefits. The company would prefer you to use their card so they get those instead. A few years ago Google, for example, cracked down and started requiring company cards for expensive purchases like flights.
Credit card rewards typically represent around 1% of transactions. For a cross-country trip with a $500 flight, 3 night at a $200 hotel, 4 $25 taxi trips and 9 (average) $20 meals that works out to 1% of $1380 or $13.80. In exchange for this modest benefit you will need to keep receipts and do data entry for about 15 items. If you forget a single meal receipt or accounting disputes a single charge, you’re already in…
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I think it is a superiority complex. SAP, IBM, Oracle (and many small companies running for ages) are all making "shitty" products, yet, every year, their revenue is in billions. On the other hand, we have "beautifully hand-crafted products with love" made in the best languages human can invent (your favorite language only HN crowd dicking around), and those companies are barely paying their developers and bills. But…
Did you really have to add a jab at vegan food and renewable energy in there and somehow make this about politics? Where is this weird (and frankly suspicious) hostility against either of those even rationally coming from? No need to act as if "crazy HN hipster developers" (apparently your perspective) are the only ones who don't understand that there is a very good reason why SAP is still used at Apple and Google.
I was fortunate to be in touch with renewable energy companies (professionally and indirectly), and you'd be surprised how unhealthy those things are for the environment on a grand scale. But, YMMV...
I’ve no doubt that you have many anti-Concur club members here! Whenever they make “improvements” it breaks something. Monthly Concur expense reports are torture, possibly being the only part of my job I consistently dislike. Can anyone recommend better alternatives to lobby my company to try?