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Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

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Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#241

Post by rfrey »

ROTMetro wrote: post #75
agentultra wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our sales people had connections in the industry that led us into various "approved vendor" lists. This eventually allowed us to worm our way into getting demos with floor managers who could use some of their budget to buy our software. Word of mouth spread from there and within a couple of years we were driving their IT department up the wall. It was grass-roots and the end-users, the people on the floor doing the w…

And probably broke their MRP/ERP systems. But the IT departments probably came up with workaround to get data out of the system and feed the ERP/MRP system just enough to keep things going but probably way less efficiently than they would have ultimately been if pain points would have been addressed in the existing system instead of the virus of your software injected inappropriately. And then you probably badmouthed…

No need for such a ridiculously aggressive response.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#242

Post by lbayes »

ajb wrote: post #207
ROTMetro wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point I wore a hat in a IT leadership role for factories. We hated third party software because it created silo's where our data became un-usable. There is no point in an MRP/ERP factory system if all the bits aren't talking/working together. People fight and fight you as you try to get there, but once you get there and it all starts to work together and you no longer have jobs travelers looking like daisies w…

Was that last sentence autocorrected maybe? I'm struggling to parse the last bit about travellers and daisies.

Not the OP, but just trying to be helpful.

"Travelers" are paper packets that move through a manufacturing process with whatever material is being improved. Lots of machine shops have these printed out packets of specs, communications and notes that accompany a given order as it makes it's way through the process.

I'm pretty sure the "daisies" comment was related to how many shops escalate a given order by adding bright stickers or other obvious, visual indicators to the traveler, and shops can sometime become so overwhelmed that everything is escalated and all the bright travelers start looking like a field of flowers.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#243

Post by rfrey »

ROTMetro wrote: post #70
radicalbyte wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume that they were having to do end-user support. I was working in IT at that time and recognise that reaction from IT.

Oh you just need to support this XYZ new database, our app doesn't have a way deploy with your deploy tools, doesn't have granular permissions levels (in a factory environment), etc. Why do you not want our tool? Also, we will silo away a bunch of data needed for an MRP/ERP system to be effective to our system outside the MRP/ERP system. Silly IT people, not understanding our work environment (even though you support…

You sound like you're exhausted from dealing with people who are constantly doing end runs around your software. I can understand that.

On the other hand, if everyone in your org outside of IT execs despise SAP -- and make no mistake, they do, every last one of them -- then maybe it would be productive to wonder why that is rather than blaming your idiot users.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#244

Post by ajb »

lbayes wrote: post #242
ajb wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that last sentence autocorrected maybe? I'm struggling to parse the last bit about travellers and daisies.

Not the OP, but just trying to be helpful. "Travelers" are paper packets that move through a manufacturing process with whatever material is being improved. Lots of machine shops have these printed out packets of specs, communications and notes that accompany a given order as it makes it's way through the process. I'm pretty sure the "daisies" comment was related to how many shops escalate a given order by adding bri…

Ah cool, that makes a lot of sense. Interesting peek into the process.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#245

Post by alberth »

agentultra wrote: post #7

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…

Off topic: I’ve been a DH customer since 2004 and love it because to me it’s the perfect PaaS. DH is way under appreciated by HN crowd.

If you have any influence though, can you ask for the dedicated & vps offerings to get more love. Hardware is terribly out of date now (lack of nvme & modern proc).

I realize DH needs to hit a price point & margin, so I’m not asking for latest gen hardware. Just hardware that isn’t a decade old :)

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#246

Post by pixl97 »

josephcsible wrote: post #230
pixl97 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly this is the worst take yet. Go open that Excel 97 with a spreadsheet containing 65,537 rows.... Oh, you can't. People aren't building modern software that does the same set of things so attempting to measure it is much more difficult than opening up a zillon year old VM.

How many spreadsheets are that big? And how much bloat do you think supporting that accounts for?

This is an irrelevant question if you're in the business of selling most software.

Most people don't care if their spreadsheet takes 1 second or 10 seconds to open. What they do care about is "Bob sent me a spreadsheet and I can't open it" or "The app crashed and lost all my data" (and technically I've seen spreadsheets crash plenty, but they tend to have a recent copy of the data saved which is eating up resources to monitor and do this). And things like "I want to hit undo 50 bajillion times".

And that is just feature bloat. There is a ton more 'just import a library' for that bloat because adding libraries is generally much easier when it comes to fixes then finding the place in your source code and fixing it.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#247

Post by chii »

acomjean wrote: post #48
agentultra wrote: post #7

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…

My first software job was doing custom lotus notes database applications. One of the ones I was working on was going to be overlapped by future SAP implementation.. my boss said do it, because it was so much cheaper and no one could say when or if the SAP would be installed. They had to map the business to SAP, instead of having the software be flexible. But it turns out when you build something that fulfills a busin…

> They had to map the business to SAP, instead of having the software be flexible.

this is both an advantage of SAP (and realistically, the ERP industry), and a curse.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#248

Post by TheCleric »

acomjean wrote: post #48
agentultra wrote: post #7

I worked at a hole-in-the-wall-you've-never-heard-of software company that landed big contracts with large multinationals consistently that, from the customers' perspective, came down to one reason: it wasn't SAP. The licensing model of large, enterprise software does have ramifications for users on the floor. In this case it's because the software had a per-seat license and required expensive consultants to modify y…

My first software job was doing custom lotus notes database applications. One of the ones I was working on was going to be overlapped by future SAP implementation.. my boss said do it, because it was so much cheaper and no one could say when or if the SAP would be installed. They had to map the business to SAP, instead of having the software be flexible. But it turns out when you build something that fulfills a busin…

As a fellow dev who got their start doing Lotus Notes work, I feel this comment on a deep level.

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#249

Post by LanternLight83 »

mjburgess wrote: post #41
iinnPP wrote: post #24

At my previous job I was given permission to fully rewrite the call centre script/tooling used by sales agents. I also came from that team, and took a quick detour to the data team before finally landing in a development role. Giving me a full understanding of not only the agents needs and wants, but the limits on data being fed into this system. The resulting page loaded 10 times faster than what it replaced, which…

It feels like we need a youtube channel dedicated to 30min case studies of this. MS spent x months to build y, here it is in 3 days. etc. etc. People do not realise how fast development and software can be if you design with those priorities. It's orders of magnitude.

Like the Handmade Software ideals! https://youtu.be/hxM8QmyZXtg

Re: Maybe people do care about performance and reliability

#250

Post by marcus_holmes »

gilbetron wrote: post #9

The idea that software wasn't bloated and slow 20,30+ years ago is just myth. Everything was bloated and slow. MS Word in the 90s and 00s would regularly crash and take your file with you, and it often took minutes to start up. Yes, there were some brilliant counterexamples, just as there are today. But most software today is far more enjoyable and rapid to use than that from previous eras. While the software isn't a…

Disagree. VS in 2000 was the most productive environment I've ever worked in.

I was writing VB applications and could get the UI done in minutes, script it up and attach it to DCOM objects running on servers in hours. Whole applications done and dusted in a few days. It was easily the most productive environment I've ever worked in.

Now I'm writing Go in VSCode, and the language server + plugins + tools take forever (well, multiple tens of seconds). I have to run the UI in a browser, the server in a container, and the database in another container (with all the pain that entails). It's a mess and it's just not nearly as productive.

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