Why enterprise software is bloated

I think this is quite unfair to Enterprise development. There are several business reasons to not use off the shelf scripts or libraries, namely licensing, governance, security, and support, all of which add perpetual costs and further 3rd party governance to any project, specially those in large Enterprises. Very rarely does any business prepare for this at the planning stage, even more so when the software is siloed within a business unit.

In terms of using "bloated platforms" like Javascript and Python, I get a whiff of superiority from OP as there simply is no reason to build for size or speed unless it is part of the deliverable feature set. Nobody in their right mind would be writing serverless functions in C++/Rust or a Windows form to enter timesheet information (UX is about design, not platform, and is always seen as a secondary cost). If you are determined to use C++/Rust before a project has started then you're under the spell/threat of rockstar employees without a care for long term support.

The problematic Enterprise Applications I've worked on all had the same things in common, a bad maintenance plan or an expectation that the software will last decades without change. It was never, "this should have been written in xyz", its almost always that the domain knowledge has gone, and alongside it, the source code.

If you're in a business, expecting to exist in decades time, using a moving target to host your systems, like any OS, you better look at the long game, as well as the short, and factor in versioning, source control and inevitable bit rot. Its not about how old it looks, or how fast it could be.

Ultimately, there is a massive desire for businesses to offload development entirely via no-code platforms like PowerApps and absolutely no desire to make code that requires more expensive technical hires to maintain, or add more process to manage.

Finally, I've been coming across a lot of developers pining for the "old days" where you could change change things willy nilly and release it, without writing tests or having code reviews. These were the bad old days, and they're long gone. They got away with it because software was not as ubiquitous, and the internet wasn't around to spread 0-day vulnerabilities, and had very little oversight.

This is just pure hyperbole. The modular system of javascript is designed explicitly to ensure features can be made when needed. And I'm not sure where you breathlessly pulled 5GB of modules from, to write "Hello World" but I bet its dark and smelly.

Easy. A marginal purchase of software in an enterprise is expensive in human terms. Adding a feature and notching the price up is trivial.

Case in point, I manage an org with a $200M budget. I have a budget line for a $90 software item for some VIP somewhere that has to be justified/validated annually by somebody. That $90 probably costs is $500.

But… We subscribe to office. Adding teams required zero effort, because of the bundling effect. Slack at the time was going through a PoC/vetting process, but why bother if I have a 80% product. The pitch was that Teams was “free”… although mysteriously the price of Office was revised upward.

Is easy to blame the wish of people for this (and IS true), but the major point is this:

A enterprise NEEDS ALL.

I work in this niche (mostly for small companies), and what I see for this past +25 years is that even the most "small" of all companies have a HUGE array of needs, apps, data to work, laws to comply, demands of suppliers AND their customers (that RECURSIVELY add bloat!), both ancient, current, modern, and next-gen tech in their stacks.

Is like a developer that instead of being only "LAMP" + editor, is one that:

- Support Mysql, Postgres, Sql Server, Sqlite, FoxPro, Firebase, DBISAM, redis and in terrible days mongo

- N-variations of csv and alikes, json, toml, yalm, .ini, binaries formats...

- Talk to cobol, web services (SOAP, JSON, RPC, GraphQL), pipes of commands

- Deal with python, java, swift, obj-c, .net, c, c++, c#,, f#, go, rust, js, typescript, css, html

- Test on chrome, safari, firefox, ie (OLD ie)

- Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, Android, Web

- bash, cmd, powershell

- VS Studio toolchain, LLVM toolchain, OSX toolchain, Android toolchain

- Docker, normal deploy, CI

- Sublime, VS Code, Xcode, IntelliJ, Notepad++, Notepad (as-is), nano and in very bad days, vim

- Have Hardware: M1 laptop, Lenovo Windows machine, iPhone, iPad, Android phone

WHO can be the lunatic that deals with all of this?

ME.

(if you wanna understand why I so grumpy about C, C++, Js, Android, the state of shells, terminals, rdbms, nosql, now you know)

I don't mean I fully deep dive to ALL of this, but I need to at least HAVE it or install, or touch it here and there. Is like I say:

Not matter how SMALL a "company" is, it

NEEDS ALL.

My experience is that the manager seldom knows enough to judge usability - vs. merely not giving a crap. Especially not usability when in production - on well-loaded servers, via the lower-end workstations and network connections given to the day-to-day workers, etc.

And generally the most important feature for a manager to check off is the one never mentioned (at least on the customer-organization end) - "How does the Shiny Newness, Dog & Pony Show, and Buzzword Parade offered by this software make me feel about myself?"