Why enterprise software is bloated • Hacker News Board

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#41

Post by treis » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

evancoop wrote: post #12

When a private citizen buys software, the question is "does it do enough, for the price, for me to buy it?" When an enterprise procurement office buys software, the question is "is there anything it does NOT do that will cause someone to fire me for having purchased it ?"

I don't know that's necessarily the cause, but if you've ever seen an RFP for enterprise software it's obvious why bloat happens. There's hundreds of does it do X, does it do Y... questions. And in order to win the bid you have to answer yes. Even if it doesn't make a lick of sense.

Like I worked on a big server side Java application and when offline became a thing one of the questions was "Does it support offline usage?". Obviously, since it's a gigantic Java server side application, the answer should be no. And there's no reason that a customer should want to run it or any application like it offline. But the question is there and if you answer "no" then you don't get the sale. So they built some half assed terrible bit of offline functionality that no one in their right mind should ever use. Now they can answer "yes" to the dumb question and get more sales.

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#42

Post by doubled112 » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:27 PM UTC

ihateolives wrote: post #27

rightbyte wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the example was convincing until I got a child myself. The hard part is getting the legs and arms in. The 10 buttons are easy.

> The 10 buttons are easy. Yes, until you reach the 9th buttonhole, but you've already used up all the buttons.

Status: CLOSED

User error.

Really though, where does the last button hole go? You count buttons - 10. You count holes - 10. You put the buttons in the holes - one is no longer 10.

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#43

Post by est » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

My experience is enterprise software is not really engineering-problem solving, more like an organizational-relationship glue. And it's a fragile and moving target and makes developers feel less accomplishing.

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#44

Post by bombcar » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

ok123456 wrote: post #38

His "solutions" is to work in "pockets of the industry" that don't have "bloat". (Among one of them is use more cloud services. Which makes me wonder if he's seen some of the engineering disasters people are churning out. This makes me want to just summarily dismiss the whole piece.) The real solution is to systematically address technical debt as part of your development process. Did that feature that someone swore…

My suspicion is that any "cloud service" that isn't some proof-of-concept one-off is also filled to the brim with bloat, you just don't see it as a customer.

"Delete" is the solution, but that is a tool they don't want to use, because every feature somewhere is used by some paying customer, who will complain loudly - and may even move to a competitor. Often the pain of updating and the pain of migrating are similar.

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#45

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:33 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #36

listenallyall wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find it amusing when people talk shit about SAP and brag about giving them the boot. SAP already got your money... big deal, you cut off a few years of support fees. SAP grows and grows despite seemingly everybody saying how terrible the product is. My hat is off to them for finding (and heavily compensating) some truly talented salespeople who can consistently resell their turd to CEOs.

I should have mentioned that they got the boot during the sales process - so they hadn't won the work yet. It wasn't a criticism of the SAP product - just that they the sales team constantly got a a basic thing incorrect in a rather dogmatic way.

Then it was the right way to select a provider. Realizing that during implementation is recipe for disaster. Wether it is SAP or someone else.

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#46

Post by bombcar » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:34 PM UTC

rightbyte wrote: post #23

4by4by4 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a four month old and was inspired to buy one outfit with magnets because of this tweet. It works fairly well, but is no better than a single zipper outfit and is much more expensive.

Magnets are dangerous for children of they swallow them. Unless it is a magnet strip I would prefer buttons.

The magnets are well embedded in the clothes so there's little danger there.

The reality is it doesn't do much more or less than normal onesies but costs an insane amount more.

Also sticks to the side of the wash machine lol.

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#47

Post by hyperman1 » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

An important factor is new manager syndrome.

You start with some new head honcho somewhere. A CxO, an Enterprise Architect,... These tend to swap every 3 to 5 years.

Head honch sees horrible bloat, and decides to Act with some Master Plan. This entails buying some expensive software, deployed by a random external team, that will solve everything.

In practice, expensive software tends to barely work. Also, the deployers have no idea what the company is doing. But, anything that might be bad news is career ending, so things get deployed swiftly.

Then comes integration. External team chooses some integration point, probably somewhere in the last head honcho's expensive software, as that's the only thing where the design is not yet completely forgotten. There will be impedance mismatch, i.e. bad news, i.e. unspeakable. So people do something, anything to forcibly connect A to B.

Someone presses start, then the deployers run away in 2 weeks tops. All kinds of weird crimes are done by the new expensive software. Bad news is still not welcome, but things start to hurt more and more over the next few months. Staff was already overworked, so does some quick and dirty fixes. Head honcho falls out of grace, a reorg destroys every shred of knowledge gathered in the exercise, and a new new head honcho floats to the top. The cycle starts again.

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#48

Post by bombcar » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #26

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…

And this is why Atlassian is buying everyone in the world. If you're already setup as a vendor with a product into a company, adding a line is easy.

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#49

Post by marcosdumay » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:47 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #9

ziml77 wrote: post #4

Because every customer needs different features. No one wants to make their workflow follow what the software dictates, they want the software to support the workflow the business uses

True. People only miss out on the fact that, especially ERP systems, are to a huge extend a colection of process best parctices. By sticking as much as possible to the out of the box solution, not only and release changes or integrations become easier, but you also get a busoness process benchmark and consulting on top, automatically. Benefiting from all that does require so more depth of thought than most upper mana…

Well, between those there is also a collection of bad practices that the entire industry shares for some reason (the existence of the ERP being the most likely culprit).

It's not all gain.

Re: Why enterprise software is bloated

#50

Post by saint_abroad » Thu, Mar 03, 2022, 2:52 PM UTC

StrangeClone wrote: post #29

Hardware is quite cheap. Even with bloated software companies are making ton of money. Software developers like to optimise resource but never have enough time for this as business requirements itself keep changing. Time to market and engineering resource required are bottlenecks here. Only part of software optimisation which should be focusing early should be cross cutting concerns like logging, monitoring, authenti…

> Hardware is quite cheap.

Enterprise has embraced a cloud-first stragegy.

Suddenly, throwing hardware at a problem becomes throwing cash at the cloud.