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1hr and 36 minutes. As long as I carry my papers with me I'm good to go.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: As long as I carry my papers with me I'm good to go
Definite hallmark of all totalitarian States.
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You've got a bee in your bonnet, don't you?
I guess I should have added the joke emoji.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Nope, just a firm believer that Benjamin Franklin was correct:
Quote: Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The reality is that no government has ever returned liberty to their citizens once they've taken those liberties away.
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And we're done here. You've taken a fun thread about my experience and have turned it into your political commentary. I've tried to be polite about it but I'm no longer interested in the trolling.
This thread is locked.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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In the many companies I have worked for, I am always astounded when, despite an IT department that can handle the requirements, CEO's persist in falling for the generic canned bloatware; one of which I mentioned in another rant (BizTalk).
Another is SalesForce.com; which requires a SalesForce guru to set up and modify. Furthermore, for most companies, it is like killing an ant with a shotgun. As well, the pages are somewhat confusing as far as workflow goes.
Invariably, users start requesting modifications. Since different companies probably use a percentage of the site, this leaves a lot of bloating that they pay for, despite not using it; or, doesn't have exactly what they need.
Most of the time, IT is left out of the loop on these decisions. That is, the lower level employees that know whether the investment is best. So high level execs get sold on the hype without true technical consultation. If the product doesn't fit later, the exec just moves on before the heat comes down.
I hade mentioned in an earlier post that I had replaced a failed $2M BizTalk project with a C# application. Oh, and the senior IT exec that initiated the BizTalk project just disappeared one day.
I just saw that the SalesForce stock dropped -14%. Perhaps some are wising up.
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This is why the IT department doesn't want the CEO or CIO to subscribe to trade journals. 
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The problem is not limited to CEO's. CIO also get sucked into this to justify bigger and bigger budgets for their own self esteem.
Interesting Note about BizTalk as I had the exact issue about 10 years ago. When BizTalk gave us issues I told them that if the issue is not fixed before I wrote my own interfaces I would throw it out. My one is still going strong and is extremely reliable.
A Fine is a Tax for doing something wrong
A Tax is a Fine for doing something good.
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What you are ranting about is the difference between commercial software and a turnkey solution. They are completely different animals. Having once been involved in a commercial software development I am thankful I ended my career doing turnkey solutions.
I have the greatest respect and sympathy for commercial software developers (and especially the support teams)
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Not ranting about the developers. I am ranting about the execs who buy it.
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The Bespoke vs Off-The-Shelf debate has been on-going for decades. The people who are responsible for the money are always going to prefer known/fixed costs over, (let's face it), the wildly over-optimistic estimates from IT - that always go over budget. It doesn't matter that the in-house development cost less than the package. It does matter that it cost twice as much as was estimated.
Most, (probably all), software developers believe they can do a better job than anyone else and, coupled with that, are hopeless at estimating how long something will take. [Admittedly, not helped, because the business are hopeless at telling us what they really need.] But, if we continue to keep shooting ourselves in the foot, the higher-ups will continue to spend their money on packages.
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Hey! Not all estimates are wildly over-optimistic!!!! Only the ones that get approved...
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"Most, (probably all), software developers believe they can do a better job than anyone else"
And also businessmen believe they can do better than following the refined rules of the third oldest profession, so always ready to asking for a few customizations.
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I guess you have not been involved in asking the 'fixed cost' people what it costs to learn/modify the canned stuff? And, it's usually more than twice the cost of in-house. Then there's the generic/one-fits-all bloatware syndrome that requires user training (since they were not in on the development of the 'fixed stuff'.
While I agree that in-house estimates are always a problem, I would say that the people creating the bloatware had that very same problem. This will never go away because, unless you have 100% of all the business details things get changed added development time comes into play. Just ask the Agile groupies, one of its purposes is to discourage out-of-scope changes.
Oh, and when you add the additional cost of kindergarten Agile meetings, you get added costs. This was my earlier post about Agile's raising the costs of development estimates. So in that aspect I agree with you.
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On my website I describe it as "We [JUUN Software] do not believe a ‘one size fits all’ approach is right for everyone. You pay for everything, use half of it and are left missing just that functionality you needed."
I've seen it times and again.
My current job is writing everything a very huge and very expensive ERP solution cannot do 
Meanwhile they're not even using half of what this system can do.
They've been using the system since April and I don't think they'd buy it again with the knowledge they have now.
However, they're invested now and it works well enough for the parts they do use
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Yeah, my company uses an Office addon which does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING Office can't do by itself, except it's way more visible than Office's built-in functionality (as in this piece of crap opens an "updating" window on login) and I bet some salesjerk got a nice bonus smearing that into our CEO's face.
Gotta say though, IT departments can be just as moronic. Recently, we got the order to update our clients to W1020H2. The IT not doing that centrally is the first WTF here. But the next WTF is the IT department's instructions on how to find the current version.
They didn't say something sane, something like "press Win+R, input winver, press enter". No, they provided a program they wrote which we are supposed to download & run (while bypassing Windows security warnings, go figure) which DISPLAYS THE VERY SAME SYSTEM INFORMATION DIALOG!
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I feel your pain.
Currently working for a company that wants to replace their 15 year old application.
It told management that it would take 2 years development.
Management did not like that, so they outsourced it to India.
Told them to build a web version of the application we have.
It is already 6 months behind schedule. 
Now they expect it somewhere middle of next year. 
They didn't took the opportunity to redesign the database, screens, etc.
So we are stuck with the same issues (bugs) as before.
Next they expect us to maintain it. (nobody has experience with JavaScript) ![Java | [Coffee]](https://codeproject.global.ssl.fastly.net/script/Forums/Images/coffee.gif)
Next year is going to be fun....
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Several years ago we outsourced a vendor management system that was Internet facing to a group in Mexico. Once they had finished it I was tasked with getting it to run properly. I rewrote most of the database routines as they were unmanageable and then had to rebuild quite a lot of the UI as they broke it into individual, non-scalable border images. Security was a mess as well as our corporate auditors refused to allow it to be deployed until I fixed about 15 major security holes. So much for saving a bunch of money and development time.
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Yep. Been there.
Just a tip from someone who learned the hard way - if you need to use jScript, stay away from jQuery. You can run into version issues. Online samples all have different jQuery file versions, and they can conflict with something else you may be using.
Yes, there are ridiculous work-arounds for version conflicts, but they are both confusing, and several I tried did not work, whereas jScript does not have version issues - at least that I have found. It's statements are slightly more complex, but will save you trying to figure out why a certain jQuery function you used before suddenly isn't working now.
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Information Builders / IWay UGH UGH UGH
At least three companies I have worked at have fallen for the sales pitch from these guys and spent a ton of money on a product that just does not do what they said it would.
It is the worst.
I end up writing a quick and dirty reporting system in something like SSRS or SAS and putting that together for the upper bees and it just works. Without all the money and time wasted.
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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I've seen a company insist on open source (it's FREE) only to immediately branch the source code thereby locking us out of future developments on the open source project - and hiring dozens of programmers to manage the FREE software - that doesn't really do what we need but it was FREE.
I've seen FREE software cost us millions.
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You are expecting intelligence from people where none is to be found...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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In my "travels", I have found another issue at work here leading to this bloatware. There seems to be this flawed belief that going out and buying a tool will magically make the real problems and inefficiencies of the business disappear - things like poor project management and processes, poorly defined or non-existent project and development workflows, lack of development conventions, non-existent or ignored review processes, no oversight, and on and on - a tool isn't going to solve these problems...they often just waste people's time. Often, the CEO/CIOs are pretty disconnected from exactly what problems the employees are facing and get "sold a bill of goods" by IT or a sales person (with zero evaluation by the employees who have the most "skin in the game") that some tool that he/she can buy will solve all these problems with a stroke of a pen to a purchase order instead of buckling down and doing the real work needed to create an efficient working environment and a functional business.
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As a Developer, I am the first one to say, BUY software.
We don't write our own office apps (Despite some sales guy telling us he could describe a better Excel, with more word processing features)
But know what you are buying.
I've seen small project spin up to become black holes at Dow Chemical. In the end, the just needed a MAC and PC Terminal into the mainframe with additional features to extract the data, etc. But it just kept growing/consuming them.
Now, for smaller companies. I've seen 12yr SAP implementations FAIL to make the 12yr cut and run strategy. LOL
So, it depends on the complexity And the core skills of the developers. (never liked BizTalk, FWIW).
AND if they are better spent making the companies products, or internal "tools"... Both have their pros/cons.
30 years doing back office software. Small companies have tiny needs, and no spare cycles to implement/optimize packaged software well. They need help. it's amazing what using Quickbooks properly, and have a little custom software can do.
But I cannot say that buying a packaged solution is ALWAYS the wrong answer. Didn't US Steel go bankrupt hiring IBM to write custom software for them... I think the package route would have cost less... Although Steel is a really custom world!
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