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Comment by aristus | Hacker News Reader

I think the author is misled by survivor bias. How many Basecamp clones have been released and failed? How many more have been planned, half-implemented, and shelved?

Also, how many "enterprise" development teams can commit to creating and supporting one and only one (1) app over a multi-year period? How many can depend on thousands and millions of users to discover bugs, do load testing, penetration testing, usability, etc etc?

How many "massages" has Flickr had in the last 5 years? Is that uptime acceptable to a bank?

How many shoe retailers and state governments even know how to recruit and retain the type of talent that produces great software? How many could admit they don't?

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How many shoe retailers and state governments even know how to recruit and retain the type of talent that produces great software?

IMHO, this is the truth nugget. Where the rock stars go is where you will find great software and the company culture that works is "stand back and let the rock stars do their thing". That culture can't exist in the enterprise. It doesn't even exist in most startups. I never wanted to believe this but after years of first hand experience, I find the conclusion inescapable.

Agile methodologies can't extract excellence from mediocrity, but they might allow half-decent software to be made without the use of rock stars, by plugging the holes that mediocre developers typically fall into. But is half-decent software even worth making?

Where the rock stars go is where you will find great software and the company culture that works is "stand back and let the rock stars do their thing". That culture can't exist in the enterprise.

XBox is an interesting counter-example. Microsoft completely let that team do their thing. They had total freedom to design and market it. Notice they didn't even have to call it Microsoft Gaming Console.

Source: Chris Capossela's talk at the Business of Software 2009 conference.

From what I've read, Microsoft's original corporate culture wasn't that far removed from "stand back and let the rock stars do their thing." For example, Spolsky likes to talk about how management's job at Microsoft was to keep people from bothering the developers so they could keep writing code. I think he also told anecdotes about developers coming into a manager's office to resolve a technical dispute, and the manager responding "Why are you asking me? Of the people in this room, I'm the one who knows the least about it." Then the manager sent them away to work it out between themselves.

That attitude probably had a lot to do with Microsoft's success.

   Is that uptime [Flickr's] acceptable to a bank?

I would love a Flickr-like bank. Banks are only open about 8 hours out of 24, and (at least here in NZ) even when I do an online money transfer, it only goes through in their batch that midnight. I would love a front-end to our bank system that did things right, especially instant and easy transfers.

I guess you could say PayPal tries to do this, but you have to get money in and out of PayPal, and they have high fees.

Yeah, I've only ever found one bank that had a web interface that let you do immediate transfers 24/7 between accounts and credit cards. Unfortunately it's a 2 branch credit union 300 miles from where I now live, but I still hang onto that account just because.

I know they're not playing with a lot of resources, so I'm always amazed at how much better they are at doing EVERYTHING than Chase, etc.

Ok but I think his point is that in the enterprise software space even the survivors fail in the sense that users hate them.

He then oddly goes on to talk about the buy vs build argument for things like Oracle/SAP financials/ERP - which are deeply hated by those that use them (granted, may not be able to make that kind of BigCo HR/financial stuff fun !) - but what is interesting is that those systems are not really off the shelf. They are usually multi-million dollar "implementations" and sometimes (seriously!) "re-implementations" of them - which cost orders of magnitude more then most IT bespoke projects - often due to licencing costs. This makes me think that the numbers make things look better then they are. For example: if the cost of an setup for SAP financials is 2mil, and 400K "implementation", then a blow out of 100% in the "implementation" cost is not, percentage wise, as big a deal as if it was a bespoke project (ie sans the licence cost) - as the bulk of the cost is a fixed licence.

This is also why building (as in skyscraper style) blow outs don't appear as huge - they labour cost is generally a relatively smaller portion of the project cost then the materials compared to IT projects.

You know, a lot of banking systems still shut down for nightly "maintenance".

True, but it is a known quantity. I mean failwhale "unscheduled maintenance"

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