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Comment by thatguymike | Hacker News Reader

I know that large business systems are complicated, and migrating old data is much much harder. But a persistent part of me thinks... is this really so hard? The IRS core system basically requires a decision tree, a calculator app and several bindersful of business logic. They need to process about 350 million people each year, which is a big but hardly unmanageable Spark job. Isn't this just a question of getting a team of good experienced Silicon Valley engineers to build something that just works?

The Obamacare system is a great example of this. Almost half a billion dollars spent on corporate contractors, then a team of like 10 experienced engineers came in and fixed the damn thing.

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I think this comment highlights your inexperience in enterprise it systems. There challenges facing enterprise IT are not due to there being no good engineers - because all of them are working in Silicon Valley.

It is a people problem. Every department, every group, entry business unit is its own little kingdom that is fiercely defended by its workers. They cling on to it because that’s all they have done for the last 20 years. They know that if this system gets modernized, then their job is toast. Their job is vapor ware and they know it.

Having worked with many state and local governments, I see that these entities are never in favor of a business process redesign that simplified things, unless the consultants carve out a special exception for their little Access database or somehow save their pre historic C# ASP.Net application.

Every year absolutely mind bogglingly large sums of money are spent on redeveloping existing applications of that level of complexity. These all have a very predictable ending: utter failure, and the legacy stuff ends up living to fight another day.

It is a special kind of blindness: We think that just because our tools and machines are so much more powerful that rebuilding a complex legacy application is now childsplay.

From a UI perspective you are most likely right. But it's the couple of million lines of business logic that will be your Waterloo. In a nutshell: forget about it. A bit longer: it is possible but only by a very experienced crew who has nothing else to do under competent leadership and who can chart an incremental path between where they are now and where they want to be. In 5 years or so. A big bang redevelopment is DOA. Every time.

To add, what makes the business logic so painful is that you don't define the rules yourself. They are the result of legislation, regulations, lawsuits, contracts, and preferred work processes of very headstrong individuals. The codes tries to reconcile all of that to get to a solution. It's not about a great idea, it's about the laws of physics being written by a committee.

> will be your Waterloo

If you're English, that's actually a good thing ! :-)

I know that the article and your comments are related to "large" and "high" end software, but I see the same things happening on much smaller/simpler software and I cannot but attribute the issues to "wrong" attitude of the developers, that often are (I mean this in a good way) too smart/forward looking/obsessed by scalability/etc. for their own good (actually for the good of the software).

It seems to me like simplicity (and Occam's Razor) are approaches somehow lost or considered defects intead of values.

Personal example, I have a rather simple DOS (yes DOS) program that alway worked (and still works) just fine, it is Clipper/Dbase based, it does what it is supposed to do, with a single terminal, since 1990 or so.

Since it has financial and tax related connections (invoicing) it cannot (shouldn't) fail.

The business has not basically changed since the '70's, all the programs I could find to replace it now are either:

1) "jokes" not even worth mentioning

2) "worse" semi-legacy (think of MS-Access) crappy programs with terrible UI and layers over layers of "added because a customer asked for it" unneeded "features"

3) complex multifunctional multiuser multiwindow web-enabled real-time dashboard cloud connected <insert here any other buzz-word> based on SQL Server montruosities that actually do the 5 or 6 needed things (and 127 other unneeded ones) through a (slightly) different workflow (which is slower) and with data input masks that take longer to fill (compared to the good ol'DOS one)

I know that the #3 programs can scale with multiple terminals, multiple offices, unlimited number of customers, concurrent access and what not.

Still I don't need anything like that, it is - again since the 70's - a 5,000-10,000 customers per year, 20,000 to 40,000 transactions, 3,000 to 5,000 invoices, it won't become 100,000 or 1,000,000 transactions, ever.

Now I have to replace the good ol' Clipper little thingy, due to some changes in tax laws, and I will need to slow down (slightly) the operations, this is progress.

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