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Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

As shitty as it is, do you think that the CUNY school has the ability to write a spec for an administration system that handles all of the business needs and compliance requirements? Or do that and manage the delivery of those requirements?

The answer is of course no.

The Oracle pitch is "We do this for Michigan State and can do X, Y and Z". That is true.

Oracle gets alot of shit for this stuff because they own the market for enterprise financial software. Their software is gross, they bought out the competition and generally suck, but that is what the market demands.

My uncle is a locomotive engineer. His railroad makes a conscious decision to remove any creature comforts from the cab, like a chair cushion. It's needlessly uncomfortable and is awful, but that doesn't mean that GE (or whomever) sucks. They delivered what they are asked to do.

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To be fair, comfort can be a mixed bag for system safety, especially when humans are alone, safety critical and on weird schedules which can all be the case for train drivers (which is what I understand "locomotive engineer" to mean in this context) - because comfort is conducive to sleep.

One of the setups I come to almost expect in maritime accident reports is an officer taking a night watch, alone, while somewhat fatigued. Warm, dark, quiet. After a few hours the ship has drifted significantly off its intended course. For unknown reasons (the officer was probably asleep) no attempt is made to correct... When they do wake up, they often don't have good situational awareness, and their focus is on pretending nothing is wrong, even if they are in fact already in serious trouble and need all the help they can get.

Night-time railway accidents are less common in my country, perhaps because the relevant unions insist on proper "if you're too tired just go home you aren't fired" type rules to reduce fatigue errors, but I do recall a case where a freight driver was dipping in and out of consciousness. When he was conscious he could see a red lamp out of the window, signalling "Danger" ahead so he'd reduce the traction power. If he'd been less sleepy he'd have noticed those red lamps were not getting closer each time, they were moving gradually away from him. His train was on a steep climb, and he'd reduced power so much it was gently rolling backwards. Oops. Nobody died, that time.

> do you think that the CUNY school has the ability to write a spec for an administration system that handles all of the business needs and compliance requirements? Or do that and manage the delivery of those requirements?

WTF are the administrators paid for if not that? Isn't that literally their whole job?

The scalability argument of the solution is becoming less relevant with readily available cloud architecture, no?

The school cannot handle the requirements or implementation. Of course, but maybe a smaller, more focused provider than oracle can?

And yes, you have to be at peace with your data being god-know-where.

Agreeing to bad requirements makes you a bad business

You can reference the Texas power outages. Just because the requirements were to fail in cold weather, doesn't mean it was a good choice

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