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Comment by geogra4 | Hacker News Reader

For a long time I used to work at one of Kronos's competitors. This space is so incredibly behind the times that it doesn't surprise me ar all. Up until recently time capture/entry software was still on premise (or even via paper time sheets!) For most large enterprises.

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Calling something behind the times because it's on prem is exactly what caused these large corps to put their trust in this crappy vendor's 'cloud' which is what made it such a lucrative target in the first place. If every company we're running their infrastructure on prem this wouldn't have happened in quite the same way. So no, the 'cloud' is not always better just because it's the 'cloud'

If it were 'in the cloud', now the hacker has to interface with the time management / payroll service as if it were a web browser client trying to access it, assuming the network entry was via the hospital itself or some unsecure medical device physically present in the hospital. In absence of a properly-segmented LAN, it's better to have a segmented-by-design WAN in the form of SaaS and cloud vendor-based solutions.

From the standpoint of not getting locked out of your data by ransomware, one could do worse than paper timesheets.

Sort of, but for any reasonable enterprise the amount of human hours to work on and process them is a huge waste of money when payroll rules are supposed to be the same for all your employees (or at least the same for various groups)

I always wondered why. One of my assumptions is that since payroll/timekeeping does not really change, the incentive to update these systems is not there.

Also I bet these systems have lots of little moving parts under the surface no one really considers, but these little parts prevent an upgrade.

Kronos is very very good at account management, so baseball tickets and steak dinners. Everyone agrees their product is awful but it’s very hard to break that hold. (Disclosure: competitor)

I worked for a medium size payroll software company.

Payroll is highly regionalized problem - every state and city has different rules/taxes and very unique ones as well. Its often not so simple to generically describe a payroll tax and plug in different configs per region. Much hidden complexity that's grown organically over time as laws/taxes change (which they do!).

A rewrite would be an archaeological dig. I would have to be paid a lot to take that problem on.

It's also not trivial software to manage, so often it's outsourced as a service (run by humans) on top of software that cut the checks for your employees. Makes me think that the margins are low? I dunno.

Modern companies like gusto are changing this

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