Comment by rjempson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rjempson | Hacker News Reader

Nothing like broad sweeping generalizations to make a good story.

I have a few points to make :

1. End users have an incredible ability to complain that software doesn't meet their very specific and peculiar requirements at any point in time. "Why can't I print this expense report landscape on a5 paper, we have run out of normal paper" - "Why doesn't this expense report sub-total by supplier and week, but only in leap years?"

2. If the people using the software were the business owners I think they would sing a different tune, or go out of business because they spend so much money optimizing for user experience.

3. Enterprise software tends to be infinitely more complex than most Saas projects. It is hard to budget and focus on the user experience when you are processing billions of dollars in transactions, with complex business rules, complex tax rules, complex laws, integrating with legacy systems, changing business conditions and strategy. Most businesses will put compliance and accuracy ahead of user experience.

4. Non-enterprise developers seem to think they are shit-hot and have a chip on their shoulders about enterprise developers for some reason. So you get an endless stream of articles along these lines.

I'd add that I have seen some endusers complain because we implemented features they were asking for. Not because those features were done poorly, but because the change requires a slight change to the user's workflow (software is many things, but it's not psychic).

I also remembered a new hardware product going out to a satellite office in $other_country, where the favourite sport of the sales staff was coming up with excuses for not meeting targets. This next-gen bit of hardware had everything they'd asked for and used as an excuse for not meeting those targets, and it was a nice bit of kit that would sell well (I'd previously worked in the industry it was targeted at and wished I'd had it then). Supplied with the first production model, they were asked for comments. The sole comment that was returned was "well, at least it's not green".

That company also gave me an insight to your #3. We had SAP-like software but the company treated us like shit so we were looking to replace them. It turns out there are (were as of 2009) no cheap options - they all failed at nested bills-of-material. A product might be a full box with manual and other parts. That product holds the assembled product and a couple of other assemblies. That assembled product holds several boards and subassemblies. Those subassemblies then require other parts. Rinse, repeat over several products and you have a system where there's nothing useful on offer at the cheap end of the spectrum (without heavy/clunky modification). Most of the cheap stuff was entertaining a retail mindset - "item A comes from supplier B/why would you need to ever put A and B in a kit?". Even the vaunted Salesforce needed customising to handle the idea of kits - and that is only a single level of nested BOMs.

"most SAAS projects" are not the ones setting the bar.

The video games people set the bar. And they are shit-hot. And they produce stuff that even a 4 year old can use.

And the problems the video game people solve are more complex than your typical schlubby entreprise app. In the case of MMORPGs, infinitely more so - and they have to deal with compliance and accuracy as well, because they are dealing with stuff like credit card data.

The problem is that the entreprise software buyer is not the user, he just gets to inflict the stuff on others - a perverse incentive.

I've worked on entreprise software in more than one big-name company, and I'm embarrassed by what they ordered me to deliver. One time a friend of mine, who had to use my company's malfunctioning stuff, even phoned me up at work to curse me for it.

I don't really get your point. Its obvious that game developers would produce better interfaces / experiences, because that is what they are selling.

Enterprises are selling a product or service, and the customer paying the bills doesn't see the internal software that facilitates some part of the process of delivering that product or service. You could dream up a few examples where the end customer might be impacted by a poor UI used by internal staff but it would be an edge case.

If every enterprise software project attempted to produce game quality interfaces and experiences to the user, the costs would explode.

The only benefits of producing better interfaces / experiences / workflows for an enterprise are user moral and user efficiency. The latter is quite often addressed in my experience, as it affects the bottom line.

You were shooting down the article by disparaging web and app developers, claiming that entreprise apps were ooh so haaaaard, implying that they required lots of expertise to build. Bullshit. In actual fact, entreprise software can be little more than a trivial skin over a database, with a sprinkle of domain logic.

The games example was just to show something that is really hard. I don't need the UI to be game quality; I'll settle for just the same quality as Excel.

And by the way, there is some unusable entreprise software out there. You seem unconcerned with the unhappiness its piss-poor UI causes for users so long as it's "efficient".

Take a look at Lotus Notes and tell me just how "efficient" it is.

For what problem domain? There are very few players in the corporate knowledge management ecosystem, none of which is particularly easy to use, but all of which are pretty powerful at that complex task.

For what problem domain?

For using it at all without tearing your hair out

I think this comment is even more naive than the game UI comment. Excel has one of most complex UIs in existence. I seem to recall reading once there are many 100s of developers on that team.

What the hell relevance does this have?

There were hundreds of developers at Siebel. There were hundreds of developers at Peoplesoft. There are hundreds of developers at Sungard. There are hundreds of developers at Oracle. There are hundreds of developers at SAP.

The difference is, unlike (in increasing order) Microsoft, Apple or Nintendo those companies don't give a shit and produce a crappy product.

Now stop changing the goalposts. You claimed that the SAAS people were whining, that they were no good, and that their stuff was easy to do, and that's why they were wrong to complain about the shitty state of entreprise software.

I showed that your claim against the SAAS people was ad-hom, and showed how entreprise software was way worse than what your average four year old has access to.

You moved the goalposts, and claimed that doesn't count because the games people are in the business of experience. So I came up with Excel, which is in the business of business, and which basically runs Wall Street. (There are many other examples, that easily trounce "entreprise" software. MS SQL is one of them.)

Now you're moving the goalposts again, to say why Excel doesn't count. It would be far more honest for you to just admit that the SAAS people are right, and that entreprise software sucks.

And it's for no other reason than that the vendors are cheap bastards who care about nothing other than making a buck.

They don't want to put the effort in to make entreprise software any good because it would cost a lot and hence lower their margins. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more.

MMO's are fairly simple projects. They take a fair amount of code, but most of there actual cost is content. Most importantly there basic requirements are fairly well understood from day one. Which is why that code often costs far less to develop, And most of it can be reused for multiple projects.

Take a look at Eve Online, and then take a look at Siebel Systems, and then try and tell me MMOs are simpler than entreprise software...

Work at a place that has to deal with regular external audits, and you'll start to get an inkling of what complexity really is. Besides, while Eve Online is certainly interesting, they're hardly a representative sample of MMOs.

Work at a place that has to deal with regular external audits

I did.

I played eve it's far less complex than WOW and prepobably 5% the size of say Delta's internal code.

video game developers use middleware for almost anything that isn't core game logic. even if studios program their own graphics/ui/physics engines it's a tiny subset of the team. most video game developers are terrible programmers

Yeah because the people outsourced from IBM Consulting or Tata to roll out your entreprise software deployments are so much better than terrible games programmers like Tim Sweeney or David Braben </sarcasm>

That's one argument for skeuomorphic interfaces.

In the way of etoys/scratch/other-alice/etc. programming environments, perhaps this approach would result in people scripting the making of pizzas or skull caps or whatever drudgery they have to do every day.

They could also go on ebay and pay an 11-year-old in Korea or Viet Nam to grind out their jobs.

You seem to be infatuated with the notion that "video games people" are some sort of genius level software mavens, who can breathe fire and walk on water. The boring reality is that the majority of game developers, excluding outliers like Carmack etc, are young, novice programmers.

Games development is not some arcane area of software where only the "shit-hot" developers may walk. It's simply a very special branch of software development. You can of course find highly complex stuff in games (graphics, AI etc), but if you look at enterprise, you'll find equal complexity just in different, non-sexy areas like sheer code base scope, integrations, performance requirements on transactions etc.

And if you look at "mainstream" SaaS apps you have yet again a whole different type of complexity with the typically huge amounts of concurrent users, advanced UI etc.

To argue about whatever types of developers are the best, is just silly and frankly reminiscent of school yard discussions of which action hero could kick who's ass.

I believe the comment about video game developers concerns useability and not fitness. I've been playing video games for many years, and from a useability standpoint, game manuals have dwindled to nothing. If the game does not teach me how to use the functionality during game play I really have no patience for the game anymore.

Enterprise software should take a similar approach. Have something of a tutorial mode, and an easily searchable text based document. Most of the cost in the software comes not from the actual price, but in employee productivity and training.

To argue about whatever types of developers are the best, is just silly

Which is why rjempson shouldn't have started it. He was using "SAAS programmers are rubbish" as a way of dodging the crappy state of entreprise software.

if you look at enterprise, you'll find equal complexity just in different, non-sexy areas

Like the Wall Street system I heard about that ETLs its data continuously between three different databases because its developers had no idea what they were doing?

A lot of the stuff that happens under the label "entreprise" is just crap.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com