5 ms·
Bad is not a good measure. But taking 'bad' to mean large, convoluted, zero documentation; I was once at a financial services company that had a 25 million+ LOC
by le-mark 8y ago
Bad is not a good measure. But taking 'bad' to mean large, convoluted, zero documentation; I was once at a financial services company that had a 25 million+ LOC mainframe cobol application that had been under active development since 1969. This was a batch and CICs system. It was spaghetti on every level; database (db2, vsam, isam), the screens of the app, the batch jobs, the cobol. It was truly astounding. It was also the source of about $500 million in revenue. They were doing software as a service in the 1970's. It's still going today. Customers in that space don't have many options.
- cntlzw 8y agoHow are the changes to rewrite this castle of shit? Being a developer I would hate working on that pile of garbage but judging from management? Well if it works it works. Being pragmatic ain’t that bad.
- wirrbel 8y agoWith that kind of stuff, clients usually also depend on defects and accidently behavior and they are not happy touching their own Client-Code integrating the service with their systems because it is of the same quality as the service.
- pier25 8y agoSooo... what space is that?
- pmarreck 8y agoSounds like a market opportunity. What vertical market is this, more specifically?
- AlexCoventry 8y agoThe only homeless former software developer I ever met had once been a cobol specialist.
- vaylian 8y agoMarket opportunity? Sounds more like the best way to throw away your sanity. Some things are just beyond repair.
- pmarreck 8y agoSince when is a greenfield app on a new product addressing a market with only old entrenched players “throwing away your sanity?”
- vaylian 8y agoSorry, I did not realize you meant to create a new software from scratch. I thought you were talking about supporting/extending/refactoring this old pile of madness. Thanks for the clarification! I suppose you were referring to the statement "Customers in that space don't have many options". Your statement is reasonable and there might be market opportunities to create new software. But I somehow have the feeling that it would take a tremendous amount of time to recreate something that checks the same boxes as the old system. But I do not work in that sector so my judgement might be totally off.
- pmarreck 8y agoThing is, a competing product does not (at launch) have to match the entrenched one feature-for-feature. It just has to tick the MOST IMPORTANT boxes while being advantageous in other ways (such as being built on FAR newer tech, more reliable etc.)
- le-mark 8y agoThe domain is mutual fund accounting. The system in question had grown organically over decades to encompass everything related to mutual funds; account record keeping, shareholder statements, broker dealer recording keeping, commission payments, cost accounting, you name it, they do it. I agree it is an oppurtunity, but the barrier to entry is very high. Reaching feature parity is a multi year project with a large team and domain experts.
- vmchale 8y agoIt's only a market opportunity if the software is bad from a customer POV. There's a lot of engineering that goes into/went into mainframes.