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Totally NOT SURPRISED that this was an awful Oracle enterprise app. These things were put together in haste in the 90's and Oracle keeps pushing them and their

Totally NOT SURPRISED that this was an awful Oracle enterprise app. These things were put together in haste in the 90's and Oracle keeps pushing them and their corporate customers keep these things going long past when the interface becomes utterly unfamiliar. The blame has to be shared, however, with the battle-axe personalities of the people that use this stuff. They would like nothing more than to retire while still using the _exact_ same applications and dated interfaces they've used for 20+ years. Literally, these are default "grey-theme" java applications, with all kinds of inconsistent UI quirks and absolutely no shits given for discoverability or even being able to create hyperlinks so that people can share stuff without screenshots. It's fine if it's the same people keep using these apps forever, but the problems start when new people get on-boarded. If it's like most places, the newbies will be given no training and the only help they will get would be from some dour in-house oracle-application jockey whose been doing the same thing for decades. That's when people make very, very expensive mistakes. We hear about this one because the sum was vast, but people make $10,000 mistakes on shit software from Oracle all the time-- that's partly why Oracle has a very deep bench of retained lawyers, I suppose. I have to say Citibank deserves it.

kcb 6y ago
It blows my mind that Oracle gets paid huge sums of money for the garbage they put out. I went to a CUNY school and they rolled out a "new" administration system called CUNYfirst. Literally a several $100 million dollar contract and Oracle provided a slightly modified version of Peoplesoft. The UI looks like something that should have never existed on this earth. Every student gets an Employee ID, you choose classes for a semester by adding then to a shopping cart and checking out. Minimal effort from them for maximum cost.
- MisterTea 6y ago
  I went to QCC from 98-01 and you'd sit in the admin building on an IBM green screen terminal and setup your schedule. There was little to no prerequisite checking so I made all sorts of goofy schedules and took classes out of order. I don't remember having any issues with it as the interface was pretty strait forward. I wound up going back several years later when I was thinking of a different field and they had that trashcan CUNYfirst system. By then the UI was already outdated and clunky. I wound up with the wrong class the first time around because of some issue and have to have it changed post payment which was time consuming. I would have rather used the IBM's.
- rubicon33 6y ago
  That’s aggressive sales department, make no mistake about it. It’s actually easy to sell shit software. The average person knows a lot more about cars, for example, thank they do software. I’m sure Oracle makes huge money on name alone. The IT manager doesn’t want to take a chance with some lesser name. Just get Oracle, then nobody can blame them when shit hits the fan.
  - MegaButts 6y ago
    > Just get Oracle, then nobody can blame them when shit hits the fan. Only incompetent people wouldn't blame the IT manager for choosing Oracle.
  - saas_sam 6y ago
    I would be more inclined to blame the buyer, not the seller.
  - Pasorrijer 6y ago
    It's the old big business joke. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". You can easily replace Oracle in that sentence.
- josephorjoe 6y ago
  yeah, a shopping cart existing on a webapp where you are not purchasing product is such a red flag
- unethical_ban 6y ago
  I absolutely loathe any time I see "shopping cart" in an app that isn't me buying something.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    When you see that, it’s clear a system/framework/etc. is being used for something it was not designed for
    - yazmeya 6y ago
      In college, we had a two-week stretch at the beginning of a new semester when you could audition classes and add/drop them at will. This was called the "shopping period", so in my view, the shopping cart analogy on the registrar's web site doesn't sound too out of place here. Of course, the logic behind it would need to be different from an off-the-shelf e-commerce cart.
    - duderific 6y ago
      Eh, not necessarily. There might be a thought on the UX team that shopping cart is something anyone can relate to, so they use that as the metaphor.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Exactly. There are folders and a trash can on my computer desktop for the same reason.
        colejohnson66 6y ago
        Yes, but to me, a “shopping cart” implies a purchase. It’s what I use at a grocery store to put my food and stuff in. A “cart” would be better term IMO despite just being a shorter form of “shopping cart”. But idk.
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    But you signing up for classes is you buying something. I used a class registration system that wasn't this and didn't mention a "shopping cart" metaphor anywhere, but the system was exactly the same. Why object to calling it a "shopping cart?
- cbaleanu 6y ago
  I have to use an Oracle product for timesheets and besides the UI which is as you can imagine reading the previous comments, contains javascript code for a 'finite state machine for controlling the notification popup component'... [edit: typo]
- quasse 6y ago
  The University of Wisconsin used (and still uses AFAIK) this system as well. "Shopping" for classes was horrendous, and there were at least three interfaces to search for classes. I can only imagine how hard it was to populate the available classes. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the huge administrative bloat in the various departments was people who's only job was to force data into and out of PeopleSoft.
  - billh 6y ago
    10 years ago I did exactly this for the University of Wisconsin. My job was entirely to facilitate data extraction out of oracle databases / PeopleSoft for longitudinal studies done by faculty or other interested parties. There were a few dozen of us spread across the UW System who's sole job it was to extract and massage data from these databases... One, very large, central database that handled data for UW and every satellite college they had.
- Spooky23 6y ago
  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.
  - dopidop 6y ago
    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.
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    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.
- SilasX 6y ago
  They ... couldn't even relabel the shopping cart and other stuff? Like, call it "courseload" or something?
  - dmurray 6y ago
    When you've finished adding classes, would you know to click the "courseload" button in the top right to complete your enrolment? Probably not. It's lazy UI but in some ways it's going to be more intuitive, not less, to any student who's ever used an online retailer before.
    - SilasX 6y ago
      That's just an example, there are other ways to indicate that they need to click on that button to review all selections and finalize.
buttercraft 6y ago
Yep, I had never heard of it but recognized it as an Oracle app immediately. Not surprising at all. Oracle will audit them and find that someone accidentally enabled an extra, unused feature during an install one time. So, there goes another 10 million.
skissane 6y ago
> These things were put together in haste in the 90's and Oracle keeps pushing them and their corporate customers keep these things going long past when the interface becomes utterly unfamiliar. Actually the history of this app is a little more complicated. In the early 1990s, Citibank decided to establish an outsourced software development group in India to rewrite their banking software from scratch–they established it as a subsidiary company called iFlex. From 2005 onwards, Citibank progressively sold a majority of its stake in iFlex to Oracle, who then renamed the company Oracle Financial Services Software (OFSS). OFSS is listed on the Mumbai stock exchange, but Oracle owns the majority of its stock. So, rather than being a product which Oracle developed themselves and sold to Citibank, this is actually in some ways the opposite – a product Citibank developed themselves and sold to Oracle. I used to work for Oracle. I never worked on OFSS software directly, but I did work on an implementation project for some of it. I never saw the internal banking UI, all I ever saw was backend stuff – LDAP, BPML, JVMs, databases, load balancers, firewalls, etc. Indeed this article is the first time I've seen that particular UI in my life. But I can tell from the visual appearance that it is not one of Oracle's more recent UI development frameworks. (I don't know if this is because Citibank is running an older version, or if there are parts of the product still running on a legacy UI framework.)
- orthoxerox 6y ago
  Yes, that's Oracle Forms, one of the older versions. 6, I think.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    It certainly looks like Oracle Forms 6 (not sure if earlier versions looked similar, though.)
    - sepin4 6y ago
      I can confirm it is OF. However versions 7 through 10(maybe 6 as well) all look like that so I can't say which one it is. I used to work in a company using OF for the UI and I can say that while it is horrific to look at, it had its strengths. However it was appropriate 20 years ago when monitors had standard aspect ratio and resolutions. Nowadays with scaling and all kinds of aspect ratio it just doesn't work. Also Java... Ironically for one client our software was interfacing with Flexcube. However the OF technology is still supported by Oracle and while they themselves are trying to kill it, nobody is willing to migrate their core systems to something new.
ironmagma 6y ago
Keeping this in mind for the next time someone asks why we need to reinvent UIs every so often, or why technical debt needs to be paid off. Because they tend to cause financial damage, that's why.
ineedasername 6y ago
Oracle? I didn't realize that from the article. The entire situation makes A LOT more sense now. I once was deposed in a lawsuit regarding Oracle, and part of it was basically a UI issue. We had a paid customized interface that allowed users to upload basically a blob text or document (word, etc). When we went to UAT, we didn't see it in the UI in the app itself (peoplesoft): Us: "Okay, we can upload stuff, where do we find it?" Oracle: "Oh, that wasn't part of the project" Us: "Yes it was, see spec #<insert #>." Oracle: "... Well, it's in the database. A DBA can access it, so we met the spec." Us: "That is not a rational interpretation of '... and users will access it within the application...' " Oracle: "We're happy to build that customization for another <insert massive $$$ sum>" This was only one of a few material issue that led to the lawsuit. We probably wouldn't have sued over it alone, which should give you a hint at just how bad some of the other problems were. As an aside, the $/hour billed for customizations was $600, but the work was also outsourced to India. I asked a PM from Oracle how this was justified, and they gave a vague answer about multiple layers of management needed to oversee the developers. I pointed out that this price tag would allow for 3 managers per developer, with each person in the chain making ~$200k/year, and still allow Oracle $200/hour profit. I got a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ response. That I have to blame on the organization & not Oracle though. I had the detailed ~500+ page RFP response & implementation plan, which specified 1,000 hours of custom work. But I didn't have the actual contract to see what additional work would cost. The organization either didn't negotiate that in advance (so their fault) or they knew in advance & agreed to it (also their fault)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- NearAP 6y ago
  This sounds like this job was done by consultants (could have been Oracle consultants too) and this is standard behavior across consultants (that doesn't make it right though). Oracle as a product company (applies to all Enterprise Product companies) will not charge separately for a customization.
  - ineedasername 6y ago
r00f 6y ago
To me it looks like a victim of cost saving and overoptimization. Somebody requested that feature, and then someone discovered that if you hack around your system and set precise combination of fields, it will do the trick. So man hours were saved, some memo added to docs, and then the knowledge was lost. And all of that instead of adding separate form for specific case. I've seen it more than once.
TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago
> The blame has to be shared, however, with the battle-axe personalities of the people that use this stuff. They would like nothing more than to retire while still using the _exact_ same applications and dated interfaces they've used for 20+ years. Are you sure they wouldn't like a new interface if it was actually a real improvement? I'm reminded of a story[0] about Norwegian doctors refusing to use the new GUI system and stubbornly continuing to use the obsolete text-based system. Were they luddites? No. The old system let them quickly navigate with the keyboard in seconds while talking to the patient. The new system required them to use the mouse, so they had to spend a lot of time focussing on using the GUI, rather than helping the patient. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289172
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  > The old system let them quickly navigate with the keyboard in seconds while talking to the patient. Encountered a similar issue many years ago at a company trying to sell a new ad booking system to Titan - they had crufty old VT100 based systems, the new one was fancy AJAX HTML whizzbangs. Exactly the same result - they could handle 5 bookings on the old system in the time it took to do one on the new (which was also terrible and ugly besides slow.)
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  Well, there's "green-screen" VT100 terminal apps, and then there's 90's Vintage Java/oracle-forms UI's and then there's modern applications designed with informed UX approaches. The terminal apps, at least, have some history behind them and properly trained folks can be very fast with them. But we're talking here about shitty early Swing-apps (or Oracle forms). If you've ever used one it can be incredibly frustrating. Moreover, people are usually just tossed into a role where they have to use these M-F-ing interfaces with no training. Who makes a table with cells too small to fit their content and where you can't resize the table? Oracle. That's who. And they're paid for it like you wouldn't believe!
  - NearAP 6y ago
    >>> Who makes a table with cells too small to fit their content and where you can't resize the table? Oracle<<< To be fair, lots of software of those years were like this. SAP Ariba was just like this, and so were old Microsoft products
that_guy_iain 6y ago
> The blame has to be shared, however, with the battle-axe personalities of the people that use this stuff. They would like nothing more than to retire while still using the _exact_ same applications and dated interfaces they've used for 20+ years. Literally, these are default "grey-theme" java applications, with all kinds of inconsistent UI quirks and absolutely no shits given for discoverability or even being able to create hyperlinks so that people can share stuff without screenshots. Here is the thing, the reason these people would want to keep using the software is... The replacement will be broken and they'll spend years with bugfixes and what not to get to the exact same position they're in just now. Using old UIs isn't fun but if it works it's good enough. This is a case of everyone getting used to the workarounds until no one knew about the workarounds.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 6y ago
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treeman79 6y ago
Dealing with Java interfaces for Oracle 18 years ago is why I refused to touch Java for my entire career.
smogcutter 6y ago
This is precisely the story with the reporting software at the company my partner works for. Everybody who was there when the software was created is long gone. It hasn’t been updated in decades. Nobody really knows how it works, and training is entirely folk wisdom and cargo cult practices handed down over generations.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  Yep. We recently retired the Oracle reporting application at my employer. It was called "Discoverer" <-- not just "Discover" but really with an extra "er" at the end. Massive pile of shit that only a few people had the patience (or stubborn desperation) to master. The people that did know how to use it got constant phone calls (yeah, PHONE CALLS, because that's how these people roll) to do ad-hoc queries for management. I guess I can only fault them so far. This skill put food on their table and kept them employed even though their end product was endless dowdy bar-charts and badly formatted tables. Now we're using a new product. It's a "BI" tool. So many corps are doomed to repeat the bad parts of computer application history over and over and over again. In the case of "BI" or "Business Intelligence", it got it's start when middle-management got tired of begging for reports that weren't baked-in by the application vendor years ago. They started with getting permission to directly query the database (a profound coup by their standards). When they found that it was _actually_ possible to get useful information from the database, it looked like "intelligence" to them-- hence the term "business intelligence".
perl4ever 6y ago
Government uses Oracle based financial software too. I have a soft spot for Citi because where else can you get 2% back on your credit card? They're not bad, they just like giving money away to their customers...

kcb 6y ago

It blows my mind that Oracle gets paid huge sums of money for the garbage they put out. I went to a CUNY school and they rolled out a "new" administration system called CUNYfirst. Literally a several $100 million dollar contract and Oracle provided a slightly modified version of Peoplesoft. The UI looks like something that should have never existed on this earth. Every student gets an Employee ID, you choose classes for a semester by adding then to a shopping cart and checking out. Minimal effort from them for maximum cost.

MisterTea 6y ago
I went to QCC from 98-01 and you'd sit in the admin building on an IBM green screen terminal and setup your schedule. There was little to no prerequisite checking so I made all sorts of goofy schedules and took classes out of order. I don't remember having any issues with it as the interface was pretty strait forward. I wound up going back several years later when I was thinking of a different field and they had that trashcan CUNYfirst system. By then the UI was already outdated and clunky. I wound up with the wrong class the first time around because of some issue and have to have it changed post payment which was time consuming. I would have rather used the IBM's.
rubicon33 6y ago
That’s aggressive sales department, make no mistake about it. It’s actually easy to sell shit software. The average person knows a lot more about cars, for example, thank they do software. I’m sure Oracle makes huge money on name alone. The IT manager doesn’t want to take a chance with some lesser name. Just get Oracle, then nobody can blame them when shit hits the fan.
- MegaButts 6y ago
  > Just get Oracle, then nobody can blame them when shit hits the fan. Only incompetent people wouldn't blame the IT manager for choosing Oracle.
- saas_sam 6y ago
  I would be more inclined to blame the buyer, not the seller.
- Pasorrijer 6y ago
  It's the old big business joke. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM". You can easily replace Oracle in that sentence.
josephorjoe 6y ago
yeah, a shopping cart existing on a webapp where you are not purchasing product is such a red flag
unethical_ban 6y ago
I absolutely loathe any time I see "shopping cart" in an app that isn't me buying something.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  When you see that, it’s clear a system/framework/etc. is being used for something it was not designed for
  - yazmeya 6y ago
    In college, we had a two-week stretch at the beginning of a new semester when you could audition classes and add/drop them at will. This was called the "shopping period", so in my view, the shopping cart analogy on the registrar's web site doesn't sound too out of place here. Of course, the logic behind it would need to be different from an off-the-shelf e-commerce cart.
  - duderific 6y ago
    Eh, not necessarily. There might be a thought on the UX team that shopping cart is something anyone can relate to, so they use that as the metaphor.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Exactly. There are folders and a trash can on my computer desktop for the same reason.
      - colejohnson66 6y ago
        Yes, but to me, a “shopping cart” implies a purchase. It’s what I use at a grocery store to put my food and stuff in. A “cart” would be better term IMO despite just being a shorter form of “shopping cart”. But idk.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  But you signing up for classes is you buying something. I used a class registration system that wasn't this and didn't mention a "shopping cart" metaphor anywhere, but the system was exactly the same. Why object to calling it a "shopping cart?
cbaleanu 6y ago
I have to use an Oracle product for timesheets and besides the UI which is as you can imagine reading the previous comments, contains javascript code for a 'finite state machine for controlling the notification popup component'... [edit: typo]
quasse 6y ago
The University of Wisconsin used (and still uses AFAIK) this system as well. "Shopping" for classes was horrendous, and there were at least three interfaces to search for classes. I can only imagine how hard it was to populate the available classes. I wouldn't be surprised if part of the huge administrative bloat in the various departments was people who's only job was to force data into and out of PeopleSoft.
- billh 6y ago
  10 years ago I did exactly this for the University of Wisconsin. My job was entirely to facilitate data extraction out of oracle databases / PeopleSoft for longitudinal studies done by faculty or other interested parties. There were a few dozen of us spread across the UW System who's sole job it was to extract and massage data from these databases... One, very large, central database that handled data for UW and every satellite college they had.
Spooky23 6y ago
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.
- dopidop 6y ago
  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.
- tialaramex 6y ago
  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.
SilasX 6y ago
They ... couldn't even relabel the shopping cart and other stuff? Like, call it "courseload" or something?
- dmurray 6y ago
  When you've finished adding classes, would you know to click the "courseload" button in the top right to complete your enrolment? Probably not. It's lazy UI but in some ways it's going to be more intuitive, not less, to any student who's ever used an online retailer before.
  - SilasX 6y ago
    That's just an example, there are other ways to indicate that they need to click on that button to review all selections and finalize.

buttercraft 6y ago

Yep, I had never heard of it but recognized it as an Oracle app immediately. Not surprising at all. Oracle will audit them and find that someone accidentally enabled an extra, unused feature during an install one time. So, there goes another 10 million.

skissane 6y ago

> These things were put together in haste in the 90's and Oracle keeps pushing them and their corporate customers keep these things going long past when the interface becomes utterly unfamiliar. Actually the history of this app is a little more complicated. In the early 1990s, Citibank decided to establish an outsourced software development group in India to rewrite their banking software from scratch–they established it as a subsidiary company called iFlex. From 2005 onwards, Citibank progressively sold a majority of its stake in iFlex to Oracle, who then renamed the company Oracle Financial Services Software (OFSS). OFSS is listed on the Mumbai stock exchange, but Oracle owns the majority of its stock. So, rather than being a product which Oracle developed themselves and sold to Citibank, this is actually in some ways the opposite – a product Citibank developed themselves and sold to Oracle. I used to work for Oracle. I never worked on OFSS software directly, but I did work on an implementation project for some of it. I never saw the internal banking UI, all I ever saw was backend stuff – LDAP, BPML, JVMs, databases, load balancers, firewalls, etc. Indeed this article is the first time I've seen that particular UI in my life. But I can tell from the visual appearance that it is not one of Oracle's more recent UI development frameworks. (I don't know if this is because Citibank is running an older version, or if there are parts of the product still running on a legacy UI framework.)

orthoxerox 6y ago
Yes, that's Oracle Forms, one of the older versions. 6, I think.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  It certainly looks like Oracle Forms 6 (not sure if earlier versions looked similar, though.)
  - sepin4 6y ago
    I can confirm it is OF. However versions 7 through 10(maybe 6 as well) all look like that so I can't say which one it is. I used to work in a company using OF for the UI and I can say that while it is horrific to look at, it had its strengths. However it was appropriate 20 years ago when monitors had standard aspect ratio and resolutions. Nowadays with scaling and all kinds of aspect ratio it just doesn't work. Also Java... Ironically for one client our software was interfacing with Flexcube. However the OF technology is still supported by Oracle and while they themselves are trying to kill it, nobody is willing to migrate their core systems to something new.

ironmagma 6y ago

Keeping this in mind for the next time someone asks why we need to reinvent UIs every so often, or why technical debt needs to be paid off. Because they tend to cause financial damage, that's why.

ineedasername 6y ago

Oracle? I didn't realize that from the article. The entire situation makes A LOT more sense now. I once was deposed in a lawsuit regarding Oracle, and part of it was basically a UI issue. We had a paid customized interface that allowed users to upload basically a blob text or document (word, etc). When we went to UAT, we didn't see it in the UI in the app itself (peoplesoft): Us: "Okay, we can upload stuff, where do we find it?" Oracle: "Oh, that wasn't part of the project" Us: "Yes it was, see spec #<insert #>." Oracle: "... Well, it's in the database. A DBA can access it, so we met the spec." Us: "That is not a rational interpretation of '... and users will access it within the application...' " Oracle: "We're happy to build that customization for another <insert massive $$$ sum>" This was only one of a few material issue that led to the lawsuit. We probably wouldn't have sued over it alone, which should give you a hint at just how bad some of the other problems were. As an aside, the $/hour billed for customizations was $600, but the work was also outsourced to India. I asked a PM from Oracle how this was justified, and they gave a vague answer about multiple layers of management needed to oversee the developers. I pointed out that this price tag would allow for 3 managers per developer, with each person in the chain making ~$200k/year, and still allow Oracle $200/hour profit. I got a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ response. That I have to blame on the organization & not Oracle though. I had the detailed ~500+ page RFP response & implementation plan, which specified 1,000 hours of custom work. But I didn't have the actual contract to see what additional work would cost. The organization either didn't negotiate that in advance (so their fault) or they knew in advance & agreed to it (also their fault)

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
NearAP 6y ago
This sounds like this job was done by consultants (could have been Oracle consultants too) and this is standard behavior across consultants (that doesn't make it right though). Oracle as a product company (applies to all Enterprise Product companies) will not charge separately for a customization.
- ineedasername 6y ago

r00f 6y ago

To me it looks like a victim of cost saving and overoptimization. Somebody requested that feature, and then someone discovered that if you hack around your system and set precise combination of fields, it will do the trick. So man hours were saved, some memo added to docs, and then the knowledge was lost. And all of that instead of adding separate form for specific case. I've seen it more than once.

TazeTSchnitzel 6y ago

> The blame has to be shared, however, with the battle-axe personalities of the people that use this stuff. They would like nothing more than to retire while still using the _exact_ same applications and dated interfaces they've used for 20+ years. Are you sure they wouldn't like a new interface if it was actually a real improvement? I'm reminded of a story[0] about Norwegian doctors refusing to use the new GUI system and stubbornly continuing to use the obsolete text-based system. Were they luddites? No. The old system let them quickly navigate with the keyboard in seconds while talking to the patient. The new system required them to use the mouse, so they had to spend a lot of time focussing on using the GUI, rather than helping the patient. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289172 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10289172

zimpenfish 6y ago
> The old system let them quickly navigate with the keyboard in seconds while talking to the patient. Encountered a similar issue many years ago at a company trying to sell a new ad booking system to Titan - they had crufty old VT100 based systems, the new one was fancy AJAX HTML whizzbangs. Exactly the same result - they could handle 5 bookings on the old system in the time it took to do one on the new (which was also terrible and ugly besides slow.)
crispyambulance 6y ago
Well, there's "green-screen" VT100 terminal apps, and then there's 90's Vintage Java/oracle-forms UI's and then there's modern applications designed with informed UX approaches. The terminal apps, at least, have some history behind them and properly trained folks can be very fast with them. But we're talking here about shitty early Swing-apps (or Oracle forms). If you've ever used one it can be incredibly frustrating. Moreover, people are usually just tossed into a role where they have to use these M-F-ing interfaces with no training. Who makes a table with cells too small to fit their content and where you can't resize the table? Oracle. That's who. And they're paid for it like you wouldn't believe!
- NearAP 6y ago
  >>> Who makes a table with cells too small to fit their content and where you can't resize the table? Oracle<<< To be fair, lots of software of those years were like this. SAP Ariba was just like this, and so were old Microsoft products

that_guy_iain 6y ago

> The blame has to be shared, however, with the battle-axe personalities of the people that use this stuff. They would like nothing more than to retire while still using the _exact_ same applications and dated interfaces they've used for 20+ years. Literally, these are default "grey-theme" java applications, with all kinds of inconsistent UI quirks and absolutely no shits given for discoverability or even being able to create hyperlinks so that people can share stuff without screenshots. Here is the thing, the reason these people would want to keep using the software is... The replacement will be broken and they'll spend years with bugfixes and what not to get to the exact same position they're in just now. Using old UIs isn't fun but if it works it's good enough. This is a case of everyone getting used to the workarounds until no one knew about the workarounds.

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treeman79 6y ago

Dealing with Java interfaces for Oracle 18 years ago is why I refused to touch Java for my entire career.

smogcutter 6y ago

This is precisely the story with the reporting software at the company my partner works for. Everybody who was there when the software was created is long gone. It hasn’t been updated in decades. Nobody really knows how it works, and training is entirely folk wisdom and cargo cult practices handed down over generations.

crispyambulance 6y ago
Yep. We recently retired the Oracle reporting application at my employer. It was called "Discoverer" <-- not just "Discover" but really with an extra "er" at the end. Massive pile of shit that only a few people had the patience (or stubborn desperation) to master. The people that did know how to use it got constant phone calls (yeah, PHONE CALLS, because that's how these people roll) to do ad-hoc queries for management. I guess I can only fault them so far. This skill put food on their table and kept them employed even though their end product was endless dowdy bar-charts and badly formatted tables. Now we're using a new product. It's a "BI" tool. So many corps are doomed to repeat the bad parts of computer application history over and over and over again. In the case of "BI" or "Business Intelligence", it got it's start when middle-management got tired of begging for reports that weren't baked-in by the application vendor years ago. They started with getting permission to directly query the database (a profound coup by their standards). When they found that it was _actually_ possible to get useful information from the database, it looked like "intelligence" to them-- hence the term "business intelligence".

perl4ever 6y ago

Government uses Oracle based financial software too. I have a soft spot for Citi because where else can you get 2% back on your credit card? They're not bad, they just like giving money away to their customers...