2 ms·

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

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".