Looking at the original article, it seems the author was working for a software company that was in denial about being a software company: > The amount of cus

Looking at the original article, it seems the author was working for a software company that was in denial about being a software company: > The amount of customization by far exceeded the initial offering of the services, and had to be done within the constraints of each individual technology stack. > > This accumulated in hundreds of partially overlapping systems, wired together with brittle ad-hoc integrations. They had a software solution and were officially spending zero dollars on software development. You can't beat that. Never mind the huge amounts of time they spent keeping it working. All of that money showed up in other places on the bottom line. Maybe a lot of it was IT, but a lot of the expense was probably people whose job title had nothing to do with technology spending hours doing repetitive and error-prone integration work with third-party systems, emailing around spreadsheets and CSV files, manually tracking down and fixing bad data, and answering the phone for confused customers. As soon as you start employing software developers to create a more efficient system, it looks like you're spending 100x more for software, on a trajectory to take a very, very long time to achieve parity with the existing system.