5 ms·

This has happened in my wife's rather staid manufacturing industry. Many plants in the US have no on-site engineers. The "engineering" design is performed by

by downut 5y ago

This has happened in my wife's rather staid manufacturing industry. Many plants in the US have no on-site engineers. The "engineering" design is performed by remote fresh-outs at the exurban headquarters, and a lot of that work is simply regurgitating the specs from the equipment manufacturers. Who quite rightly charge exorbitantly to have their own engineers perform the inevitable changes that would be nearly trivial for an in-house on-site engineer to make. It's not unique to her particular company; this is the way her industrial customers and suppliers work too. The backend software is managed the same way. Buy Oracle/MS/Google whatever integrated functionality, and hire consultants to make changes. No expertise in-house. No in-house expertise means no management responsibility for failure: it's the supplier's fault. Yet those same vendors are more often than not locked in by prohibitive replacement economics. Gruesome for old skool highly competent engineers, like my wife. Most of these companies are profitable, so who can argue? This is the present and inevitable future.

colechristensen 5y ago
This is how startups succeed and take market share very quickly. A small number of highly paid highly competent people build something which is significantly cheaper and better than the incumbent because they aren’t weighed down by very large numbers of unnecessary people doing things poorly in the most expensive way possible. Then the startup either gets bought by the incumbent who has existed so long they just have piles of money or the startup grows into a similarly inefficient monster. It is a sign that there is something wrong with the game created by the economic and legal environment which tends towards a large proportion of useless work and barely adequate quality. I.e this is why we can’t have nice things and it’s not exactly clear how to fix it.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > and it’s not exactly clear how to fix it. Constantly creating new companies to outcompete the old corrupted ones. In other words capitalism, the solution is to ensure that competition never dies. No country in the world has found a better solution to this.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    I guess the problem currently is that the incumbents aren't actually getting replaced. Doing a good job is just a means for a small number of people to make an enormous amount of money while everyone benefits from their quality for perhaps a handful of years before they're bought out to be eaten or destroyed by the existing big players. There is a problem with competing with big players for more than a few years because they figure out ways to push you out of the market before you can beat them, with only a few exceptions. That is the problem with the environment which needs to be solved.
ozfive 5y ago
The ERP that my company uses is proprietary and they charge large sums of money to make custom changes. I am an in house developer that has gotten to know the database backing the ERP and have extrapolated functionality based on stored procedures and table schemas. The work I do would cost my company much more than my salary and I build interfaces that connect to marketplaces or marketplace API aggregators such as ChannelAdvisor. I can attest to your statement that in house engineers can cost much less than the modification engineers who know the system but will charge an arm and a leg. As a matter of fact I've carved out a niche in these matters over the years. Essentially reverse engineering systems and building out functionality instead of the original creators of the software. EDIT: The ERP company never made it not possible to interface through their DB in their contracts or by encrypting their functionality in the DB. The amount of value I bring to my company is greater than 100 fold of my salary.
- downut 5y ago
  Yeah, that's an obvious thing to do, right? However, the company armored themselves against this sort of competency attack against The Machine by having in-house IT by policy gate keep access to the ERP db tables, which are exactly as you describe, and can be reverse engineered. This does have the additional side effect of making it quite difficult (in practice impossible) to implement in-house statistical process control. Which, again, makes it much more difficult to, um, need to be diplomatic here... discover which processes could be improved. Much better to outsource to another corporate consulting parasite a multiyear/multimillion $$ effort indoctrinating the troops on the abstract importance of process. However, I enthusiastically applaud your success! Seems it might be a tightrope act to balance "Ima worth a bunch of money to you" vs. management realizing "that nerd is a massive SPOF".
  - ozfive 5y ago
    SPOF can be applied to the ERP company themselves. Services fail all of the time. DockerHub failed on Friday with their container API which you could argue made it impossible to know the outcome of your builds but you could still get by and pull your containers after pushing repositories. As someone who understands how I can be a single point of failure I make sure to ask for raises within reason and since I love what I do usually means at market rate. It's not like I am holding a company hostage by knowing what value I bring. Not everyone is of the persuasion of extorting their employer due to what their perceptive value is. My time is valuable but not so valuable that I price myself out of a market by my ego. To add to the backstory I have been an employee of the company for the last 4 years with never an intention of leaving nor an intention of taking advantage of any perceived leverage. Some people will disagree and say that I should advocate for more at all times. My perception is either I start my own company and build my ideas/imagination or I keep doing what I do. Why does everything have to be leverage in every situation? I live and work in the Seattle area and may not get paid the same amount as Amazon employees but I certainly get the freedom and encouragement to pursue ways of furthering the company and their future in revenue generating projects. I tend towards the I will give ample notificationt that I will be leaving and will help in making my own job automated eventually. I'd rather leave a trail of automated services than leave another set of people in the lurch because they took a chance on me. One day when I decide to leave there will be enough Go programmers around to maintain what I have built also. Either my services will run until the integrations change their API or I leave knowing that what I have built will maintain itself if I were to take sabbatical and in that case it is no longer my responsibility. The argument that a single developer is worse than a group of developer is old hat when it's clear that an entire team of developers can up and quit and be a single point of failure either in an individual company with a set of nerds or their outsourced company where all developers decide to unionize or the brain of the team leaves and the remainder of the people may be able to sustain the service or don't have the capacity to. Third party services are just as susceptible to these forces but fear should not be a driving factor to hinder the furtherance of your business.

by downut 5y ago

colechristensen 5y ago

This is how startups succeed and take market share very quickly. A small number of highly paid highly competent people build something which is significantly cheaper and better than the incumbent because they aren’t weighed down by very large numbers of unnecessary people doing things poorly in the most expensive way possible. Then the startup either gets bought by the incumbent who has existed so long they just have piles of money or the startup grows into a similarly inefficient monster. It is a sign that there is something wrong with the game created by the economic and legal environment which tends towards a large proportion of useless work and barely adequate quality. I.e this is why we can’t have nice things and it’s not exactly clear how to fix it.

Jensson 5y ago
> and it’s not exactly clear how to fix it. Constantly creating new companies to outcompete the old corrupted ones. In other words capitalism, the solution is to ensure that competition never dies. No country in the world has found a better solution to this.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  I guess the problem currently is that the incumbents aren't actually getting replaced. Doing a good job is just a means for a small number of people to make an enormous amount of money while everyone benefits from their quality for perhaps a handful of years before they're bought out to be eaten or destroyed by the existing big players. There is a problem with competing with big players for more than a few years because they figure out ways to push you out of the market before you can beat them, with only a few exceptions. That is the problem with the environment which needs to be solved.

ozfive 5y ago

The ERP that my company uses is proprietary and they charge large sums of money to make custom changes. I am an in house developer that has gotten to know the database backing the ERP and have extrapolated functionality based on stored procedures and table schemas. The work I do would cost my company much more than my salary and I build interfaces that connect to marketplaces or marketplace API aggregators such as ChannelAdvisor. I can attest to your statement that in house engineers can cost much less than the modification engineers who know the system but will charge an arm and a leg. As a matter of fact I've carved out a niche in these matters over the years. Essentially reverse engineering systems and building out functionality instead of the original creators of the software. EDIT: The ERP company never made it not possible to interface through their DB in their contracts or by encrypting their functionality in the DB. The amount of value I bring to my company is greater than 100 fold of my salary.

downut 5y ago
Yeah, that's an obvious thing to do, right? However, the company armored themselves against this sort of competency attack against The Machine by having in-house IT by policy gate keep access to the ERP db tables, which are exactly as you describe, and can be reverse engineered. This does have the additional side effect of making it quite difficult (in practice impossible) to implement in-house statistical process control. Which, again, makes it much more difficult to, um, need to be diplomatic here... discover which processes could be improved. Much better to outsource to another corporate consulting parasite a multiyear/multimillion $$ effort indoctrinating the troops on the abstract importance of process. However, I enthusiastically applaud your success! Seems it might be a tightrope act to balance "Ima worth a bunch of money to you" vs. management realizing "that nerd is a massive SPOF".
- ozfive 5y ago
  SPOF can be applied to the ERP company themselves. Services fail all of the time. DockerHub failed on Friday with their container API which you could argue made it impossible to know the outcome of your builds but you could still get by and pull your containers after pushing repositories. As someone who understands how I can be a single point of failure I make sure to ask for raises within reason and since I love what I do usually means at market rate. It's not like I am holding a company hostage by knowing what value I bring. Not everyone is of the persuasion of extorting their employer due to what their perceptive value is. My time is valuable but not so valuable that I price myself out of a market by my ego. To add to the backstory I have been an employee of the company for the last 4 years with never an intention of leaving nor an intention of taking advantage of any perceived leverage. Some people will disagree and say that I should advocate for more at all times. My perception is either I start my own company and build my ideas/imagination or I keep doing what I do. Why does everything have to be leverage in every situation? I live and work in the Seattle area and may not get paid the same amount as Amazon employees but I certainly get the freedom and encouragement to pursue ways of furthering the company and their future in revenue generating projects. I tend towards the I will give ample notificationt that I will be leaving and will help in making my own job automated eventually. I'd rather leave a trail of automated services than leave another set of people in the lurch because they took a chance on me. One day when I decide to leave there will be enough Go programmers around to maintain what I have built also. Either my services will run until the integrations change their API or I leave knowing that what I have built will maintain itself if I were to take sabbatical and in that case it is no longer my responsibility. The argument that a single developer is worse than a group of developer is old hat when it's clear that an entire team of developers can up and quit and be a single point of failure either in an individual company with a set of nerds or their outsourced company where all developers decide to unionize or the brain of the team leaves and the remainder of the people may be able to sustain the service or don't have the capacity to. Third party services are just as susceptible to these forces but fear should not be a driving factor to hinder the furtherance of your business.