3 ms·

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 d

by 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.
kragen 5y ago
Hmm, so 99% of the value you create is being skimmed off by the company's shareholders and management? Have you thought about trying to renegotiate to a more equitable split, like 10%/90% or 50%/50% instead of 1%/99%? Or is that impossible because you're in a very weak bargaining position, like a migrant cannery worker? That seems like a major reason people might quit jobs like yours and go work for ERP vendors or other outsourced vendors: even if they create less value, they are in a better bargaining position and so they can capture maybe 5% or 10% or 30% of the value they create instead of less than 1%.
- ozfive 5y ago
  I would argue that if I went to work for the ERP company themselves that my "bargaining" power would actually decrease due to the revenues that they are garnering compared to the company that utilizes the ERP itself. It also assumes I am unhappy with such an outcome that my work is worth 100x my salary and somehow that in itself is reason enough to ask for more. I have ideas that I share with no one that are worth much more and one day soon I will build them myself. Along the way I will have made good contacts in business and investor potential all while not rocking the boat all of the time. I could be completely wrong and would love argument against without down-voting to convince me and potentially others that this in fact is the wrong way to think about things.
  - kragen 5y ago
    I don't think it's a wrong way to think about things. Multiple ways of thinking about things are valid. It's possible that your bargaining position vis-a-vis the ERP company would be worse if you were an employee. But probably not if you were a founder. And surely the ERP company's bargaining position relative to your company is better than yours.
    - ozfive 5y ago
      > It's possible that your bargaining position vis-a-vis the ERP company would be worse if you were an employee. But probably not if you were a founder. And surely the ERP company's bargaining position relative to your company is better than yours. I don't think that this is the case as the value they add comes with opinion entrenched in the belief of the path that their product should take. This opinion actually has caused them to flat out refuse to do some work which in my opinion is an opportunity to make things better for the company that has originally taken on this ERP system as their central authority of information. I actually came in from a friend of mine who knew that I was familiar with Coldfusion. Ultimately in my exploration for knowledge I have become intimately entrapped by the ERP data model based on the simple fact that it is esoteric and inflexible which has in fact been proven by how the front-end interface is a kludge of C++ utilities, C#, and some shell scripts. Upgrades continue to happen but they give me 0 faith that the small company that they are (ERP) has a clear path to less of a kludge of a system. It gives me solace that as long as their opinions are strong contrary to the revenue model of my employer that in fact I will be useful for a long time. The moment the ERP company actually understands the niche they are pursuing is the moment I will have less of a potential for work. Until then they can fight their way upstream against their customers as much as they like and their customers will hedge their bets until they can migrate to something better. It is assumed I am less in line with the directive of the customer and have my own agenda against the ERP company when in fact I am elongating the runway for my company to operate until they have a better plan to migrate away to a solution that doesn't assume so much about their customers. Manufacturing knows they have to evolve yet they have made past decisions that they realize they can only mitigate by extending their systems without having to pay the high prices their vendors request. How is this not a good strategy? It's not like I am a contractor and trust me when I say that my company is better off with my SPOF than just the SPOF of their ERP company. Lose the ERP company and you not only lose the company and their regular updates but you lose the custom development of that company which will be 10 times more when the developers that were fired become independent contractors themselves. It's just business.

by ozfive 5y ago

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.

kragen 5y ago

Hmm, so 99% of the value you create is being skimmed off by the company's shareholders and management? Have you thought about trying to renegotiate to a more equitable split, like 10%/90% or 50%/50% instead of 1%/99%? Or is that impossible because you're in a very weak bargaining position, like a migrant cannery worker? That seems like a major reason people might quit jobs like yours and go work for ERP vendors or other outsourced vendors: even if they create less value, they are in a better bargaining position and so they can capture maybe 5% or 10% or 30% of the value they create instead of less than 1%.

ozfive 5y ago
I would argue that if I went to work for the ERP company themselves that my "bargaining" power would actually decrease due to the revenues that they are garnering compared to the company that utilizes the ERP itself. It also assumes I am unhappy with such an outcome that my work is worth 100x my salary and somehow that in itself is reason enough to ask for more. I have ideas that I share with no one that are worth much more and one day soon I will build them myself. Along the way I will have made good contacts in business and investor potential all while not rocking the boat all of the time. I could be completely wrong and would love argument against without down-voting to convince me and potentially others that this in fact is the wrong way to think about things.
- kragen 5y ago
  I don't think it's a wrong way to think about things. Multiple ways of thinking about things are valid. It's possible that your bargaining position vis-a-vis the ERP company would be worse if you were an employee. But probably not if you were a founder. And surely the ERP company's bargaining position relative to your company is better than yours.
  - ozfive 5y ago
    > It's possible that your bargaining position vis-a-vis the ERP company would be worse if you were an employee. But probably not if you were a founder. And surely the ERP company's bargaining position relative to your company is better than yours. I don't think that this is the case as the value they add comes with opinion entrenched in the belief of the path that their product should take. This opinion actually has caused them to flat out refuse to do some work which in my opinion is an opportunity to make things better for the company that has originally taken on this ERP system as their central authority of information. I actually came in from a friend of mine who knew that I was familiar with Coldfusion. Ultimately in my exploration for knowledge I have become intimately entrapped by the ERP data model based on the simple fact that it is esoteric and inflexible which has in fact been proven by how the front-end interface is a kludge of C++ utilities, C#, and some shell scripts. Upgrades continue to happen but they give me 0 faith that the small company that they are (ERP) has a clear path to less of a kludge of a system. It gives me solace that as long as their opinions are strong contrary to the revenue model of my employer that in fact I will be useful for a long time. The moment the ERP company actually understands the niche they are pursuing is the moment I will have less of a potential for work. Until then they can fight their way upstream against their customers as much as they like and their customers will hedge their bets until they can migrate to something better. It is assumed I am less in line with the directive of the customer and have my own agenda against the ERP company when in fact I am elongating the runway for my company to operate until they have a better plan to migrate away to a solution that doesn't assume so much about their customers. Manufacturing knows they have to evolve yet they have made past decisions that they realize they can only mitigate by extending their systems without having to pay the high prices their vendors request. How is this not a good strategy? It's not like I am a contractor and trust me when I say that my company is better off with my SPOF than just the SPOF of their ERP company. Lose the ERP company and you not only lose the company and their regular updates but you lose the custom development of that company which will be 10 times more when the developers that were fired become independent contractors themselves. It's just business.