6 ms·

It's a classic problem with big companies and software development. Say you worked for a Fortune500 company and they wanted you to build a TODO list app. The co

It's a classic problem with big companies and software development. Say you worked for a Fortune500 company and they wanted you to build a TODO list app. The core app can be built in a week, but it ends up taking 3 months and a team of 10 engineers, why is that? * Well we need to integrate it with our engagement platform, meetings required with engagement to determine scope and requirements. * Well we need it to also integrate with our productivity API, another set of meeeting to determine scope of integration. * We need deep reporting capabilities, please get with the reporting team to determine requirements. * Also this app will need to integrate into EXISTING_TOOL_A and EXISTING_TOOL_B. App cannot be built in React and must be built in Angular with OLD_SOFTWARE_PKG_1 and OLD_SOFTWARE_PKG_2 in order for it to successfully integrate with these old apps. * Hey we just signed a contract with CLOUD_PROVIDER_Y, we know you were using IN_HOUSE_PROVIDER_1 for your infra but now please modify the entire app to work with CLOUD_PROVIDER_Y. * Oh and it also needs to be backwards compatible with IN_HOUSE_PROVIDER_1 because it needs to run in parallel while we onboard CLOUD_PROVIDER_Y

jerf 4y ago
The requirements will expand too. The startup is probably not worried about ADA compliance, deep Unicode compatibility, localization (the reason why we need to be good at Unicode), complying with the backup policy, security team review, auditing requirements, immediate compliance with privacy laws in other jurisdictions (e.g., a US startup might ignore EU law right away but the Fortune500 might not want to), especially with regard to personally identifiable information, etc. You list a lot of perfectly valid "external" things that a Fortune500 company might add, but there's also internal things that it may need immediately that a startup won't. (The backup policy being a particularly trenchant one, in my opinion. It's not an every day thing, but we've certainly seen several stories over the years on HN of startups basically going "whoops, we accidentally the data, sorry we're shut down now because this is unrecoverable for us".)

jerf 4y ago

The requirements will expand too. The startup is probably not worried about ADA compliance, deep Unicode compatibility, localization (the reason why we need to be good at Unicode), complying with the backup policy, security team review, auditing requirements, immediate compliance with privacy laws in other jurisdictions (e.g., a US startup might ignore EU law right away but the Fortune500 might not want to), especially with regard to personally identifiable information, etc. You list a lot of perfectly valid "external" things that a Fortune500 company might add, but there's also internal things that it may need immediately that a startup won't. (The backup policy being a particularly trenchant one, in my opinion. It's not an every day thing, but we've certainly seen several stories over the years on HN of startups basically going "whoops, we accidentally the data, sorry we're shut down now because this is unrecoverable for us".)