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The problem is that beyond the boilerplate we aren't solving commodity problems most of the time. If you've worked in the same field long enough, you'll see th
by steveBK123 3y ago
The problem is that beyond the boilerplate we aren't solving commodity problems most of the time.
If you've worked in the same field long enough, you'll see that things certainly rhyme, but everyone has slightly different business requirements. At each level of the stack this grows, and so in total there's a ton of non-commodity, bespoke work to do.
That's why no two products are exactly alike and we don't just have 1 giant all world megacorp producing everything.
- booleandilemma 3y agoThe problem is that beyond the boilerplate we aren't solving commodity problems most of the time. The only people that see it is a problem are the ones that wish programmers were commoditized. Your complexity is my salary.
- pixl97 3y agoThat complexity is how companies typically differentiate their product, generally purposely to keep it from interoperability with other software so their entire business is not commodified. Just look at the IOT space to see this in play.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago> Your complexity is my salary. Then your salary paid out of broken window fallacy. But that's fine. All the nice, humane things happen where the market optimized things a little bit, but not too much.
- mattgreenrocks 3y agoYep! What the business really needs is something that will do whatever necessary to ensure stuff actually lands. The skills are important for sure, but the responsibility aspect can’t be offloaded to machines well. And even a lot of our boilerplate removal mechanisms (eg frameworks) are not very good either. They’re just slightly less worse than before.
- steveBK123 3y agoYes, or better to see these products as time to market reducers. There's plenty of times I have the option of writing my own code or using some good-enough framework that gets me started, and then add my own customizations over time.
- theshrike79 3y agoUnless you're SAP, you always need to customise whatever you build for every customer. You can have reusable components, but a full one size fits all solution is really hard.
- wombatpm 3y agoIs there a business that has implemented SAP without customization? My experience has been the opposite and that vanilla SAP is usually stupid and wrong.
- theshrike79 3y agoThe #1 rule of taking SAP into use in your organisation (according to multiple actual SAP Consultants I've chatted with) is: your organisation must switch its processes to fit the SAP model, not the other way around. You _can_ customise SAP to fit your way, but it'll be an uphill battle all the way. Every update will also need to be customised, every new feature has to be modified and eventually it'll fail and you'll be out tens or hundreds of millions. You can look up any of the big SAP failures and that's the reason for every one of them.
- lr4444lr 3y agoAnd that software purchasers demand changes. I would imagine we are not far from an AI being able to take over pure Waterfall development methodology. But successful businesses aren't static, nor are their software needs. Once the AI decides on a data layer and you ask it to iterate on the code that interacts with it to meet new use cases and add features, god help you.
- steveBK123 3y agoThe hardest part is not implementing the specifications as described (maybe AI will do this soon, doubt). The hardest part is taking various competing requests in plain English (often in their second language) from non-technical people, having an interactive conversation to tease out actual needs, and converting that into a specification (if even only in your head) to then implement. When we have an AI that can understand French Quants, let me know.