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What the author failed to mention is that the software industry itself is also responsible for this state of affairs. I am talking about the consultants and th

What the author failed to mention is that the software industry itself is also responsible for this state of affairs. I am talking about the consultants and the salesmen of enterprise software. In many cases, they convince CEOs that they simply need to sign a contract and all their problems will be solved. They don't care to explain the high rate of failure of software implementations or how much manpower is needed on an ongoing basis to maintain the shitty software. CEOs think they are buying an appliance. e.g., I buy a coffee maker, I pour water into it, I put in the coffee pod, I press the button, and coffee comes out. In the best scenario (from a CEO perspective), they are getting an assembly line someone else put together for them. e.g., the CEO hires a general contractor who lines up all the subcontractors, installs the different pieces of equipment including the "glue" that connects them, and will maintain equipment going forward. The CEO simply needs to pay for the capital expense and provide the operators for the assembly line. In the typical scenario (bad from a CEO perspective and bad for the software industry), what the CEO gets is a stack of re-purposed software modules that have been pressed together in a slip-shod fashion that works when it wants to and fails without a trace as no logging exists. The CEO has to hire IT developers just to get the thing to run. And he will now look for his next job because the board of directors told him, you failed.

ludicity 3y ago
Thank you for taking the time to write this. "CEOs think they are buying an appliance" sums it all up perfectly. I hold them accountable because they're paid so much that they should know better, but you're right that a lot of people try very hard to mislead them, and sometimes they're even incentivized to be misled. If you build in-house to suit your data models and workflow, there is a chance you won't ever get the thing deployed, then you look bad. You can always sign up for Salesforce, and it might be bad, but it's running so you can hide the details of the badness from the board. This is why when I wrote another post on saving 500K for my company, the two-slide presentation I was asked to write went through a lead, a director, and a lower-level C-suite member before being allowed to reach the top of the pyramid.

ludicity 3y ago

Thank you for taking the time to write this. "CEOs think they are buying an appliance" sums it all up perfectly. I hold them accountable because they're paid so much that they should know better, but you're right that a lot of people try very hard to mislead them, and sometimes they're even incentivized to be misled. If you build in-house to suit your data models and workflow, there is a chance you won't ever get the thing deployed, then you look bad. You can always sign up for Salesforce, and it might be bad, but it's running so you can hide the details of the badness from the board. This is why when I wrote another post on saving 500K for my company, the two-slide presentation I was asked to write went through a lead, a director, and a lower-level C-suite member before being allowed to reach the top of the pyramid.