4 ms·

I have observed that being a large corporation is an asset unto itself, regardless if the company has any valuable product. I believe this comes from connection

I have observed that being a large corporation is an asset unto itself, regardless if the company has any valuable product. I believe this comes from connections to people in other big corporations that will funnel you huge sums of money if you stroke them sufficiently. I currently am employed at a large corporation that pays astronomical sums to IBM and SAP and who knows what other enterprise consultants for software that either doesn't work, or at best is significantly inferior to free alternatives. The view from the trenches is insane, but I am sure it's cushy at the top.

pjc50 12y ago
"Too big to fail" + "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" + complicated & expensive tendering requirements. It's much easier for a big company to buy from another single giant company than to assemble a solution from smaller contractors. More expensive, but easier to organise.
big_co_ 12y ago
Yep, I also worked for Big Co. and they wouldn't even consider smaller corporations. IBM has a history and a deeply ingrained "support" structure within other corporations. I could have built in house solutions that deployed faster and better auditing in just a few weeks than what they paid hundreds of thousands in licensing fees and man hours to do the same job. Hell, I even pitched it and management said no.
- vo1aQXJ3 12y ago
  which makes sense for them... Lets assume they went with your solution. All fine. up and running in no time. Then you get hit by a bus or leave the company. Then things go wrong. How are you going to explain this to senior management. If they take IBM/Oracle/etc. and things go wrong? you call them. they fly over an exec you can beat up and all is fine.
  - rayiner 12y ago
    It's not irrational. I went from using an in-house DMS at my work to one made by Big Co. I'm sure it was more expensive, but at the end of the day, it's someone else's problem, not ours. If something goes wrong, there is someone we can call and tell at, someone else in charge of fixing bugs, etc. There are rational reasons to want those things.
    - mgkimsal 12y ago
      IF you can really actually shove off the responsibility and all the attendant headache, yeah, sure, it's fine. I don't think I've ever been able to do that. Instead of spending my time trying to come up with a fix for a broken system impacting my users, I'd spend my time contacting someone else in a different company to see if they've come up with a fix for a broken system impacting my users. If you really truly can just punt, sit back, and even get to say "I told you so" when the system/software/service in question doesn't work, that's great. But... in almost all cases I've experience, it was still 'my problem', I just had far less control over making it work.
      - anigbrowl 12y ago
        True, but you're only dealing with the technical end of it. Later on your technical headache may be translated into dollar amounts for damages in a lawsuit or price negotiations in service agreements. But since that's legal and/or business stuff, chances are you won't be informed or consulted. You do the leg-work of getting the thing that's broken up and running again. Your manager does the tedious administrative business of estimating the value of resources spent on solving, the problem, which is added to the estimated losses sustained by other departments impacted by the outage. The people who negotiate expensive service and supply contracts are not interested in the minutiae of why something was broken, only in the measurable economic cost of the failure. Suppose you rent your home and a plumbing problem leads to flooding and damage of some of your possessions. You take it up with the landlord and are credited two weeks' rent as compensation. Do you care about the specifics of the plumbing problem or the landlord's dealings with whatever plumber installed the system which later failed? Even if the plumber who turns up the house to fix the problem goes into detail about a previous plumber's ill-considered decision to apply PVC adhesive to ABS pipe, chances are that your interest is purely superficial.
- dgregd 12y ago
  > management said no Because management would have more work and responsibility with your solution. > what they paid hundreds of thousands in licensing fees and man hours to do the same job They spent shareholders money. So they don't care about costs. And what looks better in resume: a) managed one programmer b) two million dollars software system deployment If these guys have created a start-up and payed with their own money, I guarantee they would have chosen your solution.
yourapostasy 12y ago
A lot of this pain is self-inflicted by Big Co., your employer in your specific case but I'm not picking on you in particular just offering some observations. I take it you haven't gone through many large companies' procurement processes and procurement culture as a vendor. It literally takes entire man-days to man-weeks of effort (and for especially large and/or complex requirements, man-months to man-years) to respond to the procurement demands of these large companies, and vendors know it is a "my way or the highway" arena with these large customers. Perhaps the software might not work for you, but for varying definitions of "work", it satisfies one or a consortium of constituencies within your company. You, personally, are simply not at a position of sufficient power within your company to be privy to what that specific definition of "works" is for the specific software that is used by your company. You probably haven't had the pleasure of working many months over an RFP strictly gated by the procurement staff, with only two one-hour, chaperoned meetings with the technical staff to attempt to clarify wildly lost-in-translation contract verbiage. Generally the more clarifying questions you ask, the worse the procurement team looks, and the more hostile they are towards you, so you also have to carefully choose your questions. And a good proportion of the time, you only find out after losing the bid that they dragged you through all that pain and suffering simply to get a number to beat up an incumbent over the head with to get a lower maintenance renewal, all along never intending to consider any change at all, and never admitting during the process they even have an incumbent solution in place already in the first place. The chaperone from procurement actively monitors and mutes the technical staff during the conversations, to prevent the technical staff from divulging whether or not a solution is already in place, for example. This and other behavior forms an enormous torrent of obfuscation from the customer base; it hugely bloats the sales costs. This is what incentivizes the production of the software you experience, because it sells. There are many big companies who are happily using open source alternatives for all sorts of requirements, but when you see poorly-fitting software in the trenches, a lot of the time that is produced by a severe disconnect between the procurement process and the trenches at the customer itself. Sometimes this communications gap stems from the procurement department, sometimes from the trenches, sometimes from the company culture, etc.; the reasons are all over the map and I've never discerned a pattern, but the gap is real and problematic. I should touch upon internal customer political factions that muddle the picture even more. When these political factions are not managed by a single strong managerial hand, this frequently causes the design-by-committee feature bloat you see, because different factions demand all sorts of features for their specific concerns to obtain their "buy in", with no coherent guidance that prioritizes and establishes required features to meet a focused, accomplish-able goal. This also produces the ironic result of software procured that meets all the official, politically-sanctioned requirements, but does not meet the daily needs of the trenches. I won't even go into the dynamics of dealing with political factions who are at odds with each other. There are solutions to this state of affairs, but customers by and large turn away from them because buying these packages and services is to the decision makers at these customers less painful than the alternatives. It is maddening and infuriating to outsiders not already familiar with the workings of these processes, but outsiders can take heart that the situation is slowly changing over time as better technologies evolve.

pjc50 12y ago

"Too big to fail" + "Nobody got fired for buying IBM" + complicated & expensive tendering requirements. It's much easier for a big company to buy from another single giant company than to assemble a solution from smaller contractors. More expensive, but easier to organise.

big_co_ 12y ago

Yep, I also worked for Big Co. and they wouldn't even consider smaller corporations. IBM has a history and a deeply ingrained "support" structure within other corporations. I could have built in house solutions that deployed faster and better auditing in just a few weeks than what they paid hundreds of thousands in licensing fees and man hours to do the same job. Hell, I even pitched it and management said no.

vo1aQXJ3 12y ago
which makes sense for them... Lets assume they went with your solution. All fine. up and running in no time. Then you get hit by a bus or leave the company. Then things go wrong. How are you going to explain this to senior management. If they take IBM/Oracle/etc. and things go wrong? you call them. they fly over an exec you can beat up and all is fine.
- rayiner 12y ago
  It's not irrational. I went from using an in-house DMS at my work to one made by Big Co. I'm sure it was more expensive, but at the end of the day, it's someone else's problem, not ours. If something goes wrong, there is someone we can call and tell at, someone else in charge of fixing bugs, etc. There are rational reasons to want those things.
  - mgkimsal 12y ago
    IF you can really actually shove off the responsibility and all the attendant headache, yeah, sure, it's fine. I don't think I've ever been able to do that. Instead of spending my time trying to come up with a fix for a broken system impacting my users, I'd spend my time contacting someone else in a different company to see if they've come up with a fix for a broken system impacting my users. If you really truly can just punt, sit back, and even get to say "I told you so" when the system/software/service in question doesn't work, that's great. But... in almost all cases I've experience, it was still 'my problem', I just had far less control over making it work.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      True, but you're only dealing with the technical end of it. Later on your technical headache may be translated into dollar amounts for damages in a lawsuit or price negotiations in service agreements. But since that's legal and/or business stuff, chances are you won't be informed or consulted. You do the leg-work of getting the thing that's broken up and running again. Your manager does the tedious administrative business of estimating the value of resources spent on solving, the problem, which is added to the estimated losses sustained by other departments impacted by the outage. The people who negotiate expensive service and supply contracts are not interested in the minutiae of why something was broken, only in the measurable economic cost of the failure. Suppose you rent your home and a plumbing problem leads to flooding and damage of some of your possessions. You take it up with the landlord and are credited two weeks' rent as compensation. Do you care about the specifics of the plumbing problem or the landlord's dealings with whatever plumber installed the system which later failed? Even if the plumber who turns up the house to fix the problem goes into detail about a previous plumber's ill-considered decision to apply PVC adhesive to ABS pipe, chances are that your interest is purely superficial.
dgregd 12y ago
> management said no Because management would have more work and responsibility with your solution. > what they paid hundreds of thousands in licensing fees and man hours to do the same job They spent shareholders money. So they don't care about costs. And what looks better in resume: a) managed one programmer b) two million dollars software system deployment If these guys have created a start-up and payed with their own money, I guarantee they would have chosen your solution.

yourapostasy 12y ago

A lot of this pain is self-inflicted by Big Co., your employer in your specific case but I'm not picking on you in particular just offering some observations. I take it you haven't gone through many large companies' procurement processes and procurement culture as a vendor. It literally takes entire man-days to man-weeks of effort (and for especially large and/or complex requirements, man-months to man-years) to respond to the procurement demands of these large companies, and vendors know it is a "my way or the highway" arena with these large customers. Perhaps the software might not work for you, but for varying definitions of "work", it satisfies one or a consortium of constituencies within your company. You, personally, are simply not at a position of sufficient power within your company to be privy to what that specific definition of "works" is for the specific software that is used by your company. You probably haven't had the pleasure of working many months over an RFP strictly gated by the procurement staff, with only two one-hour, chaperoned meetings with the technical staff to attempt to clarify wildly lost-in-translation contract verbiage. Generally the more clarifying questions you ask, the worse the procurement team looks, and the more hostile they are towards you, so you also have to carefully choose your questions. And a good proportion of the time, you only find out after losing the bid that they dragged you through all that pain and suffering simply to get a number to beat up an incumbent over the head with to get a lower maintenance renewal, all along never intending to consider any change at all, and never admitting during the process they even have an incumbent solution in place already in the first place. The chaperone from procurement actively monitors and mutes the technical staff during the conversations, to prevent the technical staff from divulging whether or not a solution is already in place, for example. This and other behavior forms an enormous torrent of obfuscation from the customer base; it hugely bloats the sales costs. This is what incentivizes the production of the software you experience, because it sells. There are many big companies who are happily using open source alternatives for all sorts of requirements, but when you see poorly-fitting software in the trenches, a lot of the time that is produced by a severe disconnect between the procurement process and the trenches at the customer itself. Sometimes this communications gap stems from the procurement department, sometimes from the trenches, sometimes from the company culture, etc.; the reasons are all over the map and I've never discerned a pattern, but the gap is real and problematic. I should touch upon internal customer political factions that muddle the picture even more. When these political factions are not managed by a single strong managerial hand, this frequently causes the design-by-committee feature bloat you see, because different factions demand all sorts of features for their specific concerns to obtain their "buy in", with no coherent guidance that prioritizes and establishes required features to meet a focused, accomplish-able goal. This also produces the ironic result of software procured that meets all the official, politically-sanctioned requirements, but does not meet the daily needs of the trenches. I won't even go into the dynamics of dealing with political factions who are at odds with each other. There are solutions to this state of affairs, but customers by and large turn away from them because buying these packages and services is to the decision makers at these customers less painful than the alternatives. It is maddening and infuriating to outsiders not already familiar with the workings of these processes, but outsiders can take heart that the situation is slowly changing over time as better technologies evolve.