Memo to kid coders: Enterprise software exists If you live or spend time in Silicon Valley, it's easy to forget that enterprise software exists, or that it still drives $245 billion in annual revenue, according to Gartner. Google, Facebook, and a rising generation of consumer-facing startups get the media buzz, to the point that young developers have neither an interest in …
I'm currently contracting at the same place I got most of my skillz. For the record, I'm 37.
We started with something hacked together in Access. It sucked. But people knew how to drive it, and it could be maintained.
Then we got Visual Intercept, over the objections of every single engineer involved in the selection process. It might work now (dunno), but at the time it was chock full of bugs. Still, the desktop version was customisable, and various engineers did useful stuff to make it work how we needed it to.
Then management decided we needed to use the web version, not the desktop version. Trouble was that the VI web version was effectively just a beta. (Yes they sold it to you. Why did you believe them, and not everyone who'd actually used it?) So basically it didn't work, it *couldn't* work, and all the customisation effort had gone. It was theoretically possible to tinker with the web interface, but it wasn't something your average engineer could get access to.
And then the company got taken over. And in the worst possible scenario, we now have a change request system which has been grafted on the side of a timesheet system. It is less useful in many, many ways than the Access database from back in 1999. It has some advantages for managers, sure, but for engineers wanting to do their job it's a PITA.
Bottom line, the enterprise software you see will almost always be rubbish. Not because of the coders, but because of the managers - both at the enterprise software company, and at your company when the particular configuration of that enterprise software is locked down.
For all the complaints about the size and expense of enterprise software, the fact is that for global organisations, the cost of the software is still a very small % of the overall cost of running the system as a whole across geographies, esp. when integrated with multiple backends from the org's latest M&A activity. The associated tasks and concerns of running a system in a data center greatly outweigh in complexity the software itself, and cuts across many more functions & teams (HR, legal, finance, etc). And the loss of business in the event of failure has greater implications in terms of goodwill and credibility for a large household name than a small start-up whose absence is unlikely to be missed. This is why big globals are willing to pay millions to the likes of IBM, SAP, Oracle to ensure their systems don't go down. In the general scheme of things, that cost is worth it.
"Besides, it's easier to learn a scripting language like PHP than it is to master Java or .Net. "
Earlier in the article a "joke" is made about us young'uns not knowing the difference between Javascript and Java, and here you essentially say the same thing.
I'm a young mobile developer who lives off of the cloud through mobile app development, and yet I spent the first three years of my programming career with .NET and Java. PHP and Javascript came later. I choose to use the cloud tools and scripting languages because they are the better choice for me a this moment, not because I simply don't understand "real" programming languages and platforms.
The article overall spends a lot of time trying to say that it isn't putting down fresh-faced developers yet all the while jabbing at them for their lack of understanding. I'm bored of my age group all being chucked in the same barrel and shot, it's arrogant and agist, and comes from a judgmental place.
Is it the lower than management pay? The temptation of a thankless job that will go wrong despite your best efforts.
I work for a major OEM manufacturer where I have to use Enterprise software and goddamn if I don't cringe whenever that software fails.
Down time measured in days. What? You are not in Sales? Well their stuff is working so fixing yours is not a priority.
We only recently only managed to get the Java versions in use in the company (the Java app is just a front end for a really clunky non-java application, its a Tandem application and thats all I'll say about that) down to two from four. I like flashy stuff like everybody else but if Java stuff causes my machine to grind down, get rid of it, I can deal with linky, texty stuff.
And of course, the software is usually running on underspecced servers. What do you mean we have to migrate to a more powerful server?! This application designed for 30K employees should be able to work with 150K users at a time!
Management, naturally, helps to aggravate the problem. Its preferable to EoL an application that is working, is easy to read, easy to use\ but a bitch to get data out of from to put into Excel spreadsheets than to create an ugly bastard that is hard to use, hard to read from, but that they can copy paste easily to spreadsheets. Who uses the application every day to document their cases? Users. Who uses the application once a week to get data to put into spreadsheet to berate people for not hitting the eternally shrinking goals? Managers. Guess who they develop for?
I can see why people don't want to work in the field and also when recruitment people expect new hires to have experience with such ancient cruft for a shit salary. Why would they want to make that choice? In my country, outsourcers are whining that there isn't enough personnel here that fit their needs. Does that mean you are willing to pay premium for the few blokes that are of use? What, people want higher salaries?!
I'm 23 and have been in my current job for the last 4 and a bit years. I've provided enterprise software for the likes of CitiGroup, HSBC, RBS, Lombard Direct and so on. I work with someone who is 22 and has been in a similar role for the last year or two.
I'd suggest that there is a higher percentage of older programmers who are not up to speed on the latest technology than there are younger programmers who are un-aware of enterprise software.
This just seems like a typical 'the yoof of today!' kind of story. I think that you might be getting confused because there are a lot more younger programmers than older programmers. Do you have any statistics to back up what you say?
AC
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
