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by jeremyjh 33 days ago
What concerns me about this is that as these stories multiply and circulate people will just completely stop buying software/SAAS from startups, because 90% or more will be this same thing. It will completely kill the market.
4 comments

Oracle have routinely had multimillion pound contract failures and people keep buying from them. Big vendors are too big to fail.
Those are custom software or heavily customized implementations of ERP and similar systems for very large organizations. I’m talking more about the SMB market where today it’s possible for a small team to carve out a niche and make a nice living or even bootstrap a venture that competes with a large player that has poor UX or antiquated feature designs.

The reason Oracle can continue failing at those massive projects is simple: everyone fails at them routinely and often it’s the customers fault.

>The reason Oracle can continue failing at those massive projects is simple: everyone fails at them routinely and often it’s the customers fault.

It's even simpler. Youre not paying oracle for some delapidated HR system. You're paying for the legion of accountability that is their on-site engineers to fix stuff for you when things screw up. You're essentially subscribing to a team of engineers you don't need to directly pay salary and benefits to.

People who think you can out efficiency that kind of accountability don't understand how large orgs think.

I used to gripe about various ERP companies but after having dealt with enough, yeah, that's just what the world of ERP systems is like. You will spend your time even with the best of them desiring to scream endlessly at everyone who works there. And they also know your pain but are powerless to help.
there are no 2 identical deployed ERP systems.

It's just an umbrella term for "weak process glue code".

Same with Deloitte
no one's getting fired for hiring either one.
> It will completely kill the market.

it will kill all the people in that hospital too

What is this, Humanitarian News?
The real Hackers were the ones actually trying to minimize suffering all along. Not reproduce it at scale.
But the Torment Nexus is such an interesting technical challenge! and I don’t personally torment people: I just move protobufs around! - Software Engineer #1 and #2 excuses
thankyou
Yeah but only one of those actually puts those responsible in prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Holmes

> On January 3, 2022, the jury found Holmes guilty on four of the seven counts related to defrauding investors: three counts of wire fraud, and one of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She was found not guilty on four counts related to defrauding patients

Those patients weren't hurt. Totally different from the post you're replying to.
I mean, the stories about how stuff was getting built in the late 90s/early 2000s aren’t much worse.
Or you end up with a certification process, which will of course introduce it's own problems but startups doing things the right way and not just "moveing fast and breaking things" can thrive.