I think the author underestimates how boring and simple 90% of enterprise software is. The part that isn’t powering aircraft and power plants. So much of it originates from one-nighters, badly managed subcontractors, and requirements that are of low quality to begin with (because they are written by people who have very different day jobs). And you know what? Most of that runs 24/7 without a glitch. LLMs just gives us more of that. And maybe it’s even better
Yes. Bad UI, cumbersome flows, too little automation, … plenty of flaws, but the business just keeps on running. Orders received, invoices written, documents shared, …
I guess experiences differ across companies and industries. I work in logistics. Logistics deals with messy processes and a messy reality all the time. A tiny fraction of that is due to buggy software. Some of it could be avoided with great software, but again: that we also didn’t have before LLMs
Orders missed/not fulfilled, invoices with the wrong amounts, wrong documents shared or shared with the wrong audience - all these and a bunch of more errors are still consistent with business not dying, yet that's definitely not the mythical 24/7 without a glitch
There is probably a marvelous software core in many large enterprises but at least in my experience it’s surrounded by layers and layers of very basic stuff. Read from a database, write to a database (often not even with any logic dealing with parallel read/writes). Excel Macros. Basic forms to submit data. Scripts to print some stuff from a database. …
I wish that were the case, my multiple experiences are quite different. its not that the software doesn't work - but the software doesn't actually capture the process, or properly talk with other systems, or isn't set up for a new business model or product line...then you have layers and layers of "tools" created to make it work, and a bunch of people using spreadsheets and csv files to do workarounds, and then the guy that wrote a bunch of the tool's 10 years ago leaves and there is no documentation or it needs to be re written in order to upgrade some other piece of the system.
i guess another way of saying this is that on the micro level a lot of this stuff is not rocket science, but at the macro level it becomes hugely complex.
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i guess another way of saying this is that on the micro level a lot of this stuff is not rocket science, but at the macro level it becomes hugely complex.