Comment by sarchertech
6 hours ago
Enterprise software is complicated mostly because of number of customers it can support.
Bespoke software can be orders of magnitude less complex. There are many reasons companies choose to use vendor solutions, but for large organizations it’s usually not “we literally can’t hire enough engineers to build it.”
There are so many counter examples.
> Bespoke software can be orders of magnitude less complex.
Not in government. For payroll/HR, we're talking about hundreds of pages of legislative mandates, union bargaining rules, Title 5 statutory compliance, and FISMA/NIST regs. Just customizing something like PeopleSoft to fit is a large task in itself, let alone trying to implement bespoke software using an engineering pool that isn't even large enough to modernize the software it currently owns.
Bespoke sounds nice and works well in startups but that's not the context we're discussing. Check out Phoenix Pay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_pay_system and understand the US is even more complex.
I’ve worked on HR software. There are currently at least 3 large scale, bespoke, homegrown payroll/HR systems in use by the Federal government. There used to be many more. There are many reasons to outsource software but the government can’t hire enough engineers is not one of them. It’s clearly been done before.
>Just customizing something like PeopleSoft to fit is a large task in itself, let alone trying to implement bespoke software
Customizing large enterprise software is more like writing bespoke software than it is what most people think of when you use the word customization. You end up paying enormous vendor margins on top of the costs for something that is effectively bespoke software.
There is so much bespoke software out there that is at least as complex as government payroll software.
This AI phase reminds me of the early web, when "my cousin coulda done it in a week". Folks fail to appreciate the complexity of commercial realities.
Considering how bad most enterprise software is, I assumed the only real relevance was if the sales team ponied up some lavish perks to the right VP who only has to sign checks and never actually interact with the software.