So very much this when it comes to how easily money can be wasted on these kinds of deals.

Can’t agree at all with the ageism though, which is wholly uncalled for.

Careful with your line of reasoning.

There is a difference between "ageism", and "being honest about how hard some problems are to solve".

There are a lot of unbelievably brilliant 22-year-olds.

None of them have been building enterprise-scale architectures that turn messy, vague, and incomplete requirements that model even more messy, vague, and incomplete business processes for 20 years.

There are certainly a lot of 22 year olds that have been led to believe that they’re unbelievably brilliant.

I’m sure some of them are. I’m sure a lot of 22 year olds were brilliant in the 80’s and 90’s too.

Unless your thesis is that there’s been a sudden upsurge in the proportion of superintelligent earthlings in the last 25 years I’m unsure what your point is.

> None of them have been building enterprise-scale architectures that turn messy, vague, and incomplete requirements that model even more messy, vague, and incomplete business processes for 20 years.

Exactly! If you’ve been doing that for 20 years I do not want to work with you, since you are apparently perfectly content with that status quo.

I’ve been doing it for two years and it’s already too much. My highest priority is fixing their chronically useless requirements.

I’m glad you’ve clarified as when you said that it sounded like you’re astonished at the level of apathy and/or incompetence you’re surrounded with and I was worried for a second that you’ve just too little experience to understand that your predecessors have very likely been trying for much of that time to push back against the status quo and have better ideas implemented, likely swimming upstream against resistance you’re wholly unaware of.

But it’s clearly not that after all, which is a relief - I’m glad it’s just a case of everyone else that’s come before you being useless.

Boomers, am I right?

Is it just me, or are you being needlessly sarcastic here?

The resistance is ridiculous, but it’s still the single most valuable thing we can be doing to improve our project delivery.

Given the current division of people that care/not care (or are disinclined to act on it?). It is entirely likely that none of my predecessors did.

That said, if they had been doing it (and made any progress), I really wonder what the previous situation was. Maybe there just weren’t any requirements at all?

From experience I would suggest that it's very likely they had a very clear idea of where the problems were and tried to solve them, but found that they were not a priority upstream.

It's still an absurd situation, but I doubt very much it's the result of apathy - or at the very least the result of apathy from your direct predecessors.

Doing something for 20 years does not necessarily make someone better at it than someone who’s done it for 5 years. Arguably doing something for that long could even make you worse.

I don't mean to support any ageism and would be happy to withdraw my age reference.

What that may leave is decision makers who don't always have a high enough level of digital or technical literacy.

Folks who are not competent in technology decisions and implementations being in positions of decision making and spending is the point I was trying to make.

Ever heard of the Peter principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle) ?

Haha, have heard of that principle but not what it was called.

>Beware Management Consultants and Accountants encroaching into "IT". Their worlds are drying up because tech folks can learn business easier than business folks can learn tech.

Could say the exact same thing about tech recruiters

> and use Excel as the height of their digital literacy

In Germany we literally use fax and enter data by hand. A project that successfully moved things to an emailing Excel sheets based workflow would be absolutely revolutionary.

My former business partner back in the Web 1.0 days (hey D) had remarkable experience in scaling large systems. Studied under ast. Rolled his own ETL language to power primary research for a Nobel-prize winning social scientist. Could sound like Werner Herzog on demand. He’s the kind of man anyone shuts up and listens to. While helping him clean up a failed $25mm Deloitte project circa 1996, we got drunk in a Manhattan bar. Sometime around martini #3 he said:

“The next 10 years of software will be very boring. The entire field of CS will be employed turning paper process into digital process, at great cost. Almost all of these projects will fail because Americans are admirably earnest but tragically over-confident. You underestimate paper.”

“Good money for us though. But have a hobby to occupy your mind or you will be miserable. Zum Wohl.”

And that’s how I ended up order an ill-considered 4th martini. He was correct, although the interregnum was perhaps 2-3 years shorter than he predicted. Or 15 years longer depending on how one judges these things.

No longer true:

https://www.zdf.de/nachrichten/panorama/corona-test-digital-...

And it wasn't really true before either, most of the Ämter used the Demis system.

That's very well put. And likely where a lot of companies remained. It would be interesting to see how the pandemic affected those operations.

It doesn’t sound like that at all. “channel their inner Steve Jobs” sounds like everyone is staring at the clouds and practising some blue sky thinking, while the OP you replied to is talking about managing legacy systems, old data and bringing along an existing work force into using a new system. These are all the diametric opposite of “Steve Jobs architecting”.

I can expand on the Steve Jobs reference.

Apple is about creating usable technology for the masses, not the few.

Apple also simplified access to legacy systems, like buying music and making it digital. Or maybe using your watch or phone to pay.

IPhone is geared for ease of use for anyone to adopt, including folks who arent super tech saavy..

Apple's innovation is charging a premium to create beginners in tech adoption who might not be experts at tech, who want yo feel empowered by everything just working.

As someone that’s been using Apple products for a few decades I don’t think I can agree that they make “for the masses, not the few”.

Their market share figures would show that if that’s their aim then they are failing. IMO Apple makes premium products for a specific kind of customer and have little regard for issues like backwards compatibility. Which is absolutely fine. But probably not a model you’d want the government to follow.

When thinking of Apple, I wonder..

Was the Apple II for beginners? School children?

Was the original Macintosh easier for beginners to use than other computers?

Was the Apple Quicktime Pro one of the first digital cameras that anyone could relatively pick up and start using?

Was the iPod the first digital music player that just worked to buy and download music from end to end?

Was iPhone.. despite arriving as a smartphone a decade after Palm, etc, was the first usable smartphone for the masses?

Was iPad the first tablet that also just worked? Seems like anyone who can't use a laptop can use their finger on an iPad.

How about that AppleTV? Can anyone use it? It's easier than my AndroidTV.

What about that Apple watch, how many people who were new to wearables had it as their first? Seems popular with the masses.

Experts are usually the few, not the masses.

There's no doubt apple charges a premium. Their devices on average last 4-6 years, longer than the Android I'm typing this on.

Rather than being first, they do try to get it right for the masses. I'm not a happy Apple user, or fan with the keyboard fiasco. Apple's history though remains what it is.. easier to adopt by beginners.

45% of Americans use an iPhone. That would require users across the economic spectrum.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/236550/percentage-of-us-...

It's users, as a percentage of mobile phone users (80% of population). So if a family have one iPhone, they can all count as users.

iPhone only bring affordable to richer people who mostly want the latest means lots of second hand items. I'll warrant Android users at the lower end keep their phones longer.

> Edit: Beware Management Consultants and Accountants encroaching into "IT". Their worlds are drying up because tech folks can learn business easier than business folks can learn tech.

Sounds plausible but I sadly only observe the opposite of management consulting “drying up”

I agree on observing the opposite.

My hope is leaders with tech backgrounds can grow into that space. Its far more lucrative than most software only endeavours.