I was going to say, a few thousands lines of code that reliably solves a real business problem for over a decade is pretty much the exact opposite of 'crapware'...

As long as you don’t care about stuff like maintainability or logging sure. The issue is that a lot of times businesses outgrow their bespoke Access app or whatever and then it’s a huge headache to untangle the reliance on it and go more robust. Of course if that never happens it’s great and frees up developers’ time for higher-value work.

I don't get the relation here?, most businesses care somewhat, and certainly the better run businesses do quite a bit, so they'll make sure to record down everything important about the software.

So when it goes wrong in many predictable ways it’s a nightmare. All the stuff software engineers put around software to make it reliable, fault tolerant, and generally having the expected behavior is not just for laughs but the result of hard-won experience.

Why would it be a 'nightmare' if they recorded everything down and understand their software, what it does, what it doesn't do, how it operates, etc.?

Database corruption, unexpected bugs, inability to account for new desired behaviors… have you worked on software before?

It seems like your describing more of a problem with the system between the screen and the chair.

e.g. 'inability to account for new desired behaviors' for presumably a core business system, that the business relies on, would almost certainly imply that.

As to your question, it doesn't really matter what my background is, I could be a ballet dancer and would still be able to reason out how businesses operate and how software historically has integrated. It's not some big secret.

> The issue is that a lot of times businesses outgrow their bespoke Access app or whatever... > Of course if that never happens it’s great..

It could also be argued that outgrowing your initial business app is good thing.

Lots of business don't outgrow it, because they don't grow :)

Indeed, it might be reasonable not to invest too much upfront, before you have scale and can afford to build stuff you won't outgrow.

The issue is there’s no engineering process around it, even in a shitty organization where the “engineering” is garbage.

One place I helped out at had a pretty awesome access app for doing some business functions. Way better than the Oracle whatever they failed to replace it with.

The problem was, nobody was willing to claim ownership. The business guy who wrote it was long gone, and IT would not accept an Access app.

> The problem was, nobody was willing to claim ownership. The business guy who wrote it was long gone, and IT would not accept an Access app.

If the business relies upon that Access app, and IT refuses to accept it, then it's a failure of IT to accept it and then replace it.

IT exists to serve the business.

If Nobody in the business is willing to sponsor the application then it shouldn't be there.

OK but does IT exist to serve the business by accepting responsibility for stuff that doesn’t meet their standards and they can’t really support? Why have qualified people at all then?

I can't speak to IT specifically, but generally the answer would be yes. Stuff happens, resulting in "nonstandard" or unexpected requests, and the decision on how to deal with them rests with the business. In my own work, this can often happen by accident when departments and business units are reorganized and acquired. I once got an entire product line dropped in my lap, that didn't work at all, hardware or software.

Many, if not most, professions are not nearly as well organized and optimized as IT, so we don't have things like silos and ticketing systems to regularize our work. I can imagine an IT worker who has never experienced a nonstandard request, but I can't imagine it in my own occupation.

[delayed]

I'm sure this happens all the time. The term is technical debt.

I think there's a kind of no-mans-land, where programs get too big for an individual hacker to manage, but too small to muster the programming department. Getting small tasks done on any kind of timeline is usually just a no-go.