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A comment on Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing. Parent comment

Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by eru on Tuesday November 25, 2025 @08:57PM (#46053315)
> If you need to make a national payroll, you have to use it for a small town with a payroll of 50 people first, get the bugs worked out, then try it with a larger town, then a small city, then a large city, then a province, and then and only then are you ready to try it at a national level.

You could also try to buy some off-the-shelf solutions? Making payroll, even for very large organisations, isn't exactly a new problem.

As a corollary I would also suggest: subsidiarity.

> Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution.

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity)

If you solve more problems more locally, you don't need that many people at the national level, thus making payroll there is easier.

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Re:Trillions Spent and Big Software Projects Are Still Failing by tsimionescu on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @01:14AM (#46054668)
I think you'll find that is exactly what people do. However, payroll solutions are highly customized for every individual company and even business unit. You don't buy a payroll software in a box, deploy it, and now you have payroll. Instead, you pay a payroll software company, they come in and get information about your payroll systems, and then they roll out their software on some of your systems and work with you to make sure their customizations worked etc. There's rarely any truly "off-the-shelf" software in B2B transactions, especially the type of end-user solutions that also interact with legal systems.

Also, governments are typically at least an order of magnitude larger than the largest companies operating in their countries, in terms of employees. So sure, the government of Liechtenstein has fewer employees than Google overall, but the US government certainly does not, and even Liechtenstein probably has way more government employees than Google employees in their country.

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