vain_cain

A couple months after I started studying software engineering in 2017 I made a facial recognition desktop app that was just a few open source projects bundled together. It would just write the name and age of the person that was standing in front of the camera if it recognized the person. It was very unimpressive, but what got one of my professors attention was that I managed to scrape the college intranet web app for pictures(with names, surnames and year of birth) of pretty much everyone who ever attended or is attending the college(including all the professors). I was inspired after watching "The social network" movie where mark scrapes the yearbooks for pictures of students.

When it was finished I showed it to a few colleagues, one of which told the professor. I showed it to him and he got me a interview with a friend of his who was looking for an employee. We went for a coffee and he offered me the job right away which i took. A few weeks later i quit college, and I'm still mostly working for the company that gave me that first job, but I have my own company now.

Out of high school I've worked a couple of years for A1 telecom(in Croatia) in customer service. When someone called, all I was required to ask is their OIB(Personal identification number) and they could literally ask me for anything if it's a residential user.

Want to cancel 20 numbers that still got 2 years until the contracts expire? Sure, let me do that for you. Want to change sim? Sure, just give me the new sim number. Want to add 5 tariffs to your plan? Sure, do you want phones with that?

That was 6 years ago but I still got friends I talk to there, and not much has changed.

git repo for this:

https://github.com/brianhama/SkillzTruth

I immediately thought of the book "Thinking, fast and slow" from reading your comment. I don't know if you're familiar with it, but it talks about two "Systems" that guide our thinking. From the description of the book: "System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical."

The more you do something, or think about something - the more it becomes a "System 1" operation(fast, intuitive). Like typing on a keyboard for example, when you first started using a keyboard you had to think about every letter you want to hit, but now you probably don't even think about it for a millisecond. I guess what I'm trying to say is: Intuitive understanding = Action * Repetition.

Read the book if you haven't, it might be the kind of material you're looking for. I'm not a big fan of psychology and I think it's 90% mumbo jumbo, but this book hit a few nails for me.

>It's possible you might not have worked in erp space, especially sustainment / maintenance (as opposed to implementation) long enough to see true customization price.

I haven't, but some of my colleagues have been in the space for 20+ years.

>Every. Single. Customization. You make, which makes so much sense to seemingly eagerly satisfy the user during implementation, will be a massive pain, forever, with every patch and upgrade and new functionality released by vendor in perpetuity, and will inevitably cause performance and failure issues eventually. And will only be getting more expensive and painful to maintain exponentially over many years.

Wrong. Upgrades almost never break your customizations, because in the ERP space backwards compatibility is verry much a thing with the exception of a few extreme cases now and then. I've migrated customizations from a 2004 version of NAV to a 2022 version of Business Central - even the name of the software changed, and the language in which it is written, but the customizations were almost plug and play after running the code migration tool provided by Microsoft.

>A) number of processes Bob from accounting or Fatima from HR believe are absolutely crucial and immutable and special and unicorn and mandatory, is way way higher than processes which actually are special and must be preserved.

I never said employees wishes should be blindly followed, you still have to do the consulting part of the job...

>B) The threshold of customization at which erp no longer makes sense is in fact very very low. >If you actually, really properly are a special snowflake of a company and your convoluted hr or finance or pay processes are your key immutable competitive advantage, then don't get an erp. Other name for erp is cots, commercial off the shelf, which strongly hints as to how its meant to be used. With erp, customizations should be fought tooth and nail on every level,and that's a largely accepted industry wisdom.

Wrong. The benefit you get on the accounting side, and the all data being in one place side(reporting) outweighs almost any customization that needs to be done - because, good luck making those 2 things from scratch. And good luck living without those 2 things if you're a mid/big company.

>If a customer doesn’t like that then an off the shelf product is the worst choice they can make unless they are prepared to hire a significant in house dev team

Correct. This is the problem my company solves. We are ERP consultants/dev's who also know web development. Through the years we've made 50+ web apps to extend Microsoft's ERP, most of which can be used in most companies with similar needs with slight modifications.

And, of course you don't blindly follow a process. There's always some improvements to be made to the process before developing an app for it.

EDIT: Drastically changing workflows for employees within huge companies will ultimately almost always cost you more... It all depends on the company of course, but we have to generalize a bit.

You're right, for some reason I just assumed all ERP's are as easily extendible as Microsoft's. It just makes sense they would be oriented that way due to the complexity of the world. I often hear horror stories about SAP, and can't for the life of me figure out why it's so popular(except it's more oriented than other ERP's to non-tech savvy people).

I see a lot of comments here saying a company should adapt their business processes to their ERP, and in my experience they are wrong - with the exception of accounting(Good luck trying to customize accounting modules within ERPs to fit your process).

I don't work with SAP, but I've been working with Microsoft's ERP(Dynamics NAV/Business Central) my whole professional career(almost 5 years).

When it comes to shipping, manufacturing, HR, supply, sales, planning, quality assurance etc... every big company is going to have a million edge cases which are impossible to cover with the standard functionality of an ERP. And most importantly - hundreds, or maybe thousands of employees that have gotten used to working a certain way.

When you try to make your process fit to a standard ERP functionality you are fighting two dragons:

1) Working your way around edge cases - with the right consultants/developers this doesn't have to be a big pain.

2) Getting your employees to change the way they have been working for years, or even decades. And in addition giving them an overwhelming UI - I've never seen this work as planned. This is also probably the reason the company your mother works for had so many pains.

On the other hand, if you try to make the ERP fit to your processes, there's only one dragon you need to slay - extending the ERP's functionality.

I can only speak for Microsoft's ERP, but everything that is impossible or hard to extended within the ERP itself can easily be extended through an outside application. And by doing so, you can probably even make the employees job easier by keeping the process the same, but giving him an UI that isn't overwhelming.

> Small/medium sized non-tech companies don't value technology and don't understand its importance.

I work closely with IT departments within such companies through ERP implementations/localizations and can coroborate this. In my experience 9/10 non-tech companies with their own IT departments(1+ person) don't value and especially don't understand what their IT department does.

On the other side, the people working within such departments are in my experience just terribly bad at sticking up for themselves, and explaining what needs to be explained. They don't draw lines where lines need to be drawn and they see themselves in the same way as the management/leadership does.

I'm in my mid 20s and have been working for a small 5-person company since I started developing professionally 4 years ago. I know through my peers and offers I received that I could get at least twice as much compensation if I switch companies, and it doesn't bother me one bit.

At my current company I'm in touch with everything. From setting up servers, developing on every part of the stack, deploying and maintaining applications to working with clients on understanding their needs and business processes and then working out a solution for them. I get to argue about estimates and negotiate. I got to understand how manufacturing, sales, shipping, accounting, calculating employee payrolls and second incomes works. And as a bonus the people I work with are some of the best people I've ever met.

The amount of experience I'm getting here is definitely worth getting payed less.

I think you misunderstood what the commenter was trying to say. He didn't mention anything about becoming emotionless, but becoming less emotional. I think we can all agree that new first world generations are on the extreme side of the spectre of emotions and would benefit from leaning to the opposite side a bit.

I kind of think what you said here actually proves my point. I didn't mean it's not adventurous or exciting, it's just that it becomes too familiar when you do it repetitively for the same reason under the same circumstances. I've been doing occasional consulting work for the past 3 years for which I have to travel once or twice a month on most months. When I first started, every place I went to felt adventurous and unique. And now, if I'm traveling to someplace I've never visited even when I have to work on something I've never worked before, it just doesn't feel remotely unique or adventurous as it did before, especially in retrospect. I used to love talking to my friends what exciting things I've seen or people I've met, but now I don't think about it twice when I get home. My mind just kind of got used to it, it doesn't store it in the database with the unique or adventurous attributes set to true. Stuff just kind of goes in the "traveling for work" basket in the mind and gets all shuffled up, I've already forgot most names and faces of the people I've worked with as well and it hasn't even been that long. Sometimes I'll leave a meeting and 5 minutes later won't be able to remember someone's name. But on the other hand, when I'm going somewhere and the circumstances have nothing to do with my work, even if I'm going somewhere I've already been before but the circumstances are different this time, both at that time and in retrospect it feels more unique and adventurous. I think it's because when you do something repetitively, for the same reason and under similar circumstances, the associations in your mind kind of blend it all together.

I think you have a point. But it sounds to me like your example was more similar to repetitive traveling for work than a unique travel experience each time. I don't know much about touring, but how different could've your daily routine really have been?

I have an e-mail in my description, you can ask me what you'd like to know there.

I never said anything about not understanding them. If it's something simple, like getting a date from a string, a quick glance will tell me if it'll work. If it's more complex, a quick glance or two will give me the general idea and then I can test it against what I think will be edge cases. If you don't know what kind of a string you'll have to process then you can't really know if any regex is correct, and if you do testing it in most cases is pretty easy and quick. You'd have to test even if you write it yourself. And in the cases where it's wrong it usually gives me a good starting point.

I mostly work with data mining on my personal projects(which is a couple of hours every day), and I'm pretty sure I didn't have to write a single regex since I've started using Copilot. It's hard for me to even imagine how I used to do it before, and how much time I've wasted on stupid mistakes and typos. Now I just write a comment of what I want and an example string. It does the job without me having to modify anything 99% of the time, even for complex stuff. Sure, sometimes it gives an overly complicated solution but it almost always works. Exciting times.