But when you build a skyscraper you don’t one shot a completed building that stays static its entire life - you build a set of empty floors that someone else designs & fits out, sometimes years after the building as a whole is commissioned, usually several times in the lifespan of the superstructure.
And in the fitting out there often are things that exist only to get customer feedback (of sales), such as model apartments, sample cubicle layouts etc.
So yes, you are right that engineering can guide us to building something right first time - the hard part from software perspective is usually building the right thing, no the thing right.
An interesting analogy I came across once but could never find again is that with software systems, we’re not building a building, we’re designing a factory that produces an output - the example was a mattress factory that took in raw rubber feedstock & cloth and produced mattresses.
Are you running a mattress factory? Or are you trying to run a hotel, and need mattresses, so you build a mattress factory? The "software industry" is that - dysfunctional with perverse incentives.
We should not be building the same software over and over and over and over. I've built the same goddamn app 10 times in my career. And I watch other people build it, making the same old mistakes over and over, like a thousand other people haven't already gone through this and could easily tell you how not to do it. In other engineering professions, they write that stuff down, and say "follow this plan" because it avoids all the big problems. Thank god we have a building code and not "agile buildings".
Agile sucks because it incentivizes those obvious mistakes and reinventing of wheels. Planning allows someone to stop and look up the correct way of building the skyscraper before it's 100 feet in the air with a cracked foundation.
Workday’s student offering is designed as a full student management offering like Banner et al, with the carrot that it’s internally integrated into the financial & HR systems, which avoids another vendor and also a massive and ongoing finger pointing exercise.
It’s also one of the few from-scratch cloud-first student management solutions.
Banner is just a pile of hacks on top of an Oracle ERP with 7 character names for everything in the core. At least that was the state of affairs as of a number of years ago.
Your system was configured by muppets if you don’t have a search box - it’s a massive beast that like all enterprise-grade software is a toolbox for you to bend to your will, but the downside is that if your configuration people don’t have empathy for the users (and looking at you especially, contract architects) you end up with a system that is optimised for whoever talks with the vendor, and not for anyone else.
A two week delay on including new versions would probably work more or less as well with a bunch less effort, but a local proxy looks like it’s going to be a lot more common very soon I’m guessing.
I think the reason that the big guys don’t make money out of old films is that if they did they’d be on the hook to pay the cast & crew(‘s retirement plans).
And I guess if there’s a whole-of-life policy sold in 1962 that hasn’t been terminated - I guess there’s a lot of grandfathered rules that are just easier to keep in their original systems.
I suspect the product telemetry would be more useful - things like success of interaction vs requiring subsequent editing, success from tool use, success from context & prompt tuning parameters would be for valuable to the product than just feeding more bits into the core model.
And in the fitting out there often are things that exist only to get customer feedback (of sales), such as model apartments, sample cubicle layouts etc.
So yes, you are right that engineering can guide us to building something right first time - the hard part from software perspective is usually building the right thing, no the thing right.
An interesting analogy I came across once but could never find again is that with software systems, we’re not building a building, we’re designing a factory that produces an output - the example was a mattress factory that took in raw rubber feedstock & cloth and produced mattresses.
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