My property taxes went up a couple years ago because the local residents decided to pay $2 million to have a flowage dredged and stocked with fish.
My property taxes are going up next year because the local residents decided to pay $25 million for a new sports complex at the high school.
Now, it may cost a couple mil to get a city wide fiber rollout, but after the initial build out, the monthly fees should cover peering and maintenance. So I get a 1 year bump in my taxes, and a life time of cheaper and faster internet access?
Now that's something I can get behind!
-Rick
"It turns out that there are zillions of little apps that make businesses run. Some of them are no more robust than an excel workbook on a well known file share. Some are Access applications. Lots of VB6 apps are still keeping businesses running."
I hear ya. Been right there in the trenches for almost 20 years now doing line of business application development/management. The organization I just started with has a product catalog that has over 1000 entries, with tons of additional excel/access solutions that remain undocumented.
But this is a problem. Each of these applications involve risks, maintenance, and support. The more of them there are (and some places have mountains of them) the more maintenance and support cost, the more often those risks present themselves.
The reason these apps exist is because of a business process, and that process was likely designed in a vacuum being held over a fire. It's not that the app is flawed, but the business process itself may be the source of the issue. Working with the business units to identify processes that have multiple IT needs and finding ways to streamline the process, not the apps, will save the company vastly more than sinking time into developing yet another application.
And that's where we get to the rub. There are already hundreds of POS suites, contract managers, document management, BRMs, ERPs, HR tools, taxes and accounting apps, etc... Any core business function that a company may have has likely already been solved with a tool that is vastly cheaper than what it would cost for us to build, with refined business processes built in, and with a significantly lower TCO including maintenance and support.
The world is full of giants. Stand on their shoulders so that your IT department can spend their time on projects that take your business where others can't.
-Rick
If you're just developing for the fun of it, have at.
But if your goal is to have a POS application, stop writing code right now. There exist hundreds of off the shelf POS apps all ready. For Windows, for Linux, thick clients, thin clients, web, desktop, green screen, etc...
Your time would be vastly better spent finding an existing product and adapting your business process to it. Especially if it is something that can tie into your accounting/inventory systems.
As the old saying goes, "Good developers write good code, great developers steal good code."
-Rick
Well, part of that is due to the scale. Union membership has been plummeting over the last few decades. We're down to ~14 million total union members in the US.
And we're at ~140 million total non-farm employees in the country.
Assuming that both corporations and unions perform 'evil' at the same rate, we should expect 9 times more 'evil' reports on corporations than we see on unions just as a matter of scale.
Even just some quick google-fu shows that expectation to have some truth. More reports of corporate driven voter intimidation are available than reports of union driven voter intimidation. That isn't to say that unions don't do horrible crap too. Hell, look at that mess in Nevada back in 2010. Uhg. And if union membership wasn't at such a low level and falling, I'd be more concerned about it. But as is, unions are going the way of the dinosaur. They're still making a lot of noise, but their political clout is faltering and they don't have the impact they once did.
-Rick
I just sent out the warning shot to my management group. 5 years to get there. 2 years of bickering and foot dragging before we have to have a plan in action so we can get Windows 10 rolling out on hardware replacement.
-Rick
Kleeneness is next to Godelness.