Mohacsy's Safe Portfolio Member Forum

[Elroy Jetson]

Outside the tech business computers are merely a tool which have replaced a large number of clerical employees. Relying on software without the time and resources to create it is essentially hiring a large number of untrained clerical employees many of whom have alcohol problems.

The 128 Zellers locations in Canada provided Target with an opportunity to spend $1.6 billion for a business they wouldn't be ready to run until several years of software modification had been completed - a job which would have cost more than the 128 Zellers locations.

This was the same problem faced by the Affordable Healthcare Act creating software to be used by a huge volume of peoples on an impossibly short deadline. They had hired excellent software engineers who knew the software wasn't completed by the deadline. Programmers doing their job well should include a lot of written notes explaining what there module does and what needs to be done - and these software engineers did, making it easy to eventually make the software what it was supposed to be.

Looking through the parts of the Java code creating problems led to English language notations:

"TODO: add functionality to show alert text after too many tries at log in"

"make sure we don't try to do this before the saml has been posted if (window.registrationInitialSessionCallsComplete)"

"Attention: This file is generated once and can be modified by hand"

"Fill In this with actual content. Lorem Ipsum" (LAtin for pain itself)

"TODO: maybe modify the below to use a similar method instead"

http://www.cio.com/article/2380827/developer/developer-6-software-development-lessons-from-healthcare-gov-s-failed-launch.html

This problem was successfully addressed by shifting to a reliance on existing insurance agents who essentially became the software by exploring all the options with clients and submitting the final enrollment information in batch form - until the software was fully coded to take on as much traffic as it faced. That took some really good managers to pivot like that.


With the nearest Sears store no 90 minutes away I bought vacuum cleaner bags on Sears.com. Something which would have taken no more than two minutes on Amazon required more than two hours of work on Sears.com as their software was missing complete product descriptions and continually malfunctioned serving up pages with error messages.

Amazon has spent many billions of Dollars and a couple of decades making their software what it is. Amazon now makes a tremendous amount of money creating and managing this sort of e-commerce platform for other companies.

Faced with a problem which only got worse, and wanting their own system, Sears last February opened a software development office in Seattle and hired away a large number of Amazon software engineers. It will still take a lot of money and time to create a favorable customer experience. - http://www.geekwire.com/2015/sears-plans-new-seattle-engineering-office-hires-ex-amazon-execs-big-home-services-tech-push/

It's like designing and building a shopping center or an entire city. Even with the best contractors it takes lots of time and money to build. People not familiar with the process for some reason don't understand how nearly identical building software is to building a city.