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If you could only have one piece of SN swag, what would it be?
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To be a kind of moral Unix, he touched the hem of Nature's shift.
-- Shelley
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday March 09 2020, @03:30PM (2 children)
Maybe you're coding the wrong thing.
At one point in my career (1987) I co-wrote this thing for the (classic) Macintosh called Timbuktu. It got our small company acquired by a bigger company. We had built this to help us support our accounting software over the phone. There was "Carbon Copy" for PCs, but nothing like that for Macintosh. When I started building it, my coworker and I weren't even sure if this could be done to have a remote GUI.
For a few years it was a fantastic meteoric rise. Trade shows. Full page ads in MacWorld, etc. Awards at trade shows. (Aside: my coworker and I went to present at a larger Mac user group meeting in the midwest near us. We heard people talking excitedly about "real Mac programmers!". We snickered to ourselves. We were just a couple ordinary guys who started in a small town.)
But eventually it leveled off.
I ended up working on accounting products again. At the time I wondered if this wasn't a blessing in disguise. These products were stable. The customers for them weren't going away, soon, maybe never. It wasn't as glamorous as Timbuktu and related products that were developed. But it was steady and stable. I'm still doing that today.
It more than adequately pays the bills. Through a number of changes, I'm now at a much larger corporation -- but I never changed jobs. Everything changed around me.
The point
Being a rockstar programmer on some glamorous award-winning product is fun, and for a time profitable, but boring business software is what makes the world go around. Today's glamorous thing might be to work at Google, or Facebook.
There is more boring business software than most people realize. Every type of business needs specialized software. Several levels above my business unit, my employer makes software for cities, government, schools, lawyers, cabinet makers, hospitals, and other things. It's all boring. But it is stable, makes money, and isn't going away in the near future. How do they keep the store shelves stocked? Exchange medical records between offices? Send out natural gas utility bills, and keep track of meter readings, which meters are where in inventory or at what addresses, etc. There's more to computerize than is obvious.
You might not get rich, but it is a living.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday April 02 2020, @10:01PM (1 child)
In my usage of said boring software over the years it seems to me that an awful lot of it is written poorly by people who have no idea what the end user is trying to or has to accomplish on a daily basis. Usually it works in a generic manner, it sort of does everything but does nothing well or completely. This is probably due to the fact that the buying decisions are made by people who have no idea what the end user is trying to or has to accomplish on a daily basis, or do and no longer care as they no longer have to do it themselves.
If one could make software that is quickly customizable to a particular customer's needs it seems to me there could be a large market for that. Of course, it has to survive my point about who makes the buying decisions...
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 03 2020, @03:20PM
That is true.
From the early stages of my product's development (eg, the product I work on, but my employer owns it) we already had decades of experience in this market and understood our customers' business. We had already been through two green-screen text versions (eg, first and then major rewrite), one desktop GUI version (major rewrite), and then to the web. We pay attention to customer feedback. I am interested in feedback, especially negative feedback. In short, we've been doing this for a long time (decades). It's not some johnny-come-lately web application.
The more customizable you make software, the more complex it is to design, maintain, then configure for a customer, and then use by the user. Definitely have necessary customizability. Avoid that which is unnecessary. Understand the customer's business and workflow. Design workflows around that.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.