Ask Lemmy

Amazon Chime.

I worked for a company that manufactured products and had been running on NetSuite as the ERP for about a decade when I got there. It had been customized and tweaked and worked pretty well for what we did over that time frame, with lots of time-saving automation. Shortly before I joined the company they were bought by a conglomerate and merged into a division with a couple other somewhat complimentary companies in the central US and west coast. Although it was supposed to be a merger of equals, it soon became apparent the west coast company had won the merger and was calling the shots. They were closer to our largest customer base and while our revenues were pretty similar, they shipped much smaller volumes and had much higher margins (they apparently at one point had a box that just had a Raspberry Pi or something similar inside that they sold for $5k/each). The big difference was we were a big name in a market with a lot of competition, so we had to be efficient and smart with our margins, while they were only big in markets where they had no competition; where they had competition they were often the last choice. While the plan was originally to move everyone to NetSuite, which already had options to run multiple companies/subsidiaries out of one instance, that was abruptly cancelled and we were told we would instead need to switch to Xtuple.

Xtuple was awful. NetSuite runs in a web browser but Xtuple opens multiple windows that look like something written in Java in the late ’90s. Want to copy some text? Unless it’s in an editable text field you can basically forget about it, and even if that field was once editable, many of them can never be edited again after the first time you save, or sometimes even as soon as you click out of it after your first time typing in it.

I don’t even know how much of it was Xtuple’s fault versus the company’s customizations. Where switching to NetSuite would’ve put all the companies in the same instance and allowed for one store to sell all the products, the plan to switch to Xtuple meant a separate server for each company, plus a fourth server to coordinate with each location. When you license Xtuple, you also get access to the source code and can make changes as needed. There was one guy at the west coast company who had total control of the software and no one else had access to it. It seemed like he used this opportunity to create the proverbial million lines of undocumented spaghetti code and guarantee job security. To try and help him with creating all the different Xtuple servers, they hired a consultant directly from Xtuple to create our instance, but when the spaghetti code guy came to integrate it with his part none of it worked, apparently because spaghetti code guy was doing all sorts of things in a non-standard way. This delayed our launch by 3 months because spaghetti code guy then went and rewrote the stuff the consultant did to make it work, and of course a lot of things still didn’t work right for several months after we launched.

Because Xtuple didn’t do everything NetSuite did, some functions were moved to outside software, like Customer/Technical Support to Zendesk. The built-in tools in NetSuite weren’t the best, but it was directly integrated so it pulled customer and product history in and could make an RMA directly in the ERP, so when the product arrived Receiving basically just had to push a button to check it in (the west coast company had never bothered putting their repairs in Xtuple much beyond listing the final price of the repair; they managed the actual repair process in a massive, unwieldy Google spreadsheet). Zendesk didn’t have that, so all of the data had to be manually entered twice, once in Zendesk, then again in Xtuple. We also didn’t put our old customer history into Xtuple, including even just a customer list, partly because the west coast company assured us they already had all the same customers as us (it turned out they maybe had a third of our customers, and that only counts business customers, not individuals). Since we had access to the code it seems like we should’ve been able to tie directly into Xtuple, but spaghetti code guy would only allow custom APIs he created. We never even got that to work because a year or so in the head honchos decided to move to Salesforce instead, so they spent a ton more money trying to make that work. When I left they still weren’t communicating, and people coming in from the conglomerate were starting to ask why millions of dollars had been spent on multiple transitions to rebuild functionality that still wasn’t working 3 years in. They were also cancelling the 4th Xtuple server to control the other 3 because they just couldn’t seem to make it work.

In the end there are a lot of things I don’t miss from that company, but I found Xtuple to be especially x-stupid. Still, I don’t know if it was the software itself or spaghetti code guy. Everyone acknowledged he was a problem when he wasn’t in the room, except maybe the CFO, but no one could do anything about it because it seemed like the businesses would completely halt without him.

I supported a couple dental offices for a while, and I hope I never have to touch EagleSoft again....

CET Designer with in house tools added. Nothing worked well, or even worked as documented for longer than a couple months. And engineering projects using it would last years... We'd go to do as builts and nothing worked the way it did when the project began.

Most people wouldn't know about the tool but the ECO suite of tools for ISPs to manage devices is shit (unless they rewrote it since I last worked on it). Companies paid millions in licensing and the damn thing barely worked. It could take two hours to install despite being bundled as an RPM. Code was also a mess of overrides and black magic techniques that made it near impossible to trace and test. And I just remembered the UI was written in Java and it was source controlled by SVN.

Outlook mail server in 1999.

Only used for 2 weeks while doing some Y2K relief on site.

Eeeeewww. Felt gross after.

For context, I was using Exim4 at home at the time.

Groupwise. What an ugly, barely functional piece of crap. I'd set notifications for recurring tasks and sometimes it would remind me and then randomly stop for a while. Sending email felt like the early days of AOL. I left for about a year and when I came back, they'd switched to Outlook, which I don't love, but it's miles better than what we had.

The job I worked at for that year had a custom Salesforce thing that made me want to find whoever built it and throw something at them. It was supposed to track what benefits clients were receiving, like SNAP, disability, etc, but it was borderline impossible to read, case notes would cut off, and searches would routinely just not work. It soured me on Salesforce permanently if that's the kind of garbage they're releasing.

Sorry but FreeCAD, it's just not made for professional use. I don't blame it, I blame my boss for being so tight he had us on Linux cos of that and then plus wouldn't buy me a CAD program.

Back then Web based options like Onshape didn't exist so there wasn't much else..

Startup life for you...

QuickBooks, by far. Running that on premise (which we did before they offered it as a service) was an absolute pain.

3DS MAX, Zbrush

At my last job we used a proprietary rapid application development tool to do .. everything. It had been used for decades and it’s basically a designer window like Microsoft’s asp net stuff and pseudo code in the background for multi Plattform Desktops and web Applications. The rad in itself is okay: it is written in c++, reasonably fast and has node and js integrations. Buut as said the tool had been used for decades without major refactorings or rewrites or what not. So the codebase was a mix of awful ( you can name variables if so if if is possible ) and straight up outdated. I’d regularly find „commit-comments“ (the integrated vcs is also shit) written before I was born. It was a pain to work with. And we never used the js or node integrations since the new dev lead didn’t know much about developing outside of in said tool which made everything more complicated. So I’m kinda happy to work with js now.

Clearcase and Clearquest. Fortunately we didn't use it for very long.

React