What industry secret are you aware of that most people aren't?(programming.dev)

Okay then the users aren’t subscribers, thier boss or the boss above that are. And that person doesn’t really care how hard it is to use. They care about the presentation they gave to other leadership about all the great features the software has. And if they drop it now, they look like a fool, so deal with it.

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Lightor@lemmy.world

1 point

8 months ago

They do care, %100 they care. If you take longer to do task X because the SaaS solution crashes or is unavailable, or causes issues in finance, or a dozen other things then the company will very much care. I literally work at a SaaS company and hear complaints from clients. Money is all that matters, if your solution isn’t as good at making/saving them money as another solution, you get dropped. And reliability is a big part of that. A solution that frequently has issues is not a money-making/saving system that can be relied on.

It’s not about looking like a fool; it’s about what your P&L looks like. That’s what actually matters. Say you made a nice slide deck about product X and got buy-in. Walking that back is MUCH easier to do than having to justify a hit to your P&L.

What experience do you have to be making these claims?

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Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world

0 points

8 months ago

I have 30 years of work experience on both sides of the equation with companies of varying size. Once a company gets to somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees, the 2nd level managment starts to attract professionally ambitious people who prioritize thier career over the work to a more a more extreme degree. They never walk anything back. Every few years they will often replace a solution (even a working one) so that they can take credit for a major change. Anyway, you get enough of these and they start to back each other and squeeze out anyone who cares about the work. I have been told in one position that it doesn’t matter if you are right, you don’t say anything negative about person X’s plan. And many other people from other companies and such have echoed that over the years. Now small companies often avoid this. But most software targets the big companies for the big paydays. Of the ones I have worked at, some even openly admitted that financially they couldn’t justify fixing a user issue over a new feature that might sell more product because the user issues don’t often lead to churn, where as new features often seal a deal.

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Lightor@lemmy.world

1 point

8 months ago

You seem to be basing how the entire industry works on some people you’ve encountered who want to climb the ladder. Again, when you stand in front of a board and have to justify your EBITDA, it doesn’t matter how good your PowerPoint slide was. They don’t have to walk it back, the P&L is numbers, they have to justify those numbers or deal with not hitting budget. A company runs off numbers not initiatives people want to push.

You seem to be ignoring the fact that you have to report metrics to investors. Spend, rev, output, etc. And a poor SaaS solution that has poor quality negatively impacts those numbers. Numbers don’t lie, no matter how much spin you put on them. You say you have 30 years of experience both consuming and delivering SaaS solutions but seem to ignore that you have defended your P&L and your performance, all numbers, not office politics. Investors only care about money, dollars and cents, numbers. So what happens when solution X that Bob pushed and no one can talk bad about tanks your topline, or your EBITDA? Then what? You tell the board not to say anything bad about it? That just doesn’t make sense.

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3 points

8 months ago

And if the business needs aren’t met, said businesses will go to another SaaS company that promises them a better, brighter future.

The user might not be the subscriber, but the user being less productive because the software is getting in their way, will irritate the subscriber.

I know a SaaS company that put thousands upon thousands of engineering hours into making small (and sometimes large) optimizations over their overall crappy architecture so their enterprise customers (and I’m talking ~6 out of the top 10 largest companies in one industry in the US) wouldn’t leave them for a solution that doesn’t freeze up for all users in a company when one user runs a report. Each company ran in a silo of their own, but for the bigger ones… I’m not going to give exact numbers, but if you give every user a total of half an hour of unnecessary delays per day, that’s like 500 hours of wasted time per day per 1000 employees. Said employees were performing extremely overpriced services, so 500 hours of wasted time per day might be something like 100k income lost per day. Not an insignificant number even for billion dollar companies.

I’ve since left the company for greener pastures and I hear the new management sucks, but the old one for sure knew that they were going to lose their huge ass clients over performance issues and bugs.

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Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world

0 points

8 months ago

The key phrase was work well. You are saying they have a motive for it to work. Like not freeze up. I am saying they have no motive for it to work well. As in be user friendly or efficient or easy to use.

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boonhet@lemm.ee

1 point

8 months ago

It still worked - you could use the software with occasional hiccups, it’s not like there was data loss or anything. It just didn’t work WELL.

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Lightor@lemmy.world

1 point

8 months ago

Ok, well really splitting hairs on what “working well” means but ok. Why do UX designers exist? I mean if you have a bad UI that takes a user 10 min to do something that can be done in 10 seconds in another solution, you lose. Time is money. Anyone who has ever been in magament knows it’s all about cost vs output. If a call center employee can handle 2x more cases with another solution due to a better UX, they will move to that.

You are saying efficiency doesn’t matter, which is just %100 false. A more efficient solution makes/saves more money. It saves time, which is also money and improves agility of the team. How can you say with a straight face that a business doesn’t care about efficiency of it’s workers…

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Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world

1 point

7 months ago

Because I have worked with software for 30 years. When the employee is salaried, thier time costs nothing. I will say I have no experience with call centers. So those may be an exception. I believe the majority of computer use jobs are salary though.

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Lightor@lemmy.world

1 point

7 months ago

Ugh, wrong again. Time is money. People have limited bandwidth and output, you want to get at much output as you can for the salary spend while realizing each person has a finite output. You keep saying things like “time costs nothing” and “quality doesn’t matter” which are just completely wrong and if true would upend the industry.

Also I’ve been in software for just over 20, the last 4 of those as a CTO. Since you seem to keep bringing up your credentials for some reason.

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