I would counter with it's easier to fix bugs, improve performance, pay down technical debt than it is to fix consensus, stakeholder buy-in, and strategic direction. So even though good code, design, and architecture isn't easy it's still the easy part in a relative sense.
I did not mean to imply that consensus, stakeholder buy-in, and strategic direction are easy, or even that they are easier than writing good code. My point is just that the code part is not easy either. I think the article's point that "if good code was easy, we'd have amazing software everywhere instead of crappy software everywhere" is a very good one. The average code that gets written is horrendous, interviewing people who are presently employed and struggle to write a for-loop makes this really apparent.
A lot of those performance issues in enterprise systems are platform specific to begin with. I’ve never seen what I’d call a high performance ERP, even when on the cloud. It’s usually poorly documented. It’s unclear when a pick list passes QA today well, but in a year with the list exceeds X items, the whole application crashes or grinds under the weight. A lot of time these things are learned via scar tissue and could have been easily prevented if better standards or documentation was in place.
I’ve used a lot of Oracle ERP products and I always comment about how poorly their queries run for a database company. It used to be thought it was a hardware issue and they’d sell you accelerator licenses, but now that I see more and more I’m convinced they just don’t care about performance. They want it to slow down so they can sell you more. That, and the feeling that when you build a platform for all, you’re building a solution for none. Meaning, it’s such generic and customization heavy they can always point back at you and say it’s your implementation that’s problematic not our platform. Sometimes that’s true, but also when I pay what I pay, I should get better performance irrespective of how I implemented it. I run a simple query often that’s basically selects all the accounts numbers and names from my chart of accounts (accounting), this is a central and core part of the ERP, why does this query take 45 seconds to return 200 rows of 2 columns wide.
Fixing bugs, improving performance, paying down technical debt all require this as well, which makes them significantly more difficult to actually implement.
That’s because fundamentally you need those strategic items to have space to do those particular detail items. If you have the best strategy and no execution, you can probably hire for that. If you have no strategy and decent execution, you are driving the Titanic into the iceberg.
