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0 pointsmopsi3y ago0 comments

> It really boggles the mind. What can be so complex that you can not do it in 300 person years of development time plus the cost of SAP.

Build a inventory planning and tracking system for a company that operates in every country in the world and has to issue and receive invoices, customs documents, waybills etc in hundreds of formats, currencies, languages and accounting standards.

And you are right that the biggest problem is definining processes and data types. Whatever waybill system a 100-head HN Rust and JS crack commando comes up with, you can rest assured that there's some authority somewhere that wants an item displayed differently, so you either patch this and many other edge cases until your codes becomes an unworkable spaghetti, or you go back to the drawing board countless times and ship nothing, or you outsource it to SAP and the likes who have spent decades coming up with a working solution (even if it's not that elegant).

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panick21_3y ago

Its a fair point the amount of differences of the external world really does force an absurd amount of configuration complexity on your system however well you do on your internal processes.

You really don't just need 100 programs but you need 30 people defining the processes and 200 configuration experts.

This really seems like something the world would profit from creating a huge amount of open libraries for all this stuff. There are so many old apis in all these old systems. I work in banking and when switching company and then you re-implement the same shitty format again.

You would obviously need some people who have done ERP systems experience, not just 100 random developers.

I think, at least I have heard, that Tesla does its own internal system, would be interesting to see how many people they have working on that if its true.

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