Hacker News Reader

Comment by Scoundreller | Hacker News Reader

University of Toronto used to basically run on a homegrown curriculum management system called CCNet up until ~2006. Basically run by one professor on a CPU under their desk. Course notes, grades, that kinda thing.

I guess for future-proofing, the university moved to Blackboard. For a while, some courses were on Blackboard, others on CCNet.

We had a professor poll the class and ask which they preferred, and all 240 of us in unison said "CCNET!"

I still remember a quiz on Blackboard where the answer was something like "2" and it responded, sorry, the correct answer is 1.9999999999.

View on HN

I have been looking for the term to describe this kind of enterprise software. It has glossy dashboards that are sold to VPs with the flash, "Monitor the entire company from one screen!" The actual rank and file users hate the product because little attention is ever given to the day-to-day workflows. Things barely work, super convoluted, etc.

An accountant friend was just migrated to Workday(?) for their backend. Apparently whatever labyrinth configuration they have can only export 12,000 rows at a time. The official workaround they were given was to run reports in one week batches when a month of data is required. Previous solution could seemingly export unlimited amounts of data and time windows. A complete technical failure for which everyone should be ashamed.

I've just left somewhere that was using Workday. It was terrifically bad in an already outstanding field of ghastly Enterprise abominations.

The story is the same for the system of record for almost all enterprises:

https://open.substack.com/pub/healthapiguy/p/there-will-be-b...

We have the Internet, which was supposed to fix things. Why can't we talk to the developers at workday and make that export issue an issue? How would we force it such that the renewal contract doesn't get signed unless it gets fixed?

I am not invested in this particular issue, but the recurring root cause: the organization is completely disconnected from actual users. No accountant would think 12k rows for a corporate level system was acceptable. How do you handle monthly, quarterly, annual reporting? A single POS terminal at Target could process 12 thousands transactions in a month.

Yet, the entire Workday chain of developers, PMs, management - all slapped their seal of approval on the product and pushed it out the door. Compiles? Good Enough.

All LMS's are trash. Blackboard, moodle, canvas, whatever other bullshit.

They're all actively user hostile and add features admin think look nice but provide no real value for classes.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com