5 Reasons Why Programmers Should Not Write Business Systems
Programmers don’t understand businesses.
Programmers just don’t have the bandwidth to keep up on all the changes in the technical environments and also be really knowledgeable about a business. The whole point of Formever is to give business people with good computer skills a tool that lets them build really cool systems for clients.
Programmers are getting harder and harder to find.
Programmers are hard to find because "software is eating the world." Large companies are hiring more and more programmers. This means that smaller companies who want systems built have a small pool of talent to draw on.
Programmers who are available are often the less talented ones.
Given that programmers are being scooped up by large companies this means the the ones left over are often less-skilled and less-experienced. This is one of the reason’s that around 50% of all business systems implementation projects fail.
Programmers are getting more expensive as demand increases.
Having expensive programmers work on a system for months costs a lot. In the U.S., ERP programmers are billed out at $200/hour. This means $8,000 a week (when they don’t work overtime). So a 3 person programming team will cost around $100,000 a month. Given that the average ERP system takes 18 months – well you do the math.
Programmers use general purpose computer languages.
The average ERP system takes 18 months to build. This is because they are generally written in a ‘low level’ computer language (such as Java or one of the proprietary language used by major ERP companies). You can build pretty much anything in these language, hence they are not optimized for enterprise systems. These languages are difficult to control and programming projects are consistently way over budget. At $100,000/month as mentioned above this means clients bear a huge financial risk.