August 8th, 2024

Microsoft is a black hole of money and talent

A web developer criticizes Microsoft Dynamics ERP for its slow performance, inadequate programming language, unreliable tooling, and inefficient update process, highlighting its negative impact on customer experience and contract negotiations.

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Microsoft is a black hole of money and talent

The article expresses a web developer's frustrations with Microsoft Dynamics ERP, describing it as a poorly designed and inefficient platform. The author highlights the complexity and dullness of the ERP space, criticizing the slow performance of the application, which reportedly takes an excessive amount of time to load even simple pages. The custom programming language used in the platform is deemed inadequate, lacking essential features and proper error handling. The author also points out the cumbersome tooling, particularly the Language Server Protocol (LSP) in Visual Studio Code, which is slow and unreliable. Additionally, the update process for applications is described as tedious and inefficient, requiring manual intervention for each client. The author concludes by reflecting on a client meeting where the slow performance of the demo environment nearly jeopardized a contract, illustrating the negative impact of the platform on customer experience. Overall, the article conveys a sense of disillusionment with Microsoft's product quality and management practices, suggesting that despite some competent efforts, the overall design and execution are fundamentally flawed.

- The author criticizes Microsoft Dynamics ERP for its slow performance and complexity.

- The custom programming language used in the platform is described as inadequate and poorly designed.

- Tooling, particularly the Language Server Protocol in Visual Studio Code, is deemed slow and unreliable.

- The update process for applications is inefficient, requiring manual updates for each client.

- The article highlights the negative impact of the platform on customer experience and contract negotiations.

Link Icon 6 comments
By @ilrwbwrkhv - 9 months
I don't think this is a problem with just Microsoft. The majority of the hires at Microsoft have been TC optimization Leetcode folks who really aren't good at programming, but are great at optimizing for the FAANG hiring pipeline. Basically they are gamed.
By @mkoryak - 9 months
I've been there, worked on poorly built systems and complained about it.

One thing I found is that ranting like TFA makes you sound like you think you're the most amazing engineer and everyone else is stupid. It makes you sound like someone who no one wants to work with.

By @cowboylowrez - 9 months
I've worked with 4 erps in varying capacities from amused observer to in the weeds screen dev (and mainly database administration), 3 of those 4 had custom languages and development environments, including deployments in custom things variously. These three seemed to want to reinvent programming all for their app. I was fascinated by it all. The only erp I worked on that didn't reinvent the wheel was in cobol and there these poor developers failed to use the original wheel invention. One asleep user could halt the company until the system administrator killed the screen process, the concurrency strategy used was "pessimistic" to the extent that the whole system seemed suicidal. It got replaced by erp 2.

Microsoft AX is a beast. I was both fascinated and horrified by it. I took the developer class and loved it but then was so baffled by their source control and deployment, ended up contracting anyways, our desktop dev who also took the course simply found a better job haha, I simply shrank back into my dba role and got fairly familiar with the schema and had developed what I felt were cool and snappy queries that could run without nolock, I am a long time database geek and actually got fired over the nolock keyword, well that and me being an insufferable asshole which was all the rage with dbas at the time hahaha

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/fin-ops-core/d...

By @mepian - 9 months
The title is not very fitting.
By @less_less - 9 months
Unsurprisingly, Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an absolutely shit app from the user side too. It's horribly slow, has a nearly unusable UI, uninformative errors, that kind of thing.

The expense reporting side of D365 is especially bad, or maybe it's just my employer's integration of it. It doesn't properly understand currencies or conversion rates, so maybe you'll stay at a hotel in Prague and the expense report page will say $20000 instead of CZK 20000, and then it will write a completely wrong exchange rate, and then refuse to accept the report (with an error in a bar at the top of the screen, but it's modal) until you properly itemize this incorrectly recorded expense down to the last haléř.

By @486sx33 - 9 months
A general purpose, all encompassing ERP system that works for ANY industry

Yeah. That sounds awful

The author makes some great points, I think the biggest one from a business perspective, for anyone who is ever involved with a project that scopes an ERP is how do I get my data out of this thing? AND then, example output! I’ve seen ERPs that are basically impossible to ever get all your data out of, and then others where they export everywhere completely verbose, in CSV based on some C code from 1976 … so then what?