D&D (2024) WotC should have stuck to it's guns with the 2024 Beyond Update

[Oofta]

Yep. several times. A couple at a Fortune 100, the last one wrapped up last month. One particular process I shepherded from paper, to MSAccess (budget denied for 12+ months), to MSAccess + MS SQL (web developer budget denied, db budget approved) to IIS+MSQL ("why is this risk-management process not in a proper application?!?") then from ugly IIS vb to c#. That one was for government audits.

The last one was a migration from MSSQL to Snowflake.

There were also a few that didn't happen that should have and were the triggers for me to look for other employment. ("It's perfectly fine for multi-million dollar engineering contracts to be dependent on a set of XLS macros hacked together by a college intern to drive hydraulic simulations that could result in billions of dollars of damages, why should we spent $5k on a software license for a vetted application?")




Again, that's what due diligence and retention bonuses are for. Been through acqui-hires from both sides.

Just because it's hard doesn't mean it isn't the right decision.

Sadly, management rarely agrees to significant rewrites unless the app is a total dumpster fire.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Sadly, management rarely agrees to significant rewrites unless the app is a total dumpster fire.

That or you can make the case that it will make more money or can plausibly avoid a material loss. I spent a lot of time on risk mitigation projects.

Which is something WotC should have done to avoid those canceled accounts.

Off topic

Spoiler

My life got both easier and harder when I became the "best friend" of the corporate lawyer who was involved in those government audits. Easier as the budget got freed up PDQ. Harder because I got shifted into other processes that were related but not in my primary domain.

Risk mitigation projects kind of suck as on one hand they require really big numbers to justify (or jail time) and then they are usually not materially impactful other than averting those big numbers (or jail time). So low level of accomplishment with high stress. You almost want one or two "near misses" where someone else in the company screws up but your process catches it before a regulator does. Almost.

I "downsized" my stress by going from running a team of 8 developers to being an application architect in a different industry where the corporate impact is both more direct and less authoritative.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

I don’t use the 2024 rules and have no intention to use them for a while and I paid a lot of money for the 2014 content. I was quite annoyed at their original plan and am happy that they backed down.

There are exactly 2 new books and many many more of the old ones. Maybe in 3 or 4 years they can reconsider if they otherwise don’t fix the toggles and searches.