Thinking on Enterprise Software

What to say about enterprise software?

I asked Google Gemini… Google Bard had to change its name… to draw me some pictures of enterprise software… it also does images now… and it came up with some respectable output that gave me the *feel* of what I was looking for.

Tell me how this makes you feel…

I asked because when I think of enterprise software I think of some Paul Zwolak prints that were in our office at Edify that were meant to represent the concept as well.

Taken in 2001 with a cheap digital camera

Those three prints… those were just the ones I took pictures of with the now rather primitive Fuji 1MP digital camera I had at the time… were part of a series meant to suggest the effects of our software.  They were titled:

• Tackling the Enterprise through Self Service
• Software for Interactive Service
• Extending the Reach of Interactivity

I wish I had better images of them.  I also wonder what happened to them.  They probably ended up in a dumpster like so much of the companies I worked for.

I have been thinking of the approach I should use for the next stage of my career in telephony related technology.  I do want to keep going, in part because I did actually get to work on a bunch of interesting things, often by dint of raising my hand when some director or VP asked if I wanted to go work on something new.  (New stuff is fun and interesting, and leaving your mistakes behind is always a relief.)

The thing is, we will also be moving from an era in my career where I can point at products and services I worked on that thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of people used… Global Village modems were everywhere if you had a Macintosh in the mid-90s, and even Jasmine hard drives were pretty well known in the late 80s and early 90s… to a stage where almost nobody could see what I was working on directly.

I can point at some things that I touched that people used.  Did you ever use the voice verification feature when calling in an order for Home Shopping Network?  Were you a GM employee who needed an employee discount code to purchase a car?  Did you access your Banamex checking account over the web?  Did you call up to check on your jury duty status in Los Alamos county?  Did you ever call AMC’s toll free number to find out a movie show time?  Did the Royal Auto Club send you a response to an email you sent them ages ago and to which they had already responded?

I was involved, or at least sat next to somebody involved with most of that in some way.  (I had a cube across from the recording studio where the AMC movie line updates were recorded.)  Most of those are well in the past, but there are tales to be told.  (If you call 1-888-AMC-4-FUN these days it just tells you to use the damn web site like a normal person grandpa!)

Wikipedia has a pretty good general entry on enterprise software if you want to know what I am even going on about.

Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous post in the series, I had found the golden ticket and was on the path into enterprise software.

Golden ticket?  Why yes, because while you work in anonymity compare to other types of software… there are very few About boxes that credit devs because companies don’t want competitors poaching their key staff… the pay is better.  How much better?

Back in my early days at Global Village, when we were hiring contractors to do some manual testing, one of the people at an agency we used laid out the hierarchy of pay/abilities for their staffing.  It ran, from lowest to highest:

• Educational Software
• Video Games
• Productivity/Desktop Software
• Utility Software
• Enterprise Software

That was an off the cuff comment, meant as a general illustration, but the truth of it… not just for testers, but for developers and other engineering staff as well… has stuck with me all these years.

Yes, there are exceptions.  The trio that made Valheim (and hateful old Notch and Tim Sweeney, and some others) certainly made much more on games than your typical enterprise software developer.  But those tales also reflect an ownership stake, and the boss always takes most of the pie.  The old ditty about “my boss makes a dollar while I make a dime” is only wrong in that the ratio has move closer to a hundred dollars for every dime a worker makes.

And there are crappy enterprise software companies that pay poorly.  I could name a few.

In general though, as somebody seeking employment, the pay scale holds pretty true.  New college grads make more in enterprise shops than many senior devs at video game companies if the the industry compensation reports are at all on accurate.

And once you go up a rung on that ladder it is difficult to step back.

At one point, further down the road, I applied for a position at a video game company as a manager for their server ops team, something I was nominally qualified for on paper, plus I knew somebody at the company and had a strong recommendation.  But I didn’t get past the initial screening call because they said a couple minutes into it that, based on my most recent position, they were not going to be able to offer me anything comparable in pay.  My resume alone had priced me out of the industry.

It priced me out because it said at that point I had been in enterprise software for a dozen years and was a senior manager acting in a director level role at a large multi-national company.

Now, there were good reasons to not hire me that would have no doubt come out in any interviews.  I am not saying they owed me the job or anything.  But they couldn’t see the point of trying to move any further for the stated reason of price.  Oh well.

Why does enterprise software pay better than the other categories?

Often the deals for software licensing at the enterprise level can be for tens of thousand to hundreds of thousand to millions of dollars for a single implementation.   And since these implementations are often considered “mission critical,” there is usually an ongoing maintenance contract that goes with the deal that often generates more revenue over time than the initial sale.

So you only need a few customers to be viable in enterprise software, and a couple hundred on maintenance will make you quite profitable as they are all paying for the same team to do updates and support.

This does tend to make those customers somewhat demanding when it comes to support… though honestly I have had people yelling at me on the phone about a $129 modem they purchased three years ago be more demanding than some of enterprise customers.

Then again, there are enterprise customers who want something for nothing all the time… but we’ll get to Walmart eventually.  I’ll just say that you probably don’t want them as a customer ever.

Anyway, for some reason I felt the need to meander off into the topic of enterprise software before jumping to the next step in my career where I end up doing something other than what I was obstensibly hired to do.