• 3 Posts
  • 708 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • I know, I have seen them.

    I was sysadmin for a Bankruptcy and Insolvency Firm for more than a decade and walked into 100s of businesses on the point of failure. Many of them could not be saved simply because their systems were so bad it was better for a buyer to buy their equipment and start with a clean sheet.

    The ice cream business was going under because the partner who had been the access self starter had an argument with the others and had walked out 18months ago.

    The access system ran the entire business (accounting and wages were on other programs but the db feed them data) and he was the only one who had any idea.

    Shit started to go wrong and they had no idea what to do.


  • I believe you. I can even guess the story.

    In the late 80s/early 90s a staff member (self taught in office/access) quickly threw together something at the request of a manager as a stop gap wile a new proper system was specked out.

    The person learned as they went and the system grew in functionality and complexity until the term spaghetti code was a massive understatement. It became their job.

    The new proper system never arrived and they have been making do for the past 30-40 years.

    I ran into the same thing a decade or so ago and it was a nightmare, but it was just an ice cream franchise, not prison related


  • and might even get better

    I honestly doubt it. I don’t think it is possible for reddit to be profitable in anything like its current form.

    Twitter, before the EM implosion, had managed one profitable year in the last decade.

    Reddit has about 2 orders of magnitude less users than twitter.

    Those users are much less attractive to advertisers because reddit knows fuck all about them compared to twitter.

    Reddit surfed through the years of cheap vc money but going public could kill it.