The #1 Problem in SMEs

What if...? CrowdStrike

Hi,

What if…? I must have read this sentence hundreds of times in the last few days regarding the CrowdStrike outage. Everywhere, people are looking for someone to blame. And that is wrong!

We are witnessing the classic blame game. It is more important to find someone to blame than to solve the problem. This only fosters fear.

An employee of Tom Watson, the founder of IBM, once made a mistake that cost the company ten million dollars. When the man was called into Watson’s office, he was sure he would be fired. To his surprise, his boss said: “Fire you? Not after I just invested ten million dollars in your education.” ~ The Winners Laws by Bodo Schäfer (translated from German edition)

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Marcus Held

Customer Support

Hi,

When “the customer” calls, very different things happen in various companies

You probably know this from your everyday life. You have a question about your mobile contract. So, you call the hotline. A computer answers. You press 1… then 3… then refuse to have the call recorded for training purposes, and finally, you end up with some employee in a call center. You explain your problem. The employee has a script in front of them and goes through it with you from top to bottom. If they’re good, you don’t even notice it.

Marcus Held

4 Weeks Incident

Hi,

What happens when software rots over decades?

More than I can list. The software has accumulated so many problems that they can’t be described compactly.

• The monitoring is incomplete
• The deployment is cumbersome
• The infrastructure is heterogeneous
• Libraries are outdated
• Knowledge has been lost
• Background and context for decisions are missing
• The code is tangled
• … and has high coupling

So far, this is not surprising. Maybe you have worked on such a project yourself.

Marcus Held

Challenges in SMEs Are Similar

Hi,

Currently, I am writing a new article for Golem.de.

In this context, I have been reflecting on the similarities in software development in small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The German Federal Statistical Office defines SMEs as companies with 10 to 250 employees and a turnover of less than 50 million euros.

At first glance, this range seems very wide. Intuitively, one would expect the challenges and solutions to be very different as a result. And to some extent, this is true. However, this does not align with my experience over the last 15 years, during which I have worked exclusively in SMEs. On closer inspection, it turns out that the number of developers is not that different after all.

Marcus Held

The #1 Problem in SMEs

Hi,

As written on Monday : Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have no problem with performance.

However, that’s not entirely true. Over the past few years, I’ve worked on many products that were slow. Improving performance would have been positive for the business. In certain areas, like the gaming industry, it was inevitable to be performant. Retention is one of the most important metrics in the industry. But that’s the exception, not the rule.

Marcus Held