alt Hacker NewsI can say at least for me at a small-ish company (~40 FTE) there has been a surge in internal productivity tools. Nothing to improve the end user product directly but a lot of tools to make processes easier and less error prone.
What would previously be janky internal dashboards or excel sheets are now actually nice to use tools. That said of course the maintenance cost of all that has yet to be discovered, and the ROI is questionable.
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Yeah this seems to be a pretty widespread story, from what I've heard as well. The thing about those janky dashboards and spreadsheets though is that somebody understood them and built them with intent to solve a particular problem. Despite the rickety appearance, they're trustworthy tools. A polished single page app might look nicer but it's harder to debug than an excel sheet, and much less transparent in its internal workings--especially if nobody actually wrote it...
About the same ~40 FTE team. We're doing the same thing. Smattering of internal tools, but no net gain in external revenue. Who knows which of those tools will have any value or ppl are just doing it because it's cool now to make fancy dashboards.
OK. I guess that's good, too.