Concur's backend is typical of a slow moving industry that works with old awkward systems like airlines. It's a shitshow of business logic and 20 year old legacy code that would be a long expensive nightmare to rewrite for little actual profit so no manager would ever approve of such an endeavor. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a mess of queries involved with this search such that trying to do a real sort of the results would require a significant degree of rewriting and touching scary code with huge amounts of bureaucratic review in order to be DOD compliant, so it gets labeled as "good enough" even if the current state drives some developers crazy.
They need to call a sort function. It can happen in the client, because the data set is small. It should have happened when the app was first written, at which time they weren’t maintaining legacy code - they were writing a UI from scratch and could make changes easily. Sort functions are built in to every programming language I’ve ever used.
I agree with the author. There’s no reason for it to be like this but incompetence - either at an individual level, system level or both.
In 30 years of programming I've worked in plenty of systems where this sort of thing is nontrivial too. But its always the result of incompetent abstractions getting in the programmer's way.
Downvotes notwithstanding, I stand by my claim that this is always the result of incompetence. Either at the small level (laziness) or at a larger scale (incompetent system design).
I would even go as far as saying the opposite - engineers too "competent" for their own good.
I've walked in to so many code based where very talented individuals have made incredibly complex systems, using all their technical know how of best practices & patterns, abstraction layers and facades ... and ignored the fact that all they needed was a three field form with a submit button.
It's not just worth knowing if you can, it's if you should.
The novice creates simple work because she isn't capable. The apprentice makes unnecessarily complex designs to impress. The master makes things simple because extra work would be unnecessary. Mastery isn't measured by much complexity has been added. Its measured by how much complexity has been taken away.
It’s also very possible this list is configured by the IT department that purchased Concur. If this list is always set by purchaser configuration, not sorting kind of makes.
The IT department does not make purchases such as Concur as it is way out of their core competency.
It is the finance department under the auspices of the CFO / the managing director that do. Those people are non-technical and don't understand the technology. Therefore, anything that is more modern than an abacus is pitched (and ususally later sold as well) to them as the best thing they will have ever seen.
You are probably right. I've just tried same query ("los a") in Concur app and it was sorted alphabetically for me. Still included Spain and Chile locations though.
