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Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

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Re: Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

#91

Post by VladRussian »

strlen wrote: post #86
VladRussian wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Spending time identifying unmanageable poor performers does generate very high returns IF YOU FIRE THEM. In software, poor performers can actually have negative productivity: Their presence slows the rest of the team down. excellent advice. Before going into mission, platoon leader should better shoot all his bad soldiers, so they wouldn't slow the team down.

Horrible comparison. First, it's not uncommon (historically) for bad soldiers to have been executed. In Russian history alone, I can find examples of that (Trotsky's decimation in the Red Army, based of course on the Roman practice). Second, in this case the poor performers aren't executed. They're let go, usually after being put on a pip (which can be viewed as a notice to look for another job). They can improve the…

>Horrible comparison. First, it's not uncommon (historically) for bad soldiers to have been executed. In Russian history alone, I can find examples of that (Trotsky's decimation in the Red Army, based of course on the Roman practice).

I can only say - Kirk Douglas, "Paths of Glory". It said all about bad performers and management.

>Similarly, in the military poor soldiers aren't usually sent into front line battles (being delegated to secondary roles).

you're kidding, right?

Re: Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

#92

Post by kenjackson »

WesleyJohnson wrote: post #90
kenjackson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're at a non-profit, revenue/sales/profit are what drives the company. If you can duct tape a product that gets me $1B of yearly recurring revenue then I will take that over the cleanest architected product that no one wants to pay for. In one of my other comments from a different thread I made the point that a lot of developers don't realize that they should understand the business. When you do understand…

For those of you who think and operate this way, I'm sorry, but this WILL catch up with you eventually. At my last job our sales pitch was "Yes". I won't use the word "literally" here as it would be an outright lie, but it was pretty close. Our sales guys went into meetings with the assumption that we could pull off whatever the clients wanted in nearly any time frame they wanted. This was all decided on at sales tim…

It's amazing that you get so defensive over "learn the business". I never said to be a meek dev. In fact I clearly state that you should attempt to change minds with principled arguments that have the business in mind.

But based on my experience, that's not what I've seen. I've seen devs fight to do a completely rewrite that management won't fund because everyone wants to continue to use the old LOB solution. The devs argue about how the old system is a rats nest and uses archaic technology. But the business says that its doing the job, why do you want us to switch to something that lacks the features we need, just because it uses REST rather than SOAP (whatever that means).

And I've been brought in to consult on many of these disputes and probably 8 out of 10 times the "ugly" code is perfectly serviceable. What I've often done is shown how one can incrementally improve and rearchitect the existing code with no downtime... and probably more than half the time this ticks off the architect. His big dream was to do this monster rewrite that I've just shown is completely unnecessary.

At the end of the day maybe I've hurt morale of the dev team, but janitors don't get paid to not clean bathrooms (not that we're janitors, nor is there anything wrong with being a janitor, but you get the point).

Re: Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

#94

Post by kenjackson »

anonymous245 wrote: post #76
kenjackson wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're at a non-profit, revenue/sales/profit are what drives the company. If you can duct tape a product that gets me $1B of yearly recurring revenue then I will take that over the cleanest architected product that no one wants to pay for. In one of my other comments from a different thread I made the point that a lot of developers don't realize that they should understand the business. When you do understand…

False dichotomy ($1B vs zero). Actually, in my experience, developers understand the business quite well. It's the other business functions which doesn't understand development. You WILL drive out (and keep out) good developers if you fail to treat developers as professionals whose inputs of how to develop software should be respected.

I've heard developers tell me, in all seriousness, MS should dump Windows and start shipping a real OS like Linux. False dichotomy? I don't know, but I think you'd find the business would probably lose a fair bit of money doing that.

Re: Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

#96

Post by anonymous245 »

kenjackson wrote: post #92
WesleyJohnson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of you who think and operate this way, I'm sorry, but this WILL catch up with you eventually. At my last job our sales pitch was "Yes". I won't use the word "literally" here as it would be an outright lie, but it was pretty close. Our sales guys went into meetings with the assumption that we could pull off whatever the clients wanted in nearly any time frame they wanted. This was all decided on at sales tim…

It's amazing that you get so defensive over "learn the business". I never said to be a meek dev. In fact I clearly state that you should attempt to change minds with principled arguments that have the business in mind. But based on my experience, that's not what I've seen. I've seen devs fight to do a completely rewrite that management won't fund because everyone wants to continue to use the old LOB solution. The dev…

Thank you for your follow up. Clearly your experience is far outside my world. I've never heard of an outside consultant being brought in to second guess the company's "architect".

It seems like you mostly move among bad developers. I don't think your experience is relevant to most of the developers reading HN.

Obviously, a full rewrite not a good idea in most cases as Spolsky eloquently argued.

PS: I didn't detect any "defensiveness" (you know, the catchall passive-aggressive term that is used to use to imply that the other side has a weak hand without backing it up) in the post you were responding to. It rang true to me.

Re: Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

#97

Post by WesleyJohnson »

kenjackson wrote: post #92
WesleyJohnson wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those of you who think and operate this way, I'm sorry, but this WILL catch up with you eventually. At my last job our sales pitch was "Yes". I won't use the word "literally" here as it would be an outright lie, but it was pretty close. Our sales guys went into meetings with the assumption that we could pull off whatever the clients wanted in nearly any time frame they wanted. This was all decided on at sales tim…

It's amazing that you get so defensive over "learn the business". I never said to be a meek dev. In fact I clearly state that you should attempt to change minds with principled arguments that have the business in mind. But based on my experience, that's not what I've seen. I've seen devs fight to do a completely rewrite that management won't fund because everyone wants to continue to use the old LOB solution. The dev…

I apologize for being overly defensive, but I've unfortunately lived through all of what I was saying. I do agree with your Janitor analogy in that at the end of the day you're paid to do a job. However the problem often lies in situations where developers are hired for their expertise, but they aren't allowed to utilize it to do the job properly and instead are just asked to get it done.

I guess if I hired engineers who were capable of doing a complete re-architecture of a system, but forced them to put in "ugly" code that is perfectly serviceable - I wouldn't expect them to be around very long. I don't speak for everyone, but I do strongly believe that those that do this for a job and paycheck will be fine, if not happy, working on ugly code to keep things going. Those that do this for the love it, whom in my opinion are often better programmers, won't. At least, not for very long.

Still, there is definitely merit to your statements, especially when it comes to devs dreaming of re-architecture and instead having to settle for a small change. I appreciate the follow up.

Re: Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

#98

Post by edanm »

"Practice articulating positions you disagree with faithfully and persuasively. Unless you can do this, you’re implicitly assuming that people who disagree with you are idiots. Smart people understand why smart people disagree."

This should be taught to everyone from a young age.

"Individuals are the sole cause of anything that’s ever happened."

The most inspiring quote in the article. Reminds me of the Margaret Mead quote I have hanging in my room somewhere: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Re: Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

#99

Post by kenjackson »

anonymous245 wrote: post #96
kenjackson wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's amazing that you get so defensive over "learn the business". I never said to be a meek dev. In fact I clearly state that you should attempt to change minds with principled arguments that have the business in mind. But based on my experience, that's not what I've seen. I've seen devs fight to do a completely rewrite that management won't fund because everyone wants to continue to use the old LOB solution. The dev…

Thank you for your follow up. Clearly your experience is far outside my world. I've never heard of an outside consultant being brought in to second guess the company's "architect". It seems like you mostly move among bad developers. I don't think your experience is relevant to most of the developers reading HN. Obviously, a full rewrite not a good idea in most cases as Spolsky eloquently argued. PS: I didn't detect a…

I don't think I move among bad developers, per se, but when I consulted I generally worked at places that weren't software companies. HN is filled with developers who plan to build companies (or work for companies) whose core business is to build software and either sell or have that software be the key part of a service. A lot of the places I did consulting for, if all of their in-house software stopped working, they could probably still do business, but a lot less efficiently. Most companies are not "about" the software just like they're not about the desks in the office.

And actually... quite often I wasn't brought in to second guess the architect. Many times I was brought in at the request of the architect. But yes, most of the time you're brought in because they lose faith in the architect or team. If you see me stop by to do a simple audit of your code, you should probably get your resume ready -- well not really, as I don't do any consulting any more.

Re: Resignation letter from Microsoft Employee

#100

Post by herf »

Doesn't it show what's wrong with an organization when people's heads have this much politics and organizational complexity in them? His advice is to ship good software to get ahead, but his thought process is all about everything else.
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