91–100 of 239 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went from waiter -> self-educated SW engineer founding own startup -> sold startup -> Google. (Been on 3 teams, all of which shipped to match HW deadlines) The only thing noteworthy about Google is _there is no process_. Hell, just last week, a coworker and I finally resolved a year-long difference of opinion when it clicked for him that there wasn't a defined system, insomuch as there was one I was defining it, an…
Can you explain that better? Basically in a nutshell they don't have worthless agile processes?
Can the teams at Google experience processes where they talk to their customers, iterate, talk to customers, iterate again and move fast and break stuff - releasing at each step of the way and measuring their intended A/B/C tests? I suspect a company like that has committees and subcommittees and review processes and 100 layers of bureaucracy before anything even gets done I bet there are projects that reached a prod…
People do read your in product feedback, btw. But it takes quarters for anyone to triage and act on it.
> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…
I was at Y! at the same time , I witnesssed so many managers gaming the review system . So many funny , and some sad stories from that time.
> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…
> Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated. This is disturbing and, I think, a twisted form of grade inflation, mixed with the usual suitspeak where words don't necessarily mean what they mean. If an employee is as good as you think they should be, why woul…
I personally think that it is all matter of risk. The risk of contract work (which is what the agile manifesto writers were facing most of their careers [they are all consultants), is building something that the customer do not want or did not intend do. The actual tech risk is very low (e.g. ruby on rails on postgres) since most of them use mature technology. In this case the agile manifesto make sense - I.e. we can…
While Agile is not perfect for this kind of work, it does have a lot of facility in this area.
Now if you could just get any two people to agree on what constitutes the last responsible moment...
And with new tech you often have to do it first or do it better. Oddly I find Agile seems to work better for “do it better” because if it’s easier for you to add features than your competitor, they will probably get burned out before you do. If you can survive that long you start to pull ahead.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For someone who doesn't want to be painted in broad strokes, it seems like a very broad brush to paint non-Googlers with.
I'm so fucking sick of people being offended by everything
There is unfortunately a large gulf between “agile” and “Agile” development these days. The former refers to development generally in line with the agile manifesto, with processes tailored to the needs of the team and the project. The latter is a buzzword used by consultants to convince management to put their favored bureaucratic method in place, usually some variant on the scrum system.
This is mostly what I see happen too, "Agile" is used an excuse to introduce some type of bureaucratic process to fix what is actually pathological cultural / leadership issues.
And I think we all learned in college that hill climbing rarely if ever finds the optimal solution. Often it doesn’t even find Good Enough. But it’s the best thing you can see in the vicinity so it gets labeled Good Enough even over the protests of people who have done it better elsewhere.
> This type of innovation takes significant up-front design time, and working on components over longer than one week iterations. Because the projects have such simple external interfaces, and so much internal complexity, much of the work is not even visible to “customers”, so there is no way to write customer visible stories about it. This type of software takes 8–20 months to deliver the first working version to th…
> Little did my manager know that a few quarters of "meets expectations" had caused HR to drop me into the bottom 5% of the company and so I received a letter from HR that I was at risk of being terminated. This is disturbing and, I think, a twisted form of grade inflation, mixed with the usual suitspeak where words don't necessarily mean what they mean. If an employee is as good as you think they should be, why woul…
Because quality of the employee and the employee's work are not the only factors in hiring and firing decisions. Sometimes a smaller workforce is what makes sense, and if all your engineers are "meeting expectations", what are you going to do?