41–50 of 286 posts
Somebody asks for a feature, you build it, they pay you — that’s data. Data isn’t just spying on your users to see how they behave.
Sure it is. "Spying" is just a deliberately loaded term to make it seem bad. What would you think of an office manager who set things up only according to requests, never trying to observe and anticipate employee needs?
Feature addiction is real. This post points to perverse economic incentives as being one possible cause, but I have also seen this happen in open-source projects. It's a matter of listening to the wrong people, in my view. User feedback is incredibly valuable, but when user feedback comes in the form of GitHub issues rather than careful testing and conversation, the team will inevitably find themselves building more…
I don't actually understand what's bad about this, maybe someone who is in a company like this can explain why it's a negative? I am working with a company that is moving more towards this approach and I'm really enjoying it. Isn't this essentially what Basecamp's Shape Up method advocates for? Not everyone feels they need to be building something that changes the world I suppose. Each to their own.
I suggest re-reading this article in the negative: Assume that your team implemented every single one of these bullet points perfectly, for every feature in every sprint. Now imagine that each of those bullet points is a recurring meeting invite on your calendar. Now imagine how happy you'd be spending all of that time in meetings or reading process-related e-mails so your company could satisfy the criteria of not be…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem is that, if you're churning out features without thinking critically about why, your work might not even change the company. I've seen engineers, teams, even entire departments spend multiple quarters being a net drain on the company. But they never noticed, because they kept consistently defining release targets and hitting them.
> churning out features without thinking critically about why, your work might not even change the company Isn't this just speculation? Why would anyone build features without any thoughts about their benefit? In practice you never know how a feature is going to work out and benefit or harm the company, you just have to try it. Not trying is a sure way to lose to bolder competition.
* Sometimes companies have declared focus areas, and it's advantageous to be working in those areas. If the CEO says Project Foobar is going to be the next big thing, you want your team to be touching Project Foobar even if you have nothing valuable to contribute.
* Some kinds of projects are costly to push back on. If someone comes to you and says "this is a security feature, I'm going to build it to increase security", you have to demonstrate that the system is secure without it and not just tell them no.
* In some environments, people are measured by their ability to produce lots of features. This makes it embarrassing and politically damaging to not do a feature you proposed. So once it's publicly known that you have a feature, it's too late to think about whether it's useful, you have to just buckle down and do it.
In short, it's very easy to burn out and overall it's just stupid. The pace was surreal, some of the features very complex, many people were overworking. Everyone is super stressed out, the best decision is to just leave that environment.
Bottom line, don't work for that kind of companies, because your value is equal to the speed of your fingers typing.
What do I do if upper management seems to be driving this process?