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Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

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Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#81

Post by codingdave »

jugg1es wrote: post #65

I'm part of the technical leadership at a company who is transitioning from small to medium-sized company. This article is disparaging virtually all of the initiatives we're trying to actually implement. It's actually really hard to transition from anarchy into a more process-oriented where each person has a role to play so that Devs are no longer responsible for literally everything because everyone is used to Devs…

It is a question of balance. Don't do a process just for the sake of the process. Don't do a feature just for the sake of doing a feature. If you cannot tie those things to actual business goals, that is when you have a problem.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#82

Post by mceachen »

jugg1es wrote: post #65

I'm part of the technical leadership at a company who is transitioning from small to medium-sized company. This article is disparaging virtually all of the initiatives we're trying to actually implement. It's actually really hard to transition from anarchy into a more process-oriented where each person has a role to play so that Devs are no longer responsible for literally everything because everyone is used to Devs…

The article is not saying "big feature" pipelines (where there is coordination across several teams) are inherently bad.

The article is disparaging that process if it is the only process. (And I've worked at companies where this was nearly true).

There must be efforts to experiment and refine (and possibly remove) existing features.

There must be efforts to refactor and improve existing code, to make it easier to maintain, less painful to be on-call, and make it possible to add subsequent features without breaking existing functionality.

You have to be able to do both large and incremental work to improve, in other words.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#83

Post by lazyjones »

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #62
lazyjones wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Why would anyone build features without any thoughts about their benefit? > In practice you never know how a feature is going to work out Those two sentences are somewhat contradictory. If you think through the features you should know exactly how they further your initial goal. When you add things based on what some people might like, that's when you are guessing and you can't know. This all boils down to having o…

Google certainly had visions for all their products. They just didn't work out, for reasons that became apparent much later (although some people will always claim they "knew" beforehand).

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#84

Post by PragmaticPulp »

braindongle wrote: post #73
lr4444lr wrote: post #36

Sigh... At some point, most healthy adults who are not living in terrible circumstances come to the mature realization and compromise that their job is largely to produce value for someone else, not to be the primary source of personal fulfillment, and they come to understand that there is dignity in being productive, if not creative. Be creative on your own time. Lead a civic group. Be a good parent. Volunteer at a…

Disagree. This is an endorsement of accepting the fact that your work, your professional work, done by most of us at a job, makes you feel like a cog, a unit of production. It is better called a surrender than a compromise. Surely it's often case that life has people in this sort of scenario and there is no realistic way to a new path. In that case, sure, take care of your loved ones and yourself, stay put, and make…

> This is an endorsement for accepting the fact that your work, your professional work, done by most of us at a job, makes you feel like a cog, a unit of production. It is better called a surrender than a compromise.

The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

The problem with cog in the machine analogies is that people only think of the plus sides of having more input in decision making processes.

What people generally ignore is the added responsibility and liability that comes with being more invested in the decision making process. In my experience, after you start holding people accountable for making the wrong decisions, most people quickly go back to being happy about being a cog in the machine and taking orders from someone else. For the few who enjoy calling the shots and accepting the blame when things go wrong, you can always move up into management.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#85

Post by dillonmckay »

BossingAround wrote: post #59
ryandrake wrote: post #38

I'm surprised by so many negative comments here (actually, I'm not). This great piece summed up a lot of awful aspects about commercial software development that I've also observed over the past 20 years, but have been unable to organize together and articulate as single problem. People are asking why this is bad. One way to think about why the Feature Factory is bad is that it's mostly open loop: You "launch" featur…

I think the reason why I was confused is that it seems there's a very fine line between a feature factory and Google/Twitter/Facebook/Amazon/... At a lot of these high-functioning places, they seem to have "feature factory" moments with some tweaks (e.g. actually building metrics, refactoring, etc. so that the SW won't implode in 6 months down the line).

People complain about it, but Google being able to literally ‘pull the plug’ and shutdown unprofitable or disproportionately resource draining projects is important to note.

To me, that is a characteristic of the un-feature factory, or whatever the opposite would be called.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#86

Post by zomglings »

jugg1es wrote: post #65

I'm part of the technical leadership at a company who is transitioning from small to medium-sized company. This article is disparaging virtually all of the initiatives we're trying to actually implement. It's actually really hard to transition from anarchy into a more process-oriented where each person has a role to play so that Devs are no longer responsible for literally everything because everyone is used to Devs…

This has been my experience at every startup I've worked in before we found product market fit.

Like you, I don't see the state this article describes as a bad thing. Sometimes, that's what it takes to survive.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#87

Post by [deleted] »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #84
braindongle wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. This is an endorsement of accepting the fact that your work, your professional work, done by most of us at a job, makes you feel like a cog, a unit of production. It is better called a surrender than a compromise. Surely it's often case that life has people in this sort of scenario and there is no realistic way to a new path. In that case, sure, take care of your loved ones and yourself, stay put, and make…

> This is an endorsement for accepting the fact that your work, your professional work, done by most of us at a job, makes you feel like a cog, a unit of production. It is better called a surrender than a compromise. The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. The problem with cog in the machine analogies is that people only think of the plus sides of having more input in decision making processes. Wh…

[deleted]

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#88

Post by sidlls »

jugg1es wrote: post #65

I'm part of the technical leadership at a company who is transitioning from small to medium-sized company. This article is disparaging virtually all of the initiatives we're trying to actually implement. It's actually really hard to transition from anarchy into a more process-oriented where each person has a role to play so that Devs are no longer responsible for literally everything because everyone is used to Devs…

This article isn't disparaging having a process for developing features or for maintaining a pipeline of features. It's disparaging conditions that prioritize the release of features for the sake of releasing features as opposed to for supporting the business' needs (as determined by data--including analysis of the performance of features, market conditions, and other factors).

This article describes the last company I worked for very well: that company was and is struggling precisely because the senior leadership promoted a culture of feature releases without consideration for their impact and consistently changing the focus of feature development not based on data, but whim, so that the product was steadily losing focus and coherence.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#89

Post by tomnipotent »

mceachen wrote: post #82
jugg1es wrote: post #65

I'm part of the technical leadership at a company who is transitioning from small to medium-sized company. This article is disparaging virtually all of the initiatives we're trying to actually implement. It's actually really hard to transition from anarchy into a more process-oriented where each person has a role to play so that Devs are no longer responsible for literally everything because everyone is used to Devs…

The article is not saying "big feature" pipelines (where there is coordination across several teams) are inherently bad. The article is disparaging that process if it is the only process. (And I've worked at companies where this was nearly true). There must be efforts to experiment and refine (and possibly remove) existing features. There must be efforts to refactor and improve existing code, to make it easier to mai…

> There must be efforts to refactor and improve existing code

Some of the best tech management advice I received was to never get explicit approval for refactoring from your immediate boss - whether you're the line engineer or CTO. Instead, you pad dates as needed to get the refactoring work done implicitly.

This has yet to fail me. Granted, I don't work in embedded systems and my code is deployed on owned & operated servers that's easy to update.

Re: Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)

#90

Post by scarface74 »

pm90 wrote: post #80
lr4444lr wrote: post #36

Sigh... At some point, most healthy adults who are not living in terrible circumstances come to the mature realization and compromise that their job is largely to produce value for someone else, not to be the primary source of personal fulfillment, and they come to understand that there is dignity in being productive, if not creative. Be creative on your own time. Lead a civic group. Be a good parent. Volunteer at a…

> creative. Be creative on your own time. Lead a civic group. Be a good parent. Volunteer at a charity. If your main gripe at work is that you're on the value-adding side of a company, which is what feature dev is in software, you have it pretty good in this world. I don’t think this is a good solution. It is certainly “A” solution, and one that many folks pick. Software Development is ALL about creativity. It’s real…

Until you come to the realization that most developers are “dark matter developers” doing yet another software as a service CRUD app or bespoke app that will never see the light of day outside of the company.

At the end of the day, if you got hit by a bus, your company would send flowers to your funeral and have an open req for your position before your body was buried.

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