Everybody should go read Bullshit Jobs.
Amazing book. The funny thing is I never expected to see it applied to software engineering - but in this context it's very appropriate.
I've been a duct taper all my career.
How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
131–140 of 428 posts
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#132IMO, that's the biggest sign that your job's not going to last very long. I remember partial involvement in a major feature that I thought was kind of lame; but it pulled in quite a few engineers and was a major deliverable. I thought to myself, "huh, I guess customers will actually pay for this?" Then later I found out that no one actually bought the feature.
This happens so much, I wonder what the effect would be if management actually got honest feedback and listened to it. I think often the engineers implementing things know if they will work or not but their opinions are ignored, if they are even brave enough to point out the things that won't work. It's the curse of the employee relationship. Employees don't want to stir things up, so they do what management wants, despite their experience telling them it'll fail. This is why I don't view success as connected to whether a project is financially successful or not. Success is pushing to production. That's all.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#133Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…
Times change, patterns stay the same. I remember when Facebook got big, so obviously everybody had to copy them.
Imagine working on an accounting application when the CEO suddenly instructs everybody to figure out how accountants could connect with each other and maybe publish their balance sheets instead of cat pictures or whatever. Details changed, but it was that weird.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Somehow PC Mag seems like the best reference here: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/clientserver It’s hard to see the hype up close sometimes. The closest analogy I can think of and it’s an older one might be how in the mid-2000s everyone needed to make a “Web 2.0 mash-up” or how for awhile everyone needed “social” (remember Ping?)... if you were stuck with a stack based on jQuery and global variables, good lu…
> if you were stuck with a stack based on jQuery and global variables, good luck transitioning to React without Facebook’s scale. My team is doing exactly this on my initiative and seeing some positive effects already, even though we're only like 2% of the way there. Would you mind expanding on what you think is futile about it? I wouldn't want to be the one advocating something that with hindsight will look obviousl…
There's loads written on re-writes.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have had a couple conversations where a business guy starts off with a decent idea then he says something like "the cognitive AI module will fill out your expense report after watching you do it for a couple weeks". What the fuck? If I had the ability to code a cognitive AI module which could do that I would not be building it for you, I would solve self driving and license the software for billions.
Solve self driving? How bout market prediction and just play the market forever. Why would you risk failure when you can just do nothing and make trillions?
Ahem, actual humans cannot consistently predict the market.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#136Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…
> we all know the project will fail unless someone develops well-perfoming, human-level AGI before Q4/2020 This is hilarious, and makes me wonder how many similar corporate AI initiatives are under way in the world right now.
At least once a month I get contacted by some recruiter contracting with a company like this. They all seem to have a vauge screen reader -> OCR -> AI fill in the blanks, form submission charter. They claim to be profitable and have 10+ customers, but their examples of how their product is used sounds like they are automating Sally in Accounting's job, and she's 2 years away from retiring, so if they could get the software to interface with the 1990s software she's been using for the last 10 years, they won't have to retrain her replacement when she finally retires. I'm sure Boomer Replacement is a market, but does not seem like a 1000x unicorn growth market.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't this speak more to the board's astounding foresight than inane projects?
Somehow PC Mag seems like the best reference here: https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/clientserver It’s hard to see the hype up close sometimes. The closest analogy I can think of and it’s an older one might be how in the mid-2000s everyone needed to make a “Web 2.0 mash-up” or how for awhile everyone needed “social” (remember Ping?)... if you were stuck with a stack based on jQuery and global variables, good lu…
The PC Mag article seems mostly pretty accurate - however, I’d argue that the web isn’t classic client/server, since the server sends the code to the client just in time. Classic client/server had a totally different code deployment mechanism. It was a full app installation every time - often via sneaker network, since few corporate networks had enough bandwidth to deploy new apps over their network. And installation software infrastructure was almost non-existent. Version control systems? Seldom. Netscape was one of the very first apps that was entirely network delivered at really large scale.
If I had to describe the web to a time traveller from the 1980s, I might say the modern web browser is something like a super smart and capable 3270 terminal, while the cloud is the mainframe.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#138Do it like Amazon, have two pizza teams.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#139> Don't just build Something™, build an industry leading product that customers want and love! The point of writing software is to get paid. If the process leads to something actually useful, good on you. If not, you still got paid. It was just a drill, life continues.
Jobs where this kind of attitude prevails suck to work at. Frustration waits around every corner. And the more pointless projects and dysfunction permeates a company the more chance the other shoe will come crashing down any moment and the company will fall apart and people will lose their jobs.
Some people are busy raising a family and just need a paycheck.
It's not me either but I get it.
Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?
#140“Agile teams that truly iterate with the customer can often avoid these problems because the customer is there the whole way through and the team continuously pivots to close gaps discovered by the customer throughout the project, thereby building something the customer actually needs and wants.” I‘m 2 years into my first role as a product owner (made the switch from design) and working at a fortune 100. The thing th…
I've worked 6 years as a PM, last 4 at FANG Here's some advice, which you are free to take or to leave, (and that's very reasonable since my advice is generic and I can't speak to your exact circumstances) 1) Just start doing it. Don't wait for someone to give you permission to prioritize customer needs. Pick up the phone and call them. Go to a store and watch them shop for your product. Talk to people. When you set…
#1 is really solid advice.