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How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

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Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#241

Post by noizejoy »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #220
noizejoy wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I remember just before my first web project. I worked on a Oracle client server project (SMDS management tool) and to install the client, you installed about 4 products via 14 floppy disks one after the other on the client PC. Took two days for two of us to install it on five or six client PC's

So you can probably imagine what it was like when we had several dozens of client pc’s across several customer companies across several cities across the continent.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#242

Post by rocqua »

hef19898 wrote: post #194
RhodesianHunter wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago at a small company after a round of golf with some other shmuck, our CEO told us we needed SSO via OAuth, because that's how we can convince people we're secure. How soon could we get it developed? Spare no expense! We had a single website with an already written to OWASP standards login, no external API or plans for any.

What always drives me crazy about instances like this, is that managers and the c-level seem to be much more willing to listen to some "random" guy or blog over their own people. People they hired, people that have a much better understanding of the issue, the processes and so on. This effect is by no means limited to tech. And engineers, regardless of type, are by no means immune to that as soon as they reach higher…

I think a big worry for any C-levels is "what if my employees are wrong". And there is good reason to hedge against this, because insiders have clear interests in defending past mistakes.

And if you hired your people yourself, you probably know you skipped over some qualified people who were to expensive, and weeded out some overconfident people who turned out not to be all that. In the end, you wonder what those expensive smart people would have said, and you wonder if your confident sounding employees are just overconfident incapables that you failed to weed out.

Hence, getting an outside perspective from someone you trust has a lot of attraction. However, getting that outsider person to be knowledgeable enough, and getting them the right information, is a tough task.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#243

Post by dragonwriter »

Nope, everything we are working on someone wants.

Very often, that someone isn’t the customer, but someone in the team’s management heirarchy, and usually those tasks are both prioritized and poorly specified and subject to worse requirements flux than customer requirements (unsurprising, since customer requirements are based on actual business needs, while management requirements are based on whims, flights of fancy, that-comment-a-higher-level-manager-just-made-that-gave-me-an-idea-of-how-to-impress-them, etc.)

Agile methodologies at the team level don’t really protect against that, though.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#244

Post by tappio »

franze wrote: post #162

I am working with Start-ups since 2008 - and classic companies before that. My chances to know beforehand what customers want is 50/50.* So I am very humble by now. Launch super early. Get Feedback. Quantity wise and quality feedback (listen closely if you made their life any better). Iterrate and/or change path. Yes, like flipping a coin. Sad that, quite a lot of managers have a way lower hit rate as they have an in…

I wonder what is the chance if you are following the "worst" practices?

User is stupid -mentality, being a dictator and not explaining why things are done the way they are, etc... Id expect it to be lower, but not that much lower. Luck is a major component because new product development is basically forecasting the future. There are so many things which are out of your control. If you get lucky 4/10 times with worst practices and 5/10 times with best practices, it does not really matter.

Besides, it makes a much better story that you only knew how others are stupid and because of this only you could do the right solution. Whole western society loves the myth of intelligent jerks... Like Steve Jobs. "it's ok to be an asshole if you are smart".

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#245

Post by aloisdg »

StillBored wrote: post #106

Worse is when you know another part of the company is sabotaging what your trying to achieve. One might call it the right hand competing with the left, but frequently the path forward to the next version/product/whatever is pretty clear, but the existing product teams are well entrenched and of course make all the $$$$, so its a game of politics, and keeping a low profile while trying to gain traction. Pretty frustra…

In my previous work, I learnt that two teams could write two solutions tackling the same problem. After two years, they would each present their solution and the hierarchy will keep one.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#246

Post by lifeisstillgood »

m0zg wrote: post #144
worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously 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.…

To kind of go against the flow here: _most_ of the projects I worked on seemed to be a waste of time when I worked on them, but ended up making a lot of money many years later, years after I'd moved on. I like the green field stuff, and green field stuff looks like a waste of time most of the time. The first three versions suck ass and don't do much, but without having them you don't get to something that doesn't suc…

Thank you - it's nice to have a considered view on these things

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#247

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

tluyben2 wrote: post #172
kristopolous wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are busy raising a family and just need a paycheck. It's not me either but I get it.

Highly anecdotal, but 100% of the software devs I know in this position (living paycheck to paycheck) are living above their means, in a city. If they moved to the countryside (in another country if need be), they would have to work 2 months a year with the same pay with a larger house, garden, savings etc. After covid it is actually easy to do, but before as well if you are not completely horrible at your job. Howev…

I feel like your version of reality is different to the one most people live in.

Highly skilled people live in big expensive cities because that's where the best jobs and most professional and social opportunities are.

Once you move to the countryside your jobs and networking opportunities plummet and you'll have to endure a soul crushing commute unless you work remotely or your house and your job are close to train stations on the same route, not to mention, at least in Austria, shit internet.

People want to live with or interact with like minded people and it's much easier to find what your looking for in a big city. The countryside is lonelier and more conservative.

Sure, you can have a lot of space and a garden, but not everyone is into that and most would prefer to have the amenities of a city: sports gyms, cinemas, cafes, bars, meetups, good doctors without having to drive everywhere or wait for a train.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#248

Post by bigiain »

blauditore wrote: post #210
dkersten wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my own experience, often non-technical people will attribute things as AI that we wouldn’t, eg any basic automation. Really anything that’s in any way intelligent or seems that way. I had a project where people were excited about a feature that was basically just alerting when one value crossed over or under another... I wonder if your team could provide real value to customers providing some smart “AI” feature th…

The line of were AI starts is not well-defined. If you think about it, virtually all software can be considered AI if you put expectations low enough. From the other end, one could argue that once you understand the inner workings of a piece of AI, it just becomes a fancy algorithm to you. In the end, everything is just a piece of software converting input to output. My experience is that people tend to consider thin…

On the other hand, actual AI is kinda cut-n-paste accessible now too.

I slapped together a POC javascript tinyYolo feature detector demo last weekend (using someone else's code and pre-trained model from their github project), and joked when I showed it around that "And we can tell investors we're running AI, deep learning, and convolutional neural networks in our realtime production workflow!"...

(But as we all know, all the _proper_ magic is done by the regexes buried in that Perl module dependency hidden in a deeply nested source code directory that no-one without a grey beard is ever game to peer into...)

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#249

Post by bigiain »

fxtentacle wrote: post #157
hieunc229 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Business guys usually comes together and brag about their works. Quite often, they start to talk about things they heard but don’t understand much. And the other one hear about it, get excited, but also don’t understand much. Then on the meeting, he brought the idea up and convince everyone to do it. The next you know, you’re pulling your hair out trying to understand what is going on

Yes, the best salesperson is usually the one least concerned with reality. Or as one VC put it: Never let facts get in the way of a good story.

This makes more sense when you remember that being "concerned with reality" for a salesperson mostly means "Getting the commission paid and moving to a different role before everything blows up too badly", rather than "delivering software that meets the sales deal's contractual requirements".

Salespeople are too rarely judged/punished for the disastrus messes they leave behind, and all too quickly judged/rewarded for being able to convince a customer to sign off on a big number without any care for long term implications of that deal...

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#250

Post by hef19898 »

bigiain wrote: post #239
dkersten wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my own experience, often non-technical people will attribute things as AI that we wouldn’t, eg any basic automation. Really anything that’s in any way intelligent or seems that way. I had a project where people were excited about a feature that was basically just alerting when one value crossed over or under another... I wonder if your team could provide real value to customers providing some smart “AI” feature th…

I had a boss not so long ago who kept selling our customers our "Conversational AI Bot". What we gave them was a fairly dumb keyword search of a library of questions the customer would type in along with answers - wrapped in some html widgets displaying cartoon robot heads. It still astounds me that not only did none of those customers sue us for blatant misrepresentation, but most of them were delighted with what th…

There are a couple of lessons in that anecdote.
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