How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum • Hacker News Board

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#181

Post by bengale » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:46 PM UTC

hatchnyc wrote: post #22

> Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make it impossible for developers to interact with the rest of the business. In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the…

At the last large traditional place I was at it seemed a lot like the upper management types had put these gatekeepers in place so they had people that would pander to them. The amount of times one of them told me they couldn't tell their boss some bad news for risk of getting fired or chewed out, but wouldn't let me go and tell them the truth was mad.

From what I could tell no-one was firing engineers because it was too expensive and we didn't really care since we could get more work within a few hours, and the "bosses" didn't like the lack of power they had in that dynamic.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#182

Post by hiptobecubic » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

spaetzleesser wrote: post #126

whynotmaybe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also seen some instance where gatekeeper were pretty effective at filtering users demands because some of those requests were too dumb and the "paying" users were used to have everything they wanted, and because they "paid" the dev department, "they had to do everything they wanted". Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do.

I have seen it more often that gatekeepers filtered user demands based on their own knowledge and not on technical feasibility or effort. So you are told that a user needs a certain thing in a certain way but when you talk directly to the user you learn that the user actually had a different need which you can fulfill in an easier way than the gatekeeper thought possible. In general I think there is a huge advantage…

The whole point is that this doesn't scale. What do you do when there are too many users to interview them all over coffee?

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#183

Post by g051051 » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

troupe wrote: post #106

akudha wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with any system is that people try to enforce it, military style. In my previous job, we did scrum, but not too strict. We had two week cycles, not-too-strict deadlines (most of the time) etc. If I finished my task early, I was free to pick up tasks from the planned list, without having to get permission from my manager. We also didn't agonize over story points, retrospective etc. We did it light hearted…

> debating whether it is worth 5 points are 8 I'm baffled by this behavior. If you know it is the next most important thing, why do you care? What would it change in your behavior if it is a 5 vs and 8? If you are looking at a task that you would choose not to do if it were an 8 but choose to do if it were a 5, then you probably look for something that is more important to work on. I think you are right that much of…

My last "team" was constantly paralyzed by this. The scrum master would go around and everyone had to vote on the number of points they thought a story was, which then led to extended debate. Of course, it can always be worse...near the end, they tried some idiotic thing called "planning poker".

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#184

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:48 PM UTC

hatchnyc wrote: post #22

> Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make it impossible for developers to interact with the rest of the business. In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the…

[deleted]

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#185

Post by ericbarrett » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

dasKrokodil wrote: post #39

hatchnyc wrote: post #22

> Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make it impossible for developers to interact with the rest of the business. In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the…

The gatekeepers are the ones with the people skills: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNuu9CpdjIo

What a utopia this movie portrays! Individual cubicles, administrative assistants for senior staff, and the protagonist has only been asked to work over a single weekend.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#186

Post by hiptobecubic » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:51 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #92

whynotmaybe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also seen some instance where gatekeeper were pretty effective at filtering users demands because some of those requests were too dumb and the "paying" users were used to have everything they wanted, and because they "paid" the dev department, "they had to do everything they wanted". Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do.

> Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do. I see this as a complaint a lot, but... in a private company, they're the ones writing the checks. So if they want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save an hour, that's their prerogative. It's certainly our obligation to point out the cost (including ongoing maintenance) but again in a private compan…

This is really only true of it's coming from the very top of the food chain. Sales is obviously an important part of the revenue stream, but it's not the only part and it doesn't automatically trump all other concerns. For example, it's not useful to sell a product that doesn't work, will cause huge customer churn and will destroy the company's reputation. If you're a shareholder or care about the longevity of your job, it's important to push back on wasteful behavior.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#187

Post by shagie » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #92

whynotmaybe wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've also seen some instance where gatekeeper were pretty effective at filtering users demands because some of those requests were too dumb and the "paying" users were used to have everything they wanted, and because they "paid" the dev department, "they had to do everything they wanted". Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do.

> Like asking for a 6months dev work to help them save 1 hour annually on an annoying task they had to do. I see this as a complaint a lot, but... in a private company, they're the ones writing the checks. So if they want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to save an hour, that's their prerogative. It's certainly our obligation to point out the cost (including ongoing maintenance) but again in a private compan…

There are other factors at work that may exist outside of the "1h of labor saved" too.

It could be something that's tricky. While the optimal case is 1h of work, if something goes wrong then its doing forensic auditing on the books in 3 months and spending lots of time there.

It could be something that needs to be repeatable. Yes, it's 1h, but before this was done Alice did it and before that Bob did it. They did it slightly differently and that cause problems. Having a computer program do it provides change management to the process of doing that task.

It could be something that needs auditing. Tying into the previous two, having a "this is how it's done and all the calculations that go into it along with a test suite" makes it easier to be assured that it is working correctly.

There are lots of things outside of the purview of a developer working on doing whatever task needs to be done to solve a problem. The value of the problem being solved is the issue of the manager or the customer.

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#188

Post by shagie » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

bengale wrote: post #181

hatchnyc wrote: post #22

> Engineers are encouraged to interact with the rest of the business and build relationships with non-engineers. In contrast, traditional companies often make it impossible for developers to interact with the rest of the business. In my experience “traditional companies” will often have a bunch of people in cushy “gatekeeping“ jobs whose main function is basically forwarding emails back and forth between devs and the…

At the last large traditional place I was at it seemed a lot like the upper management types had put these gatekeepers in place so they had people that would pander to them. The amount of times one of them told me they couldn't tell their boss some bad news for risk of getting fired or chewed out, but wouldn't let me go and tell them the truth was mad. From what I could tell no-one was firing engineers because it was…

A clear implementation of the Thermocline of Truth - https://brucefwebster.com/2008/04/15/the-wetware-crisis-the-...

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#189

Post by namdnay » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:54 PM UTC

jon-wood wrote: post #30

brightball wrote: post #12

Everything described in there is mirrored in SAFe fwiw, even though their survey said it was mostly used in large non-tech companies. Individual teams can use whatever they want to manage themselves (Kanban, Lean, Scrum, etc…up to the team). Estimations planning and commitments for each quarter are done by developers exclusively, including coordinating across teams. Releases can happen at any point. A strong and cont…

I'm sure there's some nuggets of value in SAFe, but I just can't take anything seriously which welcomes you into it's world with this diagram: https://www.scaledagileframework.com/wp-content/uploads/2021... Also note up in the top left corner, where you've got the customer abstractly feeding work into this treadmill of... stuff. If your development team aren't talking to either the customer, or representatives of the…

oh you sweet summer child... that's only the first or second level of SAFe. Once you get to full "operating thetan level 8" , they give you this abomination:

https://www.agilest.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/scaled-ag...

yes, that's right, an "agile" process with 5 levels of bullshit between the customer and the keyboards

EDIT: anyone know why this is "flagged"? is there a trigger on keywords? or on URLs?

Re: How big tech runs tech projects and the curious absence of Scrum

#190

Post by Jensson » Mon, Sep 27, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

hiptobecubic wrote: post #178

Jensson wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trick big tech uses to solve this is to not just pay extra for above average engineering talent, they pay extra for above average talent in all areas. So the people you talk to are almost always pretty reasonable and understanding, they want things done and complains but they don't ask for the impossible or unreasonable.

There are also product managers and UX engineers. It's not like every random coder is interacting with sales on the go to market strategy.

Product managers and UX engineers are there to do product management or UX design, not to filter information from the rest of the company to programmers. That means that most of sales requests are better forwarded to a product manager or UX designer, but there is nothing stopping them from directly filing a bug report to a developer and chatting about potential fixes/timelines etc. Also if some feature is important the product manager can just tell them to talk directly with the relevant engineer to get the feature done.