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

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

#401

Post by donavanm »

tootie wrote: post #392
kragen wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Developers are part of the process too but they don't generate much insight into what customers want. Only how to execute. How could you fix that? Would it be sufficient to give the developers more contact with the customers, or would you need to hire different developers, for example domain experts who also knew how to program? I ask because, when you're writing software, you're constantly making tradeoffs between…

There's nothing to fix it works great. And it's worked this way at every company I've ever worked at. As hard as it is to find devs who can do frontend and backend you can't find any who are good coders and also know how to generate customer insights and spend hours doing interviews and requirements gathering. They're different jobs. When it comes to actually designing a solution then tradeoffs on implementation appr…

What youre stumbling on is these “big tech” cos are growing horizontally when possible, and its normally local engineering roles that used to seed build and manage new teams. Thats why there some pretty extreme reactions to promotion process or senior role interviews. Yes, knowing how to organize a team, mentor junior developers, do market research, evaluate customer feedback, model marginal cost, and write a business proposal are key skills over the lifetime of those senior ICs. Yes, I could backstop those areas for my team mates today. But once we succeed each of those senior developers on my team will fork off to their own team and repeat the process, thats how we scale out.

A corollary is these self organizing teams add up to self organizing business units. The teams know what to build because theyve at read & internalized what matters to the business. And senior members should be involved with the 6-12 month planning cycles that happen across that business unit. So their day to day execution is informed by, and happens in the context of, the larger business. Think of something closer to hierarchal federation than directed work silos.

WRT to “lighting money on fire” there are teams that look like that. But thats generally a speculative investment with a medium term (~2-3yr) goal theyre working towards. This is business, so its not free or infinite, and in a sense their efforts are competing with the alternative efforts that could be more profitable.

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

#402

Post by kragen »

yupper32 wrote: post #281
deepGem wrote: post #57

So the key takeaway here is that the Plan, build(iterate), ship cycle works very well. Most successful teams stick to this. What is not clear to me is how an abrupt new feature with an urgent deadline fits into all this ? "We'll fit this into the next release cycle" is not an option, let's say. So how do you fit in this new requirement ? You are already in the middle of a feature built on day 3 or 4. Devs are working…

> abrupt new feature with an urgent deadline As someone who has spent most of their 7 year career at big companies that follow "plan build ship" cycles, I don't understand this post. What abrupt new feature with urgent deadlines? Why can't this hypothetical feature wait? Sure, for Coronavirus teams spun up and other work stopped, but that's a pretty big outlier. Most features are planned a quarter or so ahead. > Do y…

What might an "urgent new feature" consist of? Well...

The Swiss Franc is no longer pegged to the Euro, so our trading software needs to track a separate currency, and also we need to stop trading EUR/CHF forex pairs as if they were still pegged; we lost $2 million before I turned the system off this morning. The new version of IOS doesn't support the old SNMP MIB, and our customer has already installed it. The vid.me domain has been bought by a porn spammer and now we have hardcore porn ads on all our news articles. YouTube revved their AJAX and our video metadata scraper stopped working. We're being hit by an 0.1Mbps DoS because this one page takes a whole CPU second to render. The new satellite downlink site came online six months earlier than expected, so our comms software needs that multisite feature next week instead of in six months, or we're paying a shitload of rent for nothing. Modi demonetized large bills last night, so we need to stop accepting them at our ATMs. Apple told us yesterday they won't approve our update to the iOS app unless we add in-application purchases (and disable every other payment method). We signed a contract to provide security for a new film, but they're filming onsite at an Air Force Base, so we need a field in the database for which security guards are cleared to go on the base, and filming starts on Monday. Turkey just ran all their ISPs through CGNAT, which means we need to fix our NAT traversal strategy so it works through two layers of NAT, or we lose half our Turkish users. Russia is fining us $100,000 a day until we move all the data about Russian users onto our Russian server. Our popular webcam software just doesn't work with this popular new webcam. We've identified a new signal in the market that we think will give us 0.7¢ per trade, but someone else will probably exploit it within the next two weeks, and then it won't be profitable anymore. It looks like Berkshire Hathaway is going to break US$671088.64 per share this month, and we need to be able to handle that. Apple just announced that in iOS 11 the default video codec is HEVC, so unless we tell our users how to reconfigure the Camera app (and they reshoot their videos) we need to be able to handle HEVC uploads before people upgrade their phones to iOS 11. NCMEC just gave us the new version of their damn fuzzy hashing algorithm; they'll start giving us hashes in that format next month, and if we don't support it by then, we're kiddy porn purveyors. Oh, Argentina canceled daylight savings time with 11 days of warning, so all those calendar entries our users scheduled two weeks from now, they now have the wrong UTC time and need to be fixed, plus we need to roll a timezone update. We finally signed the deal with Nicki Minaj to make her a character in the game we were about to ship, but we can't slip the ship date past Black Friday or our sales will take a huge hit.

(Names and details have been changed to protect the guilty. Some events haven't happened yet.)

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

#403

Post by danjac »

jopsen wrote: post #349
danjac wrote: post #7

My tinfoil hat theory is that Scrum was invented by Big Tech to hobble potential future competitors.

> My tinfoil hat theory is that Scrum was invented by Big Tech to hobble potential future competitors. Why make up an easily debunked conspiracy theory? Scrum wasn't invented at big tech.. Agile development in general became a thing in the mid-90ties.

I'm well aware of when/how Scrum was invented, hence "tinfoil hat".

The point was that whatever the origins and intent, Scrum benefits Big Tech (who largely avoid Scrum as per OP) by hobbling smaller competitors who adopt it.

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

#404

Post by kragen »

donavanm wrote: post #401
tootie wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing to fix it works great. And it's worked this way at every company I've ever worked at. As hard as it is to find devs who can do frontend and backend you can't find any who are good coders and also know how to generate customer insights and spend hours doing interviews and requirements gathering. They're different jobs. When it comes to actually designing a solution then tradeoffs on implementation appr…

What youre stumbling on is these “big tech” cos are growing horizontally when possible, and its normally local engineering roles that used to seed build and manage new teams. Thats why there some pretty extreme reactions to promotion process or senior role interviews. Yes, knowing how to organize a team, mentor junior developers, do market research, evaluate customer feedback, model marginal cost, and write a busines…

That wasn't really what I was talking about, but it's a good point too.

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

#405

Post by [deleted] »

pc86 wrote: post #218
cheschire wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you have the option of saying "no" unless the company culture / leadership climate does not allow it. That's far from the inherent obligation you're describing. I do however agree with leaving any organization that does not allow you to express disagreement.

I think that depends on whether "no" means a nice way of saying "this is stupid" - which I agree with, and have done before, to mixed results - vs. outright refusing to do work that's been requested. I don't think an employee who is being paid a wage by an employer has the right to refuse to do something just because it's a stupid idea.

[deleted]

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

#406

Post by 1ark »

ericbarrett wrote: post #185
dasKrokodil wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

... and, unpopular opinion, business attire!

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

#407

Post by theshrike79 »

bluGill wrote: post #337
nickd2001 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I realized that it all comes down to "metrics" - end of every sprint, my manager has to present it to his bosses". I wonder how widespread this is.. Certainly that's exactly what I experienced at a previous workplace, and worse than that, people's performance was judged on whether they'd done exactly the "right" stories in a 2 week sprint. Rather than thinking about developing software, people were working out how…

The purpose of metrics is to be something to game. Now you do need don't to anything illegal policies in place, and you might have a [unwritten] moral code of what you can't do. However the purpose is to game the metrics. For all the discussion that follows I'm going to assume we are within these limits. If the boss wants profit margin as a metric, then you need to figure out how to do things cheaper, and how to get…

> The problem is most developer metrics are things where gaming the metric isn't good for the company.

This is a lesson more managers need to learn. You don't give engineers a metric to game, they'll run circles around your silly numbers.

My favourite anecdote about this:

I was a consultant for a multinational corp. The Natives had their bonus targets tied to "amount of open bugs at $date".

What did they do? At $date-1 the natives assigned all their open issues to me, a poor lonely consultant - who was outside of the bonus structure.

...and at $date+1 they grabbed their issues back, bonus objectives met :D

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

#408

Post by Jensson »

mosdave wrote: post #376
Jensson wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty sure there isn't, otherwise FAANG would enforce it top down. They already enforce other practices top down like hiring etc, so if they had data saying that mandating Scrum would make the company X% more efficient they would absolutely do it. It might be a force multiplier in other types of companies, but it probably isn't in FAANG style companies. Similar to how FAANG hiring can make sense to them but still be…

> They already enforce other practices top down like hiring etc, so if they had data saying that mandating Scrum would make the company X% more efficient they would absolutely do it. lol, as if their top-down hiring practices are at all driven by concerns for company efficiency.

Why do you think otherwise? The whole reason they do it is that they looked at other big companies and noticed that everyone ended up with mediocre workforces after a while, so they did this to avoid that scenario. Then as they grew bigger they could hire a lot of data people to analyse different methods and see how well different things works to optimize further. When you spend tens of billions on engineering salaries at a data driven company you will do that.

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

#409

Post by UK-Al05 »

pc86 wrote: post #394
UK-Al05 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A broken build is meant to be everybody helps fix it situation.

I'm questioning the logic of having a workflow with a not-uncommon case of "this is on fire now everyone stop what they're doing and help me fix it" which is exactly what you'd have here.

Tests breaking should be rare. And trunk based development requires the team working closely together. So working together isn't a adrupt thing.

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

#410

Post by [deleted] »

kragen wrote: post #384
rusk wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The idea an "agile enterprise" is intrinsically absurd. Teams are agile not companies I’m really not sure what you are basing this on. Agile, as I’m familiar with it is framed in terms of lean management which is a well established approach to running business, exemplified by Toyota. Now you can debate the suitabilities of this and the effectiveness til the cows come home, just as you can with agile and scrum etc b…

I don't think it's fair to say that http://agilemanifesto.org/ is "framed in terms of lean management", or indeed management at all. While there's nothing making it impossible to organize a company along those lines, you may be interested in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28677886 where I explain why the Agile Manifesto values are deeply opposed to many established company value systems.

[deleted]
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