Many software companies are a joke
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Many software companies are a joke
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Re: Many software companies are a joke
#2One of the main reason I have come to to make peace with that, is that these companies are not optimizing for delivery and product quality first.
They are optimizing against risk (of change, of loss of control over the whole process from ideating to selling/shipping).
If you can build the product/service in 2 months with a tight focused team of 3-5 people, in a 100+ engineers company, how do you manage if this 3-5 people leave (whatever the reason): how do you manage to infuse their experience/expertise over the thing they built, to 10/20/30 other people to mitigate then this risk?
You can manage to do so when your company grows, because... you don't have a choice, you started small.
When you've grown already, to mitigate this risk, you have to start to infuse things across many people and layers of people you have, so that when, 3-5 people leave, it's almost barely noticeable an event.
Maybe there's a better set of reasons. But this one made me understand better the whole world of big corporations and especially (big) consulting sofware companies (which are often several ones contracted on the same big projects).
Edit: you may also understand "optimizing for" as "scared to death about".
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#3One of the main reason I have come to to make peace with that, is that these companies are not optimizing for delivery and product quality first. They are optimizing against risk (of change, of loss of control over the whole process from ideating to selling/shipping). If you can build the product/service in 2 months with a tight focused team of 3-5 people, in a 100+ engineers company, how do you manage if this 3-5 pe…
That also explains the "design by committee" thing and the ugly/desperate UX some corporate apps have.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#4One of the main reason I have come to to make peace with that, is that these companies are not optimizing for delivery and product quality first. They are optimizing against risk (of change, of loss of control over the whole process from ideating to selling/shipping). If you can build the product/service in 2 months with a tight focused team of 3-5 people, in a 100+ engineers company, how do you manage if this 3-5 pe…
That would be justifiable if the risk was proportional to the cost. Frequently it just isn't.
As a case in point, if "when, 3-5 people leave, it's almost barely noticeable an event" then you've almost certainly over-compensated for the general case. Why? Because the entire set of people who know anything about a given project simultaneously leaving should be incredibly rare. If that's your benchmark event probability, and your risk mitigation costs are linear in the risk probability (which they probably are, by vague handwavy analogy to finance thinking), then you're constantly bearing costs that aren't justified by the downsides you're likely to encounter unless the specific project in question is company-breakingly critical.
If an entire dev team up and leaving isn't a rare event, you've got deeper problems.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#5One of the main reason I have come to to make peace with that, is that these companies are not optimizing for delivery and product quality first. They are optimizing against risk (of change, of loss of control over the whole process from ideating to selling/shipping). If you can build the product/service in 2 months with a tight focused team of 3-5 people, in a 100+ engineers company, how do you manage if this 3-5 pe…
That would be justifiable if the risk was proportional to the cost. Frequently it just isn't. As a case in point, if "when, 3-5 people leave, it's almost barely noticeable an event" then you've almost certainly over-compensated for the general case. Why? Because the entire set of people who know anything about a given project simultaneously leaving should be incredibly rare. If that's your benchmark event probability…
This incredibly rare event has happened at almost every firm I've ever worked at (except small startups), multiple times a year (different teams/products, but sometimes also the same product with its new team)...
Yeah they should fix the actual issue many layers above, but that's not something the guy planning for this can do at huge corporations. You just deal with whatever it throws at you.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#6The sad thing is that it’s a joke that many people don’t seem to be in on.
You get all these defenders coming out of the woodwork when people wonder what the hell all the programmers at say, Twitter, are doing. Supposedly you puny mind can’t comprehend the challenges of developing a website “at scale”
The real answer is, almost nothing. People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#7Astonishing to me that someone with 20 years' experience in any industry could have so little perspective. Obviously there are inefficiencies with big companies, but complaining about needing to do documentation, or basic project management?
The writing is smug and shows no self awareness - it seems to me that the author cannot recognise that there may be other priorities than exactly what is in front of them and therefore everyone who disagrees with him must be wrong.
It is good that the author has found something that suits them better.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#8The sad thing is that it’s a joke that many people don’t seem to be in on. You get all these defenders coming out of the woodwork when people wonder what the hell all the programmers at say, Twitter, are doing. Supposedly you puny mind can’t comprehend the challenges of developing a website “at scale” The real answer is, almost nothing. People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.
Nah, most people feel some guilt at doing nothing when they're paid well, so my guess is lots of internal projects that don't go anywhere and that we never hear about. That's quite different to nothing at all.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#9One of the main reason I have come to to make peace with that, is that these companies are not optimizing for delivery and product quality first. They are optimizing against risk (of change, of loss of control over the whole process from ideating to selling/shipping). If you can build the product/service in 2 months with a tight focused team of 3-5 people, in a 100+ engineers company, how do you manage if this 3-5 pe…
I disagree.
In most of the large companies I worked for there was zero documentation (+1000 employees, +100 engineers) or very very little or only in a few projects. When people were leaving, someone else was getting hit with a shitty undocumented project, they would spend some time learning it - and that was it. In the worst case a doomed-to-fail-rewrite started and troubled the team for a couple of years.
I think the main issue is that: - People are given tasks from the board of directors (trickling down layers and layers of management), they don't feel like it's their problem - There is little accountability, tracking performance is very hard; tons of companies don't bother, but some of them do (after HR intervention, CTO being in trouble justifying the costs) and they can't find decent metrics to use for performance, so the bosses are basically flying blind / trusting middle managers. - No high growth stocks that will make you rich - Middle managers feeling like they need to prove they're doing something imposing weird and useless rituals: meetings, presentations, etc
These factors allow people to slack off as much as they can and take as long as they can to do anything.
As long as they can come up something for standup, it's all good.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be justifiable if the risk was proportional to the cost. Frequently it just isn't. As a case in point, if "when, 3-5 people leave, it's almost barely noticeable an event" then you've almost certainly over-compensated for the general case. Why? Because the entire set of people who know anything about a given project simultaneously leaving should be incredibly rare. If that's your benchmark event probability…
This incredibly rare event has happened at almost every firm I've ever worked at (except small startups), multiple times a year (different teams/products, but sometimes also the same product with its new team)... Yeah they should fix the actual issue many layers above, but that's not something the guy planning for this can do at huge corporations. You just deal with whatever it throws at you.
Interesting. I think I've seen it once in a 20-year career.