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Many software companies are a joke

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#11

Post by baybal2 »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

The 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.

> The sad thing is that it’s a joke that many people don’t seem to be in on.

On each of my job in my early career, I spent considerable effort weeding out people who got too used to such mode of work.

There are software developers with vastly different prior work experience, and expectations. People who do 30 minutes of actual coding a day, and ones who do 11 hours in coding sweatshops.

People who spent their entire career on 30 minutes of coding a day jobs, and think of themselves too much once they rise in seniority are the worst, and are the biggest source of dumpster fire/death march projects.

My third serious job in Canada: work in a consumer electronics trading company, upgrading their shipping system to get shipment status from DHL API, and submitting new ones. My predecessor, and ex-unit head wasted close to $1m, and more than a year, got SAP involved, invited many consultants, change managers, a project management contractor, and just been in the process of "fixing deficiencies" of his work by buying "enterprise SOA solution."

23 year old me called this bullshit on the second week, fought to have a serious talk with the company owner, rewrote a 10 years old steaming pile of PERL, and BASH scripts to Python, Postgres, and JS frontend in under one week, showed it working, and countered "You don't understand SOA!" protests of the unit head in front of the boss. He gets fired, I get a bonus the size of my annual salary.

Since then, my bosses always threw me as a "firefighter" on projects in crisis.

------------

We now have 2 major trends in the industry:

1. More, and more non-IT companies are trying to do software

2. A giant amount of newcomers to the industry who would've normally went working for banks, and management consulting companies eroding big IT companies as later grew with little regard to quality of hires.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#12

Post by WJW »

regularfry wrote: post #4
Juliate wrote: post #2

One 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…

I think rather frequently the impact of such a "rare" event could indeed be company-breakingly critical, depending on which part of the company that team was running. As a thought experiment, if all DBAs left tomorrow and the database fell over the next day, how much time would the next-most-capable person need to figure out the backup policies and scripts, restore the db and bring everything back up? I've personally seen this sink a company outright. It's only anecdotal evidence ofc, but it is still something that happens.

Worse, people leaving a team are not independent events. People leaving a certain team is often highly correlated to other people leaving the same team, because there is some common cause like a toxic manager.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#13

Post by a_square_peg »

I tend to think most of engineering is rather mundane but potentially very rewarding. I hate meetings and overly complicated project coordination just as much the next person but there is also danger in wanting to do ‘cool stuff’ - imagine a dentist who is passionate about pulling teeth out.

A project that I quite enjoyed involved months of investigation work, finally solved by tweaking a single software parameter that dictated how far a release mechanism moved. The number of internal/external meetings I had to demonstrate that this can indeed fix the problem could have seemed silly but it was also very reasonable given the risks involved.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#15

Post by fy20 »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

The 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.

How do I get in on this? For the 10 years I've been in this industry I've never been in a job where I felt like I had it easy. It's always been a rush to get one project done then there's always something else in the pipeline. Whether those projects are actually worth doing is a different question...

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#16

Post by Negitivefrags »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #8
Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

The 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.

Oh I’m sure that it feels like they are doing something.

But in a badly managed company each person is like a randomly oriented vector.

You sum them together and the end result is something near to zero.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#18

Post by Juliate »

regularfry wrote: post #4
Juliate wrote: post #2

One 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…

"should be incredibly rare". Not incredibly, it's rare, but it happens (seen it in two small companies, it killed them; saw it in several ESN/consultancy projects, it killed the contract, but was a manageable event in the whole company; saw it in medium software companies, it killed the projects and sometimes pushed for strategy changes).

It happens enough for many (not all) individuals to have noticed across their career (especially when in management, where a big part of their role is already to manage risk).

It happens enough for any single company to be quite traumatized by it when it happened, and to try to avoid it in the future.

Where some companies do it differently is: they don't overreact, they understand that this is a risk management issue and that you can balance it, and/or they don't setup a "general case" for all projets/teams (depending on the type of the project). This requires quite some serenity and perspective.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#20

Post by jokethrowaway »

batiudrami wrote: post #7

Astonishing 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 the…

I'm pushing more than 15 and feel like the author is right.

What you're missing is that doing soft tasks is a tradeoff and big companies are leaving a lot on the table by having an inflexible culture.

Those same big companies will end up buying startups for 10x their ARR to get some mediocre product with no documentation or tests, cranked by developers on redbulls swearing at each other instead of doing retrospectives and yoga friday.

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