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Many software companies are a joke

liou28335.medium.com

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#61

Post by bambax »

a_square_peg wrote: post #13

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 th…

> imagine a dentist who is passionate about pulling teeth out

Exactly. Many times, the best code is no code. And making decisions about what code to write need meetings, unfortunately, or at the very least some kind of coordination.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#62

Post by mschuster91 »

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…

> but complaining about needing to do documentation, or basic project management

There's a difference between "writing documentation that fits the need at the moment" or "write fifty thousand pages of documentation no one will ever read, just to check a checkbox on some manager's checklist / compliance requirement". Or endless "sync" meetings that are effectively nothing more than filling the desire of managers to (micro-)manage.

With a decade of industry experience from freelancing over small agencies to big-corp/government jobs I've worked, I can say this: The core problem at the root of most big-co/government projects and associated disasters is that there are way too many levels of "deciders" and especially a fundamental lack of trust in people to do the right thing. When everyone is just in cover-your-ass mode and no one is willing to risk making a decision that is not backed by weeks worth of analytics and big data, shit will hit the fan real hard sooner or later.

The most successful projects are done by startups or in the big-co world where a significantly high-up person says "we're going to deliver a solution to the problem X" and everyone is focused on reaching that holistic (!) milestone, not on micro-optimizing their KPIs, OKRs or other bullshit. The key to success is trust, the focus on one shared goal and actually paying enough to hire decent seniors to lead.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#63

Post by mytailorisrich »

watwut wrote: post #53
mytailorisrich wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author does not complain just about writing documentation, but about writing an unproportionate amount of it that presumably isn't being read by anyone. I've seen that happen. People writing essays about software that are bound to get outdated and will never be read by anyone. In systems that are disconnected from the source code. This has been the norm more often than not in most companies, especially larger o…

And still, working in company that does not document what the system does, it sux massively more. Because end result is that no one knows how to use our own software. You dont know what it is supposed to do, so it is impossible to keep that stuff working. It takes ridiculous amount of time to configure anything or reproduce bugs, because you need multiple calls to find the one person who barely remembers. Also agile…

No-one ever suggested not to document!

The comment I replied to says "inappropriate amount of documentation", the Agile Manifesto says "comprehensive documentation".

That's the problem. Months, if not years, spent on pages after pages of comprehensive documentation that does not add any value and is obsolete by the time you start writing actual code.

Lastly, the age of something is not a relevant criterion. Not much has actually changed over the last 20 years. What has changed is the explosion of web-related software, which is actually the best suited for the ideas behind the Agile Manifesto.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#64

Post by politelemon »

shortformblog wrote: post #30
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…

This guy also wrote a hater’s take on open-source a few months back: https://liou28335.medium.com/why-i-dislike-open-source-acbc2... Something tells me he’s gunning for that Medium paycheck.

> Medium paycheck.

I'm sorry, what? Out of the loop here.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#65

Post by mschuster91 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #20
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 retrospective…

> 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.

And yet, that mediocre product still is orders of magnitude better than what the big-co would have been able to produce internally, simply because of all the ass-kissing and butt-covering involved in big-co office politics.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#66

Post by ethbr0 »

reallscoliosoi wrote: post #54
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.

It is funny because people who are unemployed are shamed for being "unproductive members of society", yet when you get out into the real world, you see all of these people doing nothing and getting paid lots of money, which is even worse than being unemployed in that context. Anyway, it seems there is just a lot of money to go around and political and social favours dominate a lot of the decisions.

Free market capitalism is the least efficient allocator of work and pay, except for all the others.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#67

Post by slumber86 »

amitport wrote: post #58
ethbr0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author is every software engineer I hate to work with. One who thinks that code is the only truly important part of a project. It's not. "Delivering a product that solves end user needs and is as maintainable and reliable as possible" is the only truly important thing, and only some of that is code. Meetings generally aren't for developers. They're to keep everyone else involved with the project sync'd up. Do I and e…

I would even add that sometimes "maintainable and reliable" are overrated. Sometimes being quick to market is more important then having to maintain the product. Sometimes providing a bad product is only relative to the competition (which may have a worse product). Sometimes having a good customer service is more important than the reliability of the product. etc.,. I do agree with solving the end user needs... if a…

>Sometimes providing a bad product is only relative to the competition (which may have a worse product).

Eventually will came someone with a truly good product and distrupt the market

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#68

Post by achow »

There seems to be unnecessary vitriol towards the author.

What he mentions about big financial companies (where software are for internal workflows) that is the life, and there are many of them and they are usually big employers.

And what he says "You see, we were always busy but seldom productive" is actually the essence of 'Mythical Man Month'.

About FAANG/MAANG, I have seen brilliant college toppers mucking around with html tags (but not able to get them right).

High salaries to a lot of software worker is a joke indeed.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#69

Post by Ekaros »

bambax wrote: post #61
a_square_peg wrote: post #13

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 th…

> imagine a dentist who is passionate about pulling teeth out Exactly. Many times, the best code is no code. And making decisions about what code to write need meetings, unfortunately, or at the very least some kind of coordination.

There is really some questions that should be asked: Why are we doing this? For what reason it has to be done this way? Do we need to do this at all? What do you actually want? And so on.

Meetings are useful to clear up this stuff and at best result there is simpler solution, or not need to do work at all.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#70

Post by mjburgess »

The issue the author is talking about, in my view, is caused by the natural lifespan of corps tending towards bloating middle-management. (Very hard process to fight).

At the start the founder group are rutheless productivity-chasers. Then the corp expands to include the its-just-a-job group. Everything ticks along well, and at some point, the rutheless can't manage the group. So they hire followers to listen to their orders and thereby manage others. In this sense middle management is really "corporate following".

Now you have the its-just-ajobs, rutheless-productives, rutheless-leaders, and leader-followers.

When the corp grows too far the balance in these populations is thrown way off (by, often, the shortsightedness of the real leadership in balloning middle-management to cover for them).

At this point all the meaningful decisions are still held by the exec, but middle management are now so large they have to "find something useful to do", which is regulate all the meaningless decisions.

At this point most of the ruthelessly-productive leave, and you're left with the justajobs, leader-followers and the few clueless productives who'll destroy their mental health trying to grapple with it all.

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