There's one competent programmer for every 4.2 big thinkers, visionaries and non coding architects, so this is a natural order of things.
Many software companies are a joke
191–200 of 377 posts
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#192Earlier 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 argue most meetings can be mostly replaced with ticket comments, documentation, emails, and chats. Devs are constantly expected to adapt and learn new things, while others apparently don't need to learn to use comments, documentation, emails, and chats to stay informed. Learning to use search features should be a good step as well. Outlook has search, Azure DevOps has search, there's Google, and most chat pro…
> I would argue most meetings can be mostly replaced with ticket comments, documentation, emails, and chats.
s/would/should/
The real benefit of those forms of communication is that you have a written, hopefully searchable, record of the discussion. It also forces people to mold their incoherent thoughts into complete sentences.
Meetings should be reserved for brainstorming and decision making.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#193> I remember while I was working for a big financial firm as a software developer. I kept asking myself why we were doing very little coding. Most of my time was spent attending useless meetings, preparing boring slides, making goofy excel sheets and Gantt-charts and maybe 1–2 hours of coding a day if I was even lucky. The software that I and my team worked on was a basically a javascript web application that monitored and collected details about financial transactions in the company. Believe me when I tell you that I could have worked on the entire software myself in 5 months. The entire solution could not have been more than 24,000 lines of code (including lots of generated code). My team spent nearly 3 years building this software, most of the time spent in meetings, bickering over the pettiest feature like, if we should display certain data using a particular chart and what colour the chart should be.
Theoretically a Product Manager solves this problem for you: they are given the authority to be decisive about the details of a project, its scope, and they sit through all the boring meetings and manage the status update bureaucracy while working with the developers to actually build something.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
How do you think an author of the Agile Manifesto would respond to the original article?
Considering how companies are implementing the "Half-Arsed Agile Manifesto" rather than the actual "Agile Manifesto", I think reading this article might be what pushes them to jump off a bridge. 20 years of companies failing to understand your 4 line text, and using it to justify things that are utterly antithetical to what it stood for, has got to hurt. It's so simple: - Individuals and interactions over processes a…
I imagine the author of the original article works in a company which is prioritising the right hand of the principles over the left. We've all worked there, we've all hated it. I did, so I set up my own company where we'd do agile right.
Hired my own team of devs. Got no revenue, velocity was low. Ended up annoying all the devs by trying to push them to spend more on the right-hand side of the manifesto than they thought was necessary so I could figure out why nothing was getting done. Still got no revenue. Eventually gave up.
I think the authors of the agile manifesto would say that building complex software requires the business to adopt agile (real agile, not half-arsed agile) with the tech team subsequently following it. The engineers also need to deliver on their side of the bargain. That means continous value, and not just fiddling with shiny new tech and fancy design patterns. When both sides of that operation work well together, you get good software. If you've got enough good people that already know how to do this, it bodes well. But how do you find and pay for all these good people? That's why you get people that merely think they're good, but are at least much cheaper.
The engineering tendency when given freedom is to over-engineer everything, leading to disappointed clients, and a fragile system that's buggy and can't be fixed. It's one of the big reasons so many tech-led startups fail, and also why bigger businesses end up putting all these bullshit processes in place.
And that's my take on the OP. Lots of "managers bad" without recognising the faults of engineers in that process.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#195Astonishing 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…
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…
Yeah but you get tired of the fact that all of the low level business people abuse their "rank" to turn you into their personal assistant.
If I have to help them with everything, why don't I just talk to the users directly and write the requirements myself? It would be faster, and can even save the paperwork. This is modus operandi for contractors.
Why do I have to drag along these type of bozos all the time, and suck up to them like they are my masters. Cut the fat and get rid of the useless bureaucrats. Or at least get rid of this stupid "rank" that programmers are "the bottom of the food chain" so they can at least root out the shitty PMs.
Nobody complained when Steve Jobs delivered much more sharp-tongued rants than this article.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#196Astonishing 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…
The more years I have spent in my career, I have come to realise that coding and implementation of something is NOT the only productive part of the project. Even though I like to roll up my sleeves and "just get it done already", I have matured to understand that (1) scoping a problem correctly and aligning it to a function of the product, (2) documenting the need and its integration with other parts of the project/company are much harder and more important actions that makes sure that you're implementing the right thing and not wasting/overengineering the feature.
It takes a bit more perspective to understand that no one can know it all or do it all. Contributors other than "coders" and implementors such as Product owner, scrum master, tester, manager play a key role in guiding the implementation. By the nature of those jobs, they are not as quantitatively measurable as an engineer's job.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
Free market communism as in? Free market economy with communist political system and allocation? Trying to parse your definition of the term, as it seems like any definition for communism disrupts the feedback mechanism that is a free market's primary (only?) advantage.
Free/Libre software is free market communism. It's a free market but with the financial incentive system removed, but maybe social/status/religious incentive retained. Everyone does what they want but at 100% tax rate and the product is shared. Of course this only works in IP because it has zero marginal cost of consumption (and taxation!). In meat space you have the political problem of how the fruits of labor are d…
Who pays the developers of said software so they don't starve? The state? Then the state will decide what projects gets traction, such centralized planning is the main reason communism fails. Software engineers would then be more like scientists having to spend most of their time writing grant requests to motivate why they should get any pay, I really doubt this would give society better software compared to the current free market solution.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Working directly for clients and being personally responsible for the entirety of the development process gives you this perspective. You can have successful multi-person projects with almost no documentation and project management contained entirely in a single trello board with basic features. Then, when you land in a corporation you can see how large teams barely manage to match your former personal productivity b…
“ So the game is no longer about building stuff efficiently. It's about raking in as much money as you can for as long as you can and every inefficiency that justifies further work is actually best friend of everybody involved.” You’re describing the goals of the individual becoming divergent from the goals of the company. In the article the writer described his team’s goals at the VFX software company as being well…
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Re: Many software companies are a joke
#199Earlier 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 argue most meetings can be mostly replaced with ticket comments, documentation, emails, and chats. Devs are constantly expected to adapt and learn new things, while others apparently don't need to learn to use comments, documentation, emails, and chats to stay informed. Learning to use search features should be a good step as well. Outlook has search, Azure DevOps has search, there's Google, and most chat pro…
My experience is the following:
Many meetings can indeed be emails. Developers tend to be only so-so at identifying which meetings these actually are. And developers are terrible at identifying which two week long email threads could have been a short meeting.
It isn't enough to say "there are too many meetings" and be done with it. You need to identify which meetings can be removed - and that can be tricky.
Re: Many software companies are a joke
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering how companies are implementing the "Half-Arsed Agile Manifesto" rather than the actual "Agile Manifesto", I think reading this article might be what pushes them to jump off a bridge. 20 years of companies failing to understand your 4 line text, and using it to justify things that are utterly antithetical to what it stood for, has got to hurt. It's so simple: - Individuals and interactions over processes a…
I imagine the author of the original article works in a company which is prioritising the right hand of the principles over the left. We've all worked there, we've all hated it. I did, so I set up my own company where we'd do agile right. Hired my own team of devs. Got no revenue, velocity was low. Ended up annoying all the devs by trying to push them to spend more on the right-hand side of the manifesto than they th…
I'm sorry to hear that, indeed, the engineers have to follow through on their end as well. That means "working" software, minimally functional, has to be delivered ASAP, at least to be able to gouge customer engagement.
"Design Patterns" and the latest "Web Framework" fad are the opposite of delivering working software. How you find people with the right mentality? I'm not sure.
Low-level game devs tend to have that "make it work" mentality but they like to reinvent the wheel a little too much because the existing wheel is 0.1% slower than their custom made one.
Web devs are the opposite, they seem to think the wheel has manifested itself from the ether. They probably don't even know about half of the 50 wheels they brought into the project, and they'll replace them with newer, shinier wheels in a week.
I think hiring a good team lead with the right priorities is key. Not a "manager", but the team member everyone else looks up to and follows out of their own volition. It might be worth wasting a lot of money and time on finding and hiring that person at the very beginning. If you do, the rest should fall into place, as they'll hire people who work well with them, meaning same priorities.
Look at the impact someone like Jim Keller had on the companies he worked for, as an example.