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Many software companies are a joke

liou28335.medium.com

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#201

Post by miav »

As the top comment points out, the author comes off as arrogant and their view is unbalanced, but they do have a point.

I find the saying "What a programmer can do in a month, two programmers can do in two months" is quite true. I consider myself competent and the people I work with are even more so, but human communication is always very imprecise and slow. If you stack it into a hierarchy of teams and managers, efficiency loss becomes exponential.

I really do think that the best way to organize software development is to have discrete components with exactly one person in charge of a component. Of course there are notable downsides. If only one person is in charge of a component it would become quite opinionated and it would be difficult for devs to spot each other's errors, but I think it would be a great tradeoff nonetheless.

I really don't want to spend even 5 minutes of my life debating whether we should split a folder into 2 smaller folders or not. I'd much rather have any member of the team go with their gut on this. An individual's choice may not be as good as that of the entire group, but it's good enough.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#202

Post by amitport »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #190
amitport wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a quick CEO dilemma: You have startup with about 4 people, you did a quick prototype, showed it to some potential customers and the worse has happened: They want it! and they want it now! The head engineer says it's all just a temp hack, it is completely shitty, they could give it to costumers but then the maintenance will be impossible, they will need months to add any new features on top of it, they will pr…

A CEO rarely accepts designing a product for a single customer. If you did, than your team just becomes dependent contractor labor rather than a business. I will tell you a terrible secret of successful software companies: "One doesn't make money writing software, but rather reselling the same software mullions of times over." You should know this already. =P

You seem to talk in absolutes while I'm just acknowledging there is more than one right answer.

And I do have specific real cases from my experience in mind... One of a great product that never finished (money ran out, CEO didn't want to provide something that was for "a single customer" as in your words), another of a shitty buggy unmaintainable software that did grow a company from 4 to 100 employees then to an exit and only then came the nice eased-back rewrite.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#203

Post by rrdharan »

miav wrote: post #201

As the top comment points out, the author comes off as arrogant and their view is unbalanced, but they do have a point. I find the saying "What a programmer can do in a month, two programmers can do in two months" is quite true. I consider myself competent and the people I work with are even more so, but human communication is always very imprecise and slow. If you stack it into a hierarchy of teams and managers, eff…

This approach involves a high degree of risk, i.e. your bus factor is 1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#204

Post by caseymarquis »

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 think this is a little of column A and a little of column B. Just as there are good and bad developers, there are people who are good and bad at running projects and organizations. The author feels that something is wrong. He knows he is not working anywhere near his full capacity and that the organization created this environment. He also highlights a lack of growth opportunities at some companies. What he doesn't do is highlight solutions or recognize why certain behaviors are key in certain environments.

Toward that end, I would recommend three old and poorly written books with timeless and wonderful ideas: The Goal, Critical Chain, and Managing Corporate Lifecycles.

While these books are all about management and running a company, I think they lend perspective to developers on why certain things happen the way they do. They can also help someone recognize and pick a healthy organization to work in. Just like books on software development, these books augment experience, they don't replace the need for it.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#205

Post by deadbeeves »

mschuster91 wrote: post #77
shortformblog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not like the points he is bringing up are invalid though - and I say that as someone who actually likes using, creating and contributing to FOSS projects. Most of them eventually boil down to funding - it's rare that open source projects get decent funding or that big-co employees are allowed to feed back stuff back upstream. The result is a shit ton of people all doing what they want, but there is no overall vi…

That's true, the points are not invalid. Some of them aren't even coherent.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#206

Post by thenerdhead »

Here's something I learned.

Yes working in big tech or a big company can have its fair share of red tape.

You can either accept this and work as a cog in the system, or you can start to poke the sleeping bear.

When you're overburdened with more meetings than time to do the work you talk about in those meetings, that's really on you, not the group of humans we call a company.

If your boss starts to attach your performance towards meetings, then maybe its time for you to have that conversation about how nothing is getting done and that by not accepting meetings is how you do get stuff done. It's all about balance at the end of the day. Most people are reasonable and will listen.

So while big companies may never change in practice, you can change how you work in a big company and see tremendous results by just saying "No" every so often. Most of the time nobody notices or cares, and when they do they respect you for protecting your time to do meaningful work.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#207

Post by zip1234 »

danielvaughn wrote: post #109
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…

A few days ago, I made a comment about good developers knowing how to think of their work from the business’s perspective. One guy responded by saying his only job is to write code and he doesn’t care about anything else. I just can’t imagine coming to that perspective, even if I understand the desire to have minimal responsibility.

At many big companies there is plenty of room for those types of people. They just need to be put in a role where their customer is another developer. They can see things from the developer perspective and can be plenty successful working on things that are not public facing.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#208

Post by capitalsigma »

xpe wrote: post #171
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…

> Not recognizing that after 20 years in the industry is baffling. Baffing, cognitively? Or is this a value judgment? Have you observed human nature particularly in the last ten years w.r.t. echo chambers?

"Consensus about any topic is impossible because political speech has become more polarized"

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#209

Post by osigurdson »

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…

3 years, 20 people, 24K LOC does sound objectively inefficient to me for the project as described.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#210

Post by gmm1990 »

Jensson wrote: post #197
lupire wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curr…

you could have a ubi system and then add incentives for devs on open source products that are used. Just a thought, I'm sure there would be corruption of this system too
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