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Many software companies are a joke

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#211

Post by ethbr0 »

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…

Or the same thing, slightly differently, who uses FOSS? For-profit companies.

I think history has born out how FOSS incentives get entangled with a primary and majority patron.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#212

Post by onion2k »

LeanderK wrote: post #181
wruza wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the teams changes? Yeah, documentation will definitely help in this case. With it, you can swap teams and even companies, and it still works! This only fails in companies which do not review documentation and have no routine for keeping it in sync and testing it on e.g. newcomers, like you do for backups. Cause otherwise it is as good as never tested six months old backup.

It's always fun if a product is based on 20 year old code where there are parts that nobody can touch because there's nobody around who understands what's going on there. I once saw a flight-training software (I think it was for helicopters?) where the physics engine just didn't get touched because they don't know what's going on. Every change was essentially a hack around this blob of years old, highly optimised but…

I once saw a flight-training software (I think it was for helicopters?) where the physics engine just didn't get touched because they don't know what's going on.

This is an interesting case, because it's something that I probably wouldn't document. Code should be readable. If you're writing down how your code works in a document then something is wrong with the code. Documentation can't fix an incomprehensible codebase. I document how algorithms work, what the business logic is for things (which is another algorithm really), how applications work in a 'data flow' sense, what integrations there are with external services and how they work, what things mean, and so on.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#213

Post by UK-AL »

zip1234 wrote: post #207
danielvaughn wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These are often some highest paying and prestigious jobs in large companies.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#214

Post by hutzlibu »

gitfan86 wrote: post #154
mrcartmeneses wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ 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…

"The way to solve this is to allow teams to fire their managers." I don't follow. Wouldn't most teams replace their manager with a manager who would give everyone the biggest raises and the easiest working conditions? Why would a team want a manager who cares about the goals of the company?

"Why would a team want a manager who cares about the goals of the company?"

Bind their avaiable budget to their success.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#215

Post by cmrdporcupine »

fy20 wrote: post #15
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...

Careful what you wish for. It's not "easy" at places like that. It's just different. Instead of your work being keeping a system up and running putting out fires or implementing features or coming up with algorithms on a tight schedule... it's, instead: figuring out who is doing what, what you're supposed to be doing, what permissions list you need to be on in order to access X system, asking to be on that list and waiting, submitting a minor feature to code review that takes a week to go through because someone didn't check their email, rewriting a major part of the code in that review because someone came in at the last minute and didn't like some thing about it that was actually decided on weeks ago but they weren't looped in.

The amount of actual lines of code written by an average SWE at a BigCorp is miniscule. The amount of churn and spinning and hand wringing that goes into that code is staggering. But it's like that for a reason. There's just a lot of people.

It's torture, and in order to maintain productivity you need to have about 5-6 of these processes running concurrently, and it's why you get paid a lot of money to do it.

Do poorly at juggling that and making "progress"? Find yourself on the receiving end of a performance review where the label "meets expectations" actually means "you better start kicking ass at this, or you'll find yourself with no stock refresh grants for next year."

All the money and free food and so on is just a salve to try to make the whole thing less unpleasant. Some people get a high out of the process, while it drives other people slowly crazy.

(In my last months at Google the only part of the job I "enjoyed" was the week I was on-call for the first time on my new team. Because it was the only time in over a year where I felt useful even though it was quite stressful. That's how I knew it was time to pack it in)

https://goomics.net/364/

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#216

Post by blowski »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #200
blowski wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep, both managers and contributors have a faulty model of agile. We're all guilty of it, even those of us who know it when we see it because we know the theory so well.

Finding people with the right mentality is, as you say, very hard.

The temptation of the manager is to get people with the wrong mentality and wrap them enough process that it will fix them. The temptation of the contributor is to blame the manager without looking at their own faults.

As good a solution as I can suggest is to work with people who are willing to collaborate on a positive outcome, and go through genuine continuous improvement.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#217

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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.

> People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.

I'm patiently waiting for some kind of deep-dive historical monograph to be written in the 2050s. What I suspect may have happened is that these companies overhire top talent simply so their competitors can't have them. For the actual work they do, it's massively overpaying. As a strategic investment to prevent said talent from working elsewhere or starting their own business, perhaps it pays off.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#218

Post by BeFlatXIII »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #133
_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I am thinking. E.g. I am looking at lichess which has a massive user base and is developed by one full time developer and a few dozens volunteers. Twitter is obviously bigger, but I simply don't buy that you need more than 7000 people to run that site.

Maybe you don't need 7000, but software is even worse than icebergs (Only 30% visible). How many people at Twitter are there to fulfill functions we aren't even aware of? Compliance, privacy, legal, internal tooling, etc and god knows what else. My experience at a tech company with around the same number of employees is that it actually feels understaffed in some of the areas I've seen. It's surprising how much respo…

Honestly why I'm considering not starting my own business. Getting the product to work is the first 80% of the work. The remaining 96% is billing, authentication, and marketing.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#219

Post by pc86 »

nickjj wrote: post #98
ethbr0 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> imagine a dentist who is passionate about pulling teeth out That's a great metaphor for code-before-you-know developers. > finally solved by tweaking a single software parameter that dictated how far a release mechanism moved I think of this type of work as programming by other means. The problem couldn't have been "fixed" without all the discovery meetings and understanding. The "fix" couldn't have made it to prod…

> Imagine a dentist who is passionate about pulling teeth out ... That's a great metaphor for code-before-you-know developers. A key difference between a big decision and a small decision is what it's like to change your decision afterwards. I don't think we can compare reverting a pulled tooth vs 2 hours of programming the "wrong" thing. In the programming case, you may have went down a rabbit hole that wasn't corre…

I maybe wrong but let me paraphrase what I think they meant (and why I think it's a great analogy).

I don't want my teeth pulled just because. If it's a fix to a problem - a means to an end - and there's no other way to do it, I'll consider it. Likewise, I don't want to work with developers who are super passionate about typing code into vim. I want to work with developers who are passionate about solving problems. Code can be a means to that end, and by the time it gets to us we typically already know we need some code for it, but the danger is spending days or weeks writing code nobody needs and nobody asked for because it's "their passion."

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#220

Post by snarf21 »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #60

I was reading https://danluu.com/sounds-easy again today, and when reading this article I was reminded of a particular section: "Everything we've looked at so far is a technical problem. Compared to organizational problems, technical problems are straightforward. Distributed systems are considered hard because real systems might drop something like 0.1% of messages, corrupt an even smaller percentage of messages, and…

Well said. I think the key point you make is that we are paid to maximize the value of the business. If the business isn't profitable, we could all lose our jobs. Too many IC feel that if the company isn't maximizing their personal effort they are inefficient and wrong. However, sometimes more value can be added by NOT writing more code or more documents. It is sometimes more valuable to throw away a bunch of completed work and not fall victim to the sunk cost fallacy. Sometimes a "worse" architecture is the highest BV.
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