Many software companies are a joke • Hacker News Board

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#241

Post by BlargMcLarg » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:28 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #234

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author seems like someone who just loves writing code as opposed to wanting to deliver maximum business value (As defined by the company), so it makes sense he dislikes big companies. I think the point is that very little actual business value is being created. This not necessarily due to "actual business needs" but because of deterioration of culture over time and the inevitable principal-agent induced issue o…

It's always a worthy goal to try to improve communication efficiency, but it's also the case that a very common failure mode that programmers at the leaves of org charts do not understand what is driving the value of the business they're working in, and have an inflated sense of the importance of the code they're writing (or that they wish they were writing).

But that goes for everyone, until you can put it into numbers which aren't gamed. That's what is being challenged here. Do the communication methods as they exist today provide value, and to what degree? Do we have actual numbers?

Whenever the "we hate meetings / the current bureaucracy" crowd criticizes the current state of affairs, the opposition tends to seek the high ground and go "well but you just don't understand what drives value". Meanwhile, there is a surprising lack of numbers regarding all this.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#242

Post by knotofvipers » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #217

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 th…

I am not sure it is even that rational though.

I think it is like brand name vs off brand. I just bought off brand oatmeal that was $1.98 vs the brand name was $3.50.

Someone buying the brand name is just operating on an unthinking heuristic that they only buy "the best". I am sure they would justify it after the fact that the brand name taste better even though it is just oatmeal.

So many decision points in society run on that heuristic IMO.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#243

Post by gone35 » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

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…

Don't see how politics or "bickering over the pettiest feature like [...] what colour the chart should be" is what "deliver[ing] maximum business value" is about, as you put it.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#244

Post by barrenko » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:30 PM UTC

Negitivefrags wrote: post #16

bigDinosaur wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It goes to minus something imho, wherein lies our problem.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#245

Post by MrBuddyCasino » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #234

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author seems like someone who just loves writing code as opposed to wanting to deliver maximum business value (As defined by the company), so it makes sense he dislikes big companies. I think the point is that very little actual business value is being created. This not necessarily due to "actual business needs" but because of deterioration of culture over time and the inevitable principal-agent induced issue o…

It's always a worthy goal to try to improve communication efficiency, but it's also the case that a very common failure mode that programmers at the leaves of org charts do not understand what is driving the value of the business they're working in, and have an inflated sense of the importance of the code they're writing (or that they wish they were writing).

Yes engineers can be at least as ignorant as the "MBA business types" they like to scoff at. I haven't seen that in a good engineer though.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#246

Post by ratww » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:31 PM UTC

Ekaros wrote: post #69

bambax wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

However it is often the case that programmers "at the leaves of org charts" (to paraphrase another commenter) won't get to participate on meetings that can define if something can be replaced by "less code", let alone "no code".

In small orgs with a headcount of tens that's very easy for developers to grasp the value and the need for certain things.

But when you're in a 1000+ developer organization it is often the case that the reason you have to do something is because this is a requirement coming from two or three management levels above.

In some orgs, a lowly developer might even be unable to even sit at the table with the big boys. They might have a say and a good perspective in micro decisions, but not in macro ones. In this case, I can definitely see TFA being written.

To use the dentist example, imagine a dentist that's passionate about pulling teeth, but doesn't get a say on wether the teeth should be pulled or not.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#247

Post by rswskg » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

gsibble wrote: post #240

This is why I primarily prefer and frequently am the lead on backend APIs. There's no BS. I spend 90%+ of my time coding and architecting the system. No bickering, etc.. Here's the API, now use it. It's a great little niche.

Having recently disengaged from full stack/front end, I have to say that I agree with this.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#248

Post by pqs » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:33 PM UTC

All these meetings, reports, plans and apparently useless things, provide insurance to the different stakeholders of the project. Projects fail in many ways, and you need everyone to feel safe. That's why you need to document things a lot, in order to say “this was explained in section 3.2.1 of the manual” when the other team doesn't correctly use your tools. And this is true for everyone, the finance guys, the product guys, the programmers, the marketers, everyone. Providing insurance to everyone is very expensive, but it makes the large organization stable. If everyone worked like cowboys in an small company, then the large company would disappear in a large fire of infighting.

I never worked in a large company, but I work in academia, and we academics are also working on insurance a lot. The funding bodies want us to detail all expenses and justify all the changes in the plan, because they don't want people to say that the public funds are mismanaged. This is just an example. We also write tons of useless papers, to justify that we are productive with this money. This makes research very difficult. If you really want to do science, you should become rich and do it from home, like Nassim Taleb does, but in Academia we must work on all this insurance stuff, like in corporate world.

That's how things are.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#249

Post by knotofvipers » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

ejb999 wrote: post #224

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #123

They are correct. It doesn't matter, and nothing will change in large corporations. That's not a bad thing, or a good thing. It's just the way things are. I spent most of my career in large corporations; many of those years, as a manager, where it was my job to maintain all that overhead the author complains about. I'm quite aware of the need for it, and a good part of my job, was trying to streamline the overhead, a…

>>Seeing how "Agile" is being implemented in corporate Dictionary definition of agile: "able to move quickly and easily." There is nothing 'agile' about how 'Agile' is being done in most/many big corps - yet another buzzword sold by high priced consultants who like buzzwords, to top-level execs that think they know what they want.

One large corp I worked at, agile was really just an excuse to use minimum viable products in production.

We were agile until this shitty software was in production and then we would move on to the next project.

That was literally what we were calling having a startup mindset.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#250

Post by thawaya3113 » Mon, May 16, 2022, 1:38 PM UTC

One of the big differences between a startup and a big company is that big companies have to make decisions about what to build. For a smaller company that decisions is already made. It’s the reason for the existence of the smaller company.

And the cost of making the wrong decision can be extremely high and it can be hard to both identify that it is the wrong decision and to reverse it.

With smaller companies if they make the wrong decision they will simply cease to exist, but in a larger company some other product (the one that made the company large in the first place) will cover for it.

This isn’t to excuse inefficient practices, but the idea that 100% efficiency (as defined by coding 100% of the time) or even a very high coding throughput is an unmitigated good is not really valid.