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Many software companies are a joke

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#251

Post by thawaya3113 »

gone35 wrote: post #243
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.

The amount of energy and time spent on “politics” or “bickering over petty issues” is usually highly overstated by bloggers.

It’s easy to understand why. The 15 minutes spent bickering over the color of a button will be far more likely to leave an impression and remembered vs the 90 mins spent on ordinary, necessary and useful discussions in the same meeting.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#252

Post by frank_nitti »

pydry wrote: post #230
snarf21 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comple…

It's kind of trite to say that though. It's the business's job to ensure that the skills and resources at its disposal are put to good use, not yours. We're not all a bunch of mini CEOs.

From what I understood, they are talking about the author’s complaint that he doesn’t get to spend 100% of his workday coding/testing/documenting. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the companies were poorly run - larger enterprises with more projects, teams and customers are going to require more meetings.

Maybe he worked at poorly managed companies, who knows. The fact that he was asked to participate in meetings instead of only being assigned purely code-related tasks isn’t very compelling evidence of a company being a “joke”.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#253

Post by phkahler »

pqs wrote: post #248

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 produ…

>> 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.

See how the solution is causing a different form of the problem it's trying to solve?

I agree with your premise, but sometimes I think having multiple efforts in parallel and letting many fail might be more productive than going the safe route.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#254

Post by thawaya3113 »

mjburgess wrote: post #70

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 thei…

I suspect a lot of this is survivorship bias.

I suspect if one were to compare a large number of startups to one large company (or even better a portfolio of large companies), the “ruthless founders” will significantly underperform the middle management in large companies even after adjusting for the inherent advantages large companies have.

The only reason the “ruthless founders” look better is because we usually only talk about the successful ones because unsuccessful ones have disappeared.

Middle management is more successful and ruthless founders are less successful than immediate appearances would suggest.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#255

Post by tremon »

urthor wrote: post #117
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…

The thing is, there is absolutely a cost for all those meetings. Time spent working with stakeholders and building consensus takes away from the urgency and energy you can devote to good work. My experience is very similar to the article's. I just draw a very different set of conclusions. For risk averse, cost constrained, low stakes projects. Good engineering work is neither demanded or required.. My viewpoint is si…

Time spent working with stakeholders and building consensus takes away from the urgency and energy you can devote to good work

I don't see how I should square that statement with your next:

Don't work on software nobody cares about

How do you know what software people care about unless you spend time working with the stakeholders?

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#256

Post by ethbr0 »

rob_c wrote: post #187
ethbr0 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked at a fair number of companies (as either consultant or employee) and rarely have requirements landed neatly and fully-formed in my inbox. I'm sure it happens reliably somewhere, but I'd hazard not at most companies.

That doesn't mean it doesn't happen when working with competent people doing their job well. Consultants only seem to get called in after things have gone wrong too so does your experience support that not doing this is bad practice?

Agreed on consultants. It provided so much enlightenment on the multitudinous ways many companies can screw up the discovery and development process.

Setting aside the "This company was fundamentally disfunctional" cases, my takeaway has been that knowledge gaps between roles are an underappreciated cause of bad development outcomes.

Writing requirements is hard. Writing requirements without some intuition of what developers need to know is harder. Writing requirements without context on the business domain is harder.

So the ideal BA is someone who is a developer who is also experienced in the business domain.

The majority of companies don't want to pay enough to hire BAs with that experience.

So you get users (who may know nothing about software) + minimum cost BA (who is doing their best, but has no context for anything) coming up with requirements, which are of course incomplete and/or incorrect.

But fundamentally this problem is too large of a skill/knowledge gap between the user and BA, and between the BA and the developer.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#257

Post by ketchupdebugger »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #44
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.

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.

Companies like twitter operate at a different scale. Lichess can off load hiring devs by using out of box solutions like paying for AWS, paying for cdn, using adsense to serve ads, utilizing thirdparty libraries, etc. For large companies, a lot of these are in house solutions, because at that scale, it could be cheaper, they wont as dependent on other companies for reliability, they have more control over where the data is being used or stored. etc.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#258

Post by ratww »

oxff wrote: post #17

I think the inflation / funny money being injected doesn't help at reducing fake working.

It definitely doesn't.

I worked in the past at a company where Softbank asked for the dev headcount to be increased as a condition of the funding. Lots of teams ended up being responsible for halves of pages, half of a microservice, etc.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#259

Post by xtracto »

gandutraveler wrote: post #90

I've been in software for 20ish years now and I can tell you that beyond couple of years of learning, there isn't anything new to learn in software. Every few years same old patterns get wrapped under a fancy name and people jump into it thinking it's something cool to learn.

Right? Young devs are just learning at the marvels of static typing languages (python, ruby and type script static typing efforts).and then, "server side rendering" (you mean like, PHP?) and whatnot...

Having been programming for 30 years I find most of it pretty funny.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#260

Post by sanderjd »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #241
sanderjd wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 underst…

Ironically, trying to measure this better would inevitably require more bureaucracy! It's a good point nonetheless.

But I'll also say a positive word for qualitative reasoning based on experience being a good first approximation of things. If something gets pushback from a lot of people who have spent a lot of time trying to coordinate large efforts, then it's worth considering that those people may be right. I don't know anyone who has spent a lot of time in one of these coordinating roles who thinks that the primary issue is too many meetings and not enough code being written.

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