Many software companies are a joke • Hacker News Board

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#281

Post by dahart » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

reallscoliosoi wrote: post #57

lurker531 wrote: post #42

Imagine actually caring, my aim is to get away with as little work as I can while still earning good money. ‘No nonsense coding and learning’ cringe, imagine actually liking to write software. After 11 years of embedded dev, I can safely say I rather not write a single line of code ever again. This whole industry is 99% bullshit. Thankfully I could exploit it for a lot of monetary gains

I agree. Actually, I have never met anyone who has liked writing code. How much code do any of these high profile programmers even write anymore? Linus, etc? If the leaders of the industry don't even write code, it says a lot.

I love writing code, nice to meet you. I know lots of people who love writing code. (Side note I also do see the value in meetings too.) I work with some relatively high profile programmers in my field (computer graphics) who still write lots of code, and will continue to do so until they retire.

Linus doesn’t write any code, in his own words, but that’s in part because his knowledge of software makes him better at leading people than writing code now. But Linus is not all leaders of the industry, many of them still do write code. John Carmack still writes code. That said, why should high profile programmers continue to code? What exactly does it say if they move into management?

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#282

Post by native_samples » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:25 PM UTC

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…

Whilst I agree with a lot of what you say, this part:

> We also write tons of useless papers, to justify that we are productive with this money.

doesn't seem to be a logical part of your argument. Writing useless papers is not a form of insurance nor proof that work is being done. It's rather the end product, what all the 'insurance' is trying to ensure gets done. The fact that academia outputs a torrential flood of useless papers has little relevance to the corporate world where the final product is, hopefully, useful despite sometimes being inefficient to get there. After all companies that produce truly useless outputs do eventually get the rug pulled from underneath them, either by bankruptcy or forced sale.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#283

Post by BlargMcLarg » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:28 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #260

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>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.

It's one thing to consider it an approximation, it's another thing entirely to consider them "right" which is frequently followed with "so we won't investigate any further". Most of us don't live in situations where such decisions are actually critical. We can afford to criticize and experiment. Instead, this line of reasoning tends to be misused and shush any investigation.

>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.

And you don't think that group, much like others, may be a little self-reinforcing?

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#284

Post by xpe » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:31 PM UTC

amitport wrote: post #236

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 3 year survival odds are about 1:23 for software/services startups, and 1:70 for hardware projects. I have culled many half-arsed options... and the decisions are far from arbitrary. Also, who budgets for a project burning over $100k a month in labor without a detailed plan... lol

I agree with what you wrote here... I just don't see how it relates to what I said. Start-up have terrible survival odds. Decisions should not be arbitrary. There should be a detailed plan.

That moment when one person recognizes what is happening in a conversation; namely;

1. when two people are "talking past" each other.

2. It isn't only about 'what I'm saying'; multiple streams of conversation can happen at the same time and all be useful and even true

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#285

Post by frank_nitti » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

ratww wrote: post #278

frank_nitti wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could see that working for a set of moonshot efforts at startups who primarily only have to keep investors interested, or some subset of research projects at FAAMG companies with money to burn. But how could that work with big companies making contracts with other big companies as their customers? Doesn’t seem like they could afford to just “let many fail” as they could lose the customer’s trust.

Big corps doing big projects are already doing risky stuff. Those big projects often fail to deliver the expected result within the expected time frame and budget. Devils advocate: Having multiple efforts in parallel with the crazy overhead would probably give at least one of them a fighting chance of succeeding. Who cares about the ones that failed when the whole big project worked for once.

I see, we are referring to an internal mechanism for the vendor to try multiple routes to meet the customer ask - this makes more sense, but I could see a lot of traditional enterprise customers being hesitant to buy in if they were made aware (if you could do it with only the partial resources that delivered the “successful” solution, why am I paying for the others?)

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#286

Post by woojoo666 » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:35 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #253

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 h…

Well the original article talks about how the work that a software company does in a year, can be done in a few months by a freelance developer with zero bureaucratic overhead. But which freelance developer? For every freelance developer that succeeds, there will probably be ten or a hundred that fail, or push out a mediocre product. This is what all the meetings and design docs and testing is for. To increase the chance of success.

I'm sure the same can be said for the academic world. If I was in academia and I was given funding without oversight, I would probably waste it all on researching things I found interesting but weren't necessarily useful to anybody. If you don't want to have to justify your expenses, then just fund it yourself.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#287

Post by wly_cdgr » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

He ain't wrong, in fact he's right. Being a kissless virgin he fails to appreciate the importance of UX/UI decisions. But other than that, yeah

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#288

Post by xpe » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:36 PM UTC

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 should know this already. =P

Groan. This comment could make its point without assuming what the other party knows or doesn't.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#289

Post by dahart » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:39 PM UTC

mattwilsonn888 wrote: post #120

What is this mythical concept "Business Value" which floats around undefined, unquestioned, in the impassioned rebuttals to this post? If I can hire one person instead of ten to finish software in one third the time, even if it needs significant tweaking by the end, is that not "valuable" to my business? Please define and expand your terms.

Business value is defined by the business in question, and what’s valuable to one business isn’t valuable to all businesses. The point is that the goal is a collective goal and not an individual goal.

If you really can hire fewer people to get the job done, and the value you care about is lowering the costs of employing people, that certainly is valuable, and you should do it.

Business Value is a term you learn to understand very quickly and deeply when you start a business and hire some opinionated programmers who complain loudly about having to talk to others and document what they work on, and proceed to have trouble meeting their deadlines, or create issues that others need to help fix.

I’ve personally watched what happens with programmers who write code without talking to people enough, both individual programmers who seems prolific, and groups of programmers working on different parts of a larger system. When programmers refuse to stay involved in the discussion of what do to, they sometimes invent or imagine their own requirements, and they build things that don’t fit into what the business actually needs. This can be a colossal waste of time and money, even though all programmers involved were happy and felt like things were “efficient”.

The problem with the article is that the author is arguing for personal efficiency, at the expense of group efficiency. It’s funny to write something about software companies being a joke and then argue that it’s annoying to work with other people. The software companies that are a joke are the ones no longer in business.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#290

Post by xpe » Mon, May 16, 2022, 2:40 PM UTC

amitport wrote: post #157

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"maintainable and reliable" are overrated That is popular opinion among the unemployed, as hoisting that BS on your project lead has real world consequences after your code audit. =)

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…

Yes, I agree, there is a continuum there. It is easy to judge from afar, but it is much more insightful to see what people do in real situations with real resource constraints and complicated human beings trying to succeed -- and not always with the same definitions of success.

For example, for many engineers, what they (a) can learn and (b) be proud of while building a product is a big part of success.

For some CEOs, engineer satisfaction is only a secondary or tertiary goal -- their business success crowds out most other things. This is complex; sometimes this drive is what helps a business succeed; sometimes this is why people get treated poorly or ethics go out the window.