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Many software companies are a joke

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#301

Post by drewcoo »

hcarvalhoalves wrote: post #266
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…

I don't think it's about safety and stability at all, given how CEOs everywhere are _begging_ for their employees to innovate, be accountable and take risks. All this insurance is required because large organisations tend to devolve into "cover your ass" culture. People get automatically promoted by staying, so avoiding getting ousted by being someone's else scapegoat is the safest bet.

This. Incredibly risk-averse behaviors indicate an industry ripe for disruption.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#302

Post by pqs »

native_samples wrote: post #282
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…

Yes and no. A scientist should generate knowledge and insight, the scientist must discover things. The only way to prove that to a bureaucracy is through papers. It should not be the end product, but it has become the end product. In any case, it is still insurance, if you publish cited papers, you are safe, even if their contents are useless.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#303

Post by drewcoo »

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).

> 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

If that's common and not being addressed, it must not be important. If it's not important, why mention it? Seems like victim-blaming.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#304

Post by sanderjd »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #283
sanderjd wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cr…

It isn't "so we won't investigate any further", it is "we don't think it is the best use of our resources to investigate this" and in my view it also implies "but if you have a good idea for how to investigate it empirically, please feel free to do so".

I don't think "that group" is self-reinforcing at all. Essentially everyone who comes in with no experience comes in thinking "meetings are crap, communication is crap, we just need to write code". Most of those people (but not all!) slowly but surely change their minds as they gain experience. But every one of those people is an opportunity for the thesis to be disproven. Similarly, nearly every new organization is an opportunity to try something new. Google didn't start out with lots of meetings and engineering committees and design review processes. They started out just wanting to write tons of code. They didn't hire management (or "agile") consultants or bring in outside managers as they grew to come tell them how to behave like a big company is supposed to. The people who started out writing all that code and ridiculing bureaucracy are the same people who eventually accrued processes to manage meteoric growth.

I really don't think people are as narrow-minded and closed off to this as you seem to believe. People are hungry for a better way to manage organization growth, it's just a high bar because people have seen lots of these kinds of efforts, and frankly just get kind of bored of chasing "one weird trick to make everyone way more productive" again and again.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#305

Post by matwood »

xpe wrote: post #188
matwood wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One guy responded by saying his only job is to write code and he doesn’t care about anything else. Which is such a weird perspective to me. The point of writing software for business is to solve a business problem. Maybe it's a function of working in small companies and/or roles that straddle code writing and business, but I have a hard time writing good code unless I know the business problem space. It's also why…

Code 'longevity' is influenced by many more factors than code quality; e.g. rate of business change, traffic changes, infrastructure dependencies, and the complexity of the surrounding system. As a pathological counter example think about arcane obtuse code that people are afraid to modify.

That's a good point. I didn't really define what I meant by 'best'. In some cases the code was used, updated, etc... for many many years by people I knew. If people were too afraid to touch it when a bug was found, then definitely not good. But, if people had no need to touch it b/c it works, that's a good spot to be also.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#306

Post by phkahler »

frank_nitti wrote: post #285
ratww wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?)

Most software is essentially rented. It already written and has zero marginal cost. The vendor is using the rent to develop the next version. An exception would be specific contracted work, or bug fixes under a maintenance contract. How that next version gets developed is really up to the company.

Or we can just continue getting great stuff like windows 10 and 11.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#307

Post by Beltiras »

claytonjy wrote: post #299
Beltiras wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was having a discussion with one of the people higher up in the org chart about why we need to move beyond a pizza-box development model. Currently what happens is that the CEO (small org, 10 people, he's effectively the CTO) makes small-talk with a dev about a feature that needs to be developed. The dev then goes and builds the thing based on the discussion (a week-10 day sprint), takes the resulting work to the C…

That description of "pizza-box development" (unfamiliar term for me) sounds pretty good actually? Seems pretty agile: informal planning, time-boxed sprint, revisit with stakeholder, repeat. It gets so much worse when the implementers are further from the stakeholders or customers. What's the issue there? I've also worked in consulting and appreciate the explicit requirements, but I find the formality much less effici…

Buy a pizza for the devs, rip off the lid, sharpie draw the sprint on the lid while eating the pizza.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#308

Post by claytonjy »

Beltiras wrote: post #307
claytonjy wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That description of "pizza-box development" (unfamiliar term for me) sounds pretty good actually? Seems pretty agile: informal planning, time-boxed sprint, revisit with stakeholder, repeat. It gets so much worse when the implementers are further from the stakeholders or customers. What's the issue there? I've also worked in consulting and appreciate the explicit requirements, but I find the formality much less effici…

Buy a pizza for the devs, rip off the lid, sharpie draw the sprint on the lid while eating the pizza.

As long as the next pizza lid doesn't contradict the last one, that sounds like a good early-stage startup process!
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