Many software companies are a joke

I like my own space. I'm definitely introverted. But shit like this is inexcusably antisocial and I question why it was even posted.

You wanna be a s00p3r lean, high-volume company with actual impact? Good luck. 'Bloat' scales with accountability.

That's a bit invective of me so lets play out a scenario. Its not a real scenario - this never happens at an actual software company, because the incentives all hit each other at once and its not explicit. Its not even guaranteed to happen all at once!

But this drama does illustrate the incentives, to the extent I can demonstrate a point. Please read the below as an exposition rather than a testable hypothesis.

Lets say you wanna be a lean, multinational corp providing a crucial service to high paying clients. And you do it! Congrats, you, the lead dev, and a CEO who handles 'the rest' now have a strong user base, but also a lot of opportunities to be sued if your product is actually as crucial as you suggested it was and doesn't deliver. Wait.

Oops, you got sued, and you were (morally) in the right too! But fined all the same. It's a big fine.

'Never again' you and the CEO say. So now you need to hire lawyers, who advise you that to protect yourself legally, you need to monitor your service and have evidence that backs up your claims beyond 'we designed it to do that'. So now you have analysts! You are monitoring for uptime. For security. For correctness. Et cetera.

Now you have an analyst team and a legal team on top of dev.

But eventually your staff base grows. At some stage, payroll gets out of hand. An accounting division happens.

Accounting has many jobs. One such job CAN be to lower expenditure.

Accounting look at the COGs and notice that the dev team are spending money on a bunch of software but there's nothing written down as to what it does. They aren't expected to discuss their decisions with dev, so they don't.

So a budget is set up by accounting based on their expectations from similar industry. Spending on tooling is among those cut. Devs complain. Work slows. The analysts complain. The CEO is annoyed at the excess spending and the slow devs. The devs are mad at how out of touch the CEO is - after all, the accountants screwed up right? Why is the dev team to blame? Things were WORKING before! Why does she instantly take the analysts word as gospel?!

The CEO doesn't care about the devs or analysts to that extent though - she just wants the damn product to be shipped to spec so the company isn't sued again. But she recognises something needs to change.

The natural solution is to air everyone's expectations at once. A meeting is made to make sure these show-stopping issues don't show up and a cohesive company vision can be reached.

Devs have to spend time in meetings to help accounting, analytics, legal, and now marketing (since growth has slowed) not tread on their feet, and additionally prevent dev from treading on their feet.

Dev team is mad. Not only are they losing coding time, but now they feel bossed around by other departments. They were doing so much more before these other BLASTED LEECHES came in and spoilt everything. Something something 'I could do it better' something something. Cue 30 replicas of this article, complaining about Working With Other People. If you're lucky, there might even be a touch of Ayn Rand laced in. Or Marx! Truly a lottery of philosophy.

Eventually some devs break off and start their own schtick, and make a decent living for a while - maybe even for a lifetime, if the project is well scoped and managed!

But the less cautious startups? Well, if they don't deliver...

What was my point, aside from apparently being a hypocrite who can write edgy scenarios but is mad about reading them?

What i am trying to argue is that the other departments are there for an explicitly profit-generating or loss-mitigating reasons. And more than that: I'm saying this should be fairly obvious and that the dialogue needs to move on from this point.

More explicitly: I can understand working for a smaller company and enjoy the environment, but the constant whinging about megacorps being slow for devs and highly specialised/myopic is lazy thinking. Of COURSE they're slow. Of COURSE there's lots of documentation and meetings. You get paid a secure and comparatively higher wage for those inconveniences.

> I never worked in a large company

I don't want to be rude, but it sounds like you don't know what you're talking about.

It often goes far beyond "insurance." A lot of this stuff is performative. Some people simply aren't good at executing, and many managers are focused on appearances and increasing the size of their kingdoms. Most can't allow themselves to be fine setting a roadmap and having it execute smoothly. There are all sorts of other perverse incentives and absurd behaviors I could go into, but the notion that it's all completely rational is silly.

> the author’s complaint that he doesn’t get to spend 100% of his workday coding/testing/documenting

The author's complaint was that he only gets to spend 12-25% of his time on these tasks on a good day.

It's not a charity. Spoilers your company is making money hand over fist. Many company's boast a $600,000 or more revenue per employee figure. In many cases you are there just for insurance. I employ more people than I need on purpose because someone might up and leave at any moment and I have to keep operations going

Yes! My reply to "this meeting could have been an E-mail" is often: "OK, do you read your E-mail and respond promptly?" I love killing productivity-draining meetings and turning them asynchronous --BUT-- these meetings often get called because a decision needs to be made synchronously(now), and the decision makers can't wait two weeks while you get around to reading your E-mail and remembering to answer.

Those meetings that are simply "status story time" where someone reads a doc to the room? Yea, they should be removed. I don't think anyone likes them.