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"No, it's less effort than that"

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Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#341

Post by thfuran »

replyifuagree wrote: post #305
thfuran wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking a narrow view, maybe. But a sale in a jurisdiction you don’t currently have other customers in could impose significant regulatory burden for relatively little gain. A single 100x sale is very different than 100 1x sales both in overhead you’ll have and in how much leverage the customer will have in the future, etc

If we consider that Fungibility is on a continuum of very low on the left and very high on the right. Where do you think most sales fall on the continuum? I'd claim that businesses are biased toward chasing a highly fungible sales model, to the point of eliminating the need for a salesperson altogether, and so naturally sales tends to the right.

That's definitely the sort of thing I'd expect Generic Tech Startup to do, but it certainly isn't standard in every industry. B2B stuff is often a bit bespoke.

Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#342

Post by 23B1 »

lmm wrote: post #325
23B1 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the time someone just wants to put a number on their powerpoint for some organisational politics nonsense. Yes. Thats how coalition-building, budgeting, and reporting works in business. Not saying it should dominate your schedule, but it's just how organizations work. Engineers/Developers are part of the org – not some special snowflakes that are above or beyond politics.

> Thats how coalition-building, budgeting, and reporting works in business. Not saying it should dominate your schedule, but it's just how organizations work. Nah. Internal competition is a negative for the business. Selfish individuals do it so that they can get better results for themselves. Refusing to take part is the right thing for the business.

I never said it had to be competitive nor is my comment recommending that.

You don’t own 100% of your time when participating in group activities.

Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#343

Post by 23B1 »

nine_zeros wrote: post #268
23B1 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the time someone just wants to put a number on their powerpoint for some organisational politics nonsense. Yes. Thats how coalition-building, budgeting, and reporting works in business. Not saying it should dominate your schedule, but it's just how organizations work. Engineers/Developers are part of the org – not some special snowflakes that are above or beyond politics.

> Most of the time someone just wants to put a number on their powerpoint for some organisational politics nonsense. Yes. Thats how coalition-building, budgeting, and reporting works in business. Not saying it should dominate your schedule, but it's just how organizations work. Engineers/Developers are part of the org – not some special snowflakes that are above or beyond politics. And yet, none of the politicians ar…

Wrong. Organizations don’t exist without administration, as a necessary requirement for doing business. Part of your time, as part of that org, will contribute to that if for nothing else because a company is required to comply with baseline regulatory compliance (accounting, taxes, investor relations, etc.).

Happy to share in the spoils and many companies do this with stock/options of course - but don’t think for a minute you live in a walled garden. I mean, you can, but then you get zero input into things like deadlines; you’ll simply be ignored or moved out of the org.

Your comment is essentially “I want all of the responsibility and none of the accountability”

Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#344

Post by GoToRO »

mmcnl wrote: post #110
GoToRO wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well then bussiness people are also disconnected from reality. If a developer can write code and estimate and deliver in time for bussiness, then he is not an employee. He is a founder. What you want is people that deliver like a founder but that don't get any share of the profits. You want gullible people.

Honestly, I think you are an unwilling prime example of a disconnected developer. Why don't you instead try to found common ground and work from there? Who says "business people" aren't capable of dealing with uncertainty? You are making a caricature of a very simple, reasonable request. We're all just people with the same goals. Stop trying to enlarge differences.

>Who says "business people" aren't capable of dealing with uncertainty?

Well not me if you read my comment.

Also given that you don't know me but you immediately made a personal attack based on your own misunderstanding... you kind of proved yourself wrong. That's why people don't talk to you.

Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#345

Post by nine_zeros »

23B1 wrote: post #343
nine_zeros wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most of the time someone just wants to put a number on their powerpoint for some organisational politics nonsense. Yes. Thats how coalition-building, budgeting, and reporting works in business. Not saying it should dominate your schedule, but it's just how organizations work. Engineers/Developers are part of the org – not some special snowflakes that are above or beyond politics. And yet, none of the politicians ar…

Wrong. Organizations don’t exist without administration, as a necessary requirement for doing business. Part of your time, as part of that org, will contribute to that if for nothing else because a company is required to comply with baseline regulatory compliance (accounting, taxes, investor relations, etc.). Happy to share in the spoils and many companies do this with stock/options of course - but don’t think for a…

> Wrong. Organizations don’t exist without administration, as a necessary requirement for doing business. Part of your time, as part of that org, will contribute to that if for nothing else because a company is required to comply with baseline regulatory compliance (accounting, taxes, investor relations, etc.).

Where exactly did I say that organizations exist without administration. All I pointed out was that if the rewards are not shared with people, people will not do the work.

But since you are writing this from a org structure perspective, I can alsosay that administrative work can be done by HR. Eng management can be left to handle engineering direction and task. Specifically, the political org structure is not a necessity - it is only something that low IQ can understand. A smarter structure is technical leadership all the way up to VP + HR that manages pay and promos.

Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#346

Post by 23B1 »

nine_zeros wrote: post #345
23B1 wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wrong. Organizations don’t exist without administration, as a necessary requirement for doing business. Part of your time, as part of that org, will contribute to that if for nothing else because a company is required to comply with baseline regulatory compliance (accounting, taxes, investor relations, etc.). Happy to share in the spoils and many companies do this with stock/options of course - but don’t think for a…

> Wrong. Organizations don’t exist without administration, as a necessary requirement for doing business. Part of your time, as part of that org, will contribute to that if for nothing else because a company is required to comply with baseline regulatory compliance (accounting, taxes, investor relations, etc.). Where exactly did I say that organizations exist without administration. All I pointed out was that if the…

Nothing personal but I’m guessing you are either relatively inexperienced or maybe in a market that is different than the U.S.

The reward is your salary/bonus/stock, and it obviously works… because work gets done and tech talent is well-remunerated for it. The technical leadership structure you seem to be recommending already exists; plenty of ELTs have or are comprised of experienced people with deep technical roots.

Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#347

Post by yihtserns »

corry wrote: post #167

“Pushing sales people to increase their amount of sales/quota is like asking meteorologists for sunshine”. Hmmm it doesn’t seem unreasonable in that context? You’re really asking people to work more effectively, to accomplish the same amount of work more quickly. It’s like asking sales people what their quota should be. They pick a number that is no-brainer hittable, because there is a lot of complexity and many unkn…

> “Pushing sales people to increase their amount of sales/quota is like asking meteorologists for sunshine”. > Hmmm it doesn’t seem unreasonable in that context? You’re really asking people to work more effectively, to accomplish the same amount of work more quickly.

Sales quota is a target, estimate is not a target.

> And yet sales people aren’t writing article after article about how self-set quotas are sacrosanct, should only settable by sales people themselves, and how clueless management is to try to get more performance above the no-brainer target.

You mean you've never came across any post where people complain about unreasonable/unrealistic sales quota?

Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#348

Post by jghn »

ghusto wrote: post #302
jghn wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes, but not always. I've been on both sides of this situation. As an engineer I'm always adamant - yep, no way this could be done any faster and please stop pressuring me to just get the number you want to hear. It'll be done when it's done, and it'll be robust and good. Now please go away and let me cook. But when I've been the manager pushing for smaller estimates, it's been because the business realities we…

It is entirely reasonable for the business to say "we need X in Y weeks" — it still might not be possible, most of the time engineers can make _something_. What's unreasonable is saying "we need X in Y weeks, and it needs to be done properly". It will take a certain amount of time to do anything properly, and that doesn't change with pressure.

Yes, exactly.

As a manager when I've pushed back on estimates it was because the engineers were pushing for "done properly". Where "done properly" didn't mean more features but building a more solid foundation. And I 100% understood the desire, but at a higher level the long term cost of not having that solid foundation was worth incurring.

Requiring both "fast" and "good" is foolish.

Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#349

Post by regularfry »

pydry wrote: post #112
regularfry wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're doing Scrum, then you might have noticed that the Scrum Guide considers the contents of a sprint to be a "commitment" on the part of the team. That "commitment" is usually built by taking the number of story points delivered last sprint, and bin-packing the same number of story points from the backlog into the next sprint. If you don't think toxic managers and scrum masters are going to use that "commitment…

Using scrum to extract commitments on a sprint is also just waterfall by another name.

Sometimes Scrum does get called "lots of very short waterfalls". It's not entirely wrong, in the current incarnation. [On edit, I see you've made this point below. Yes.]

Note that until relatively recently (2020, I think), the Scrum Guide referred not to "commitments" but to "forecasts". That was a much better framing, and I don't know why they changed it.

Re: "No, it's less effort than that"

#350

Post by regularfry »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #147
regularfry wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there's an important detail you might have left out of your 30 minute example: are you asking for how long the effort on the specific task will take, or what the time gap will be between right now and the moment it's delivered? Because in almost all teams both are dominated by the task waiting for something, but in the latter case it's especially true. Actual hands-on-keyboard time is usually a rounding error…

> Unless a team has put hard work into unintuitive ways of working, the average ticket will spend grossly more time waiting than actually being worked on. What do you mean by "unintuitive ways of working"?

Here's a relatively small example: if you want to minimise lead time (which is almost always true) then one thing you don't want is for potentially releasable work to sit waiting for anything. That includes code reviews, if you have them on the route to production. So the right thing to do is usually for a PR being ready for a code review to be a drop-everything event for the person who's going to review it. As in, whatever you're working on right now, context switch out and do whatever is needed to get that code either over the line or bounced back ASAP so the person who wrote it doesn't context switch out.

This idea gets a lot of pushback because we have it ingrained (not unfairly, either) that context switches are expensive for the reviewer. But the safe assumption is that they're less expensive than delaying another piece of work that's already got a lot of embodied but unrealised value.

The intuitive assumption is that person waiting on the code review can pick up another piece of work and make a start on it so they're kept busy, but that falls into the trap of having too much work in progress. The result is then (usually) that the returned code review is now waiting for whatever they picked up. This is one reason why the intuitive way of working tends to having throughput that's barely ok, and latency that borders on ridiculous.

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