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Oh my poor business logic

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Re: Oh my poor business logic

#81

Post by gbalduzzi »

danwee wrote: post #74
lmm wrote: post #22

Developers can focus on the business logic when they're close to the business. Look for places where you sit close to the business people, talk to them a lot, maybe even talk to customers. Where you're part of a team that has a responsibility of delivering product X to customers rather than a team that has a responsibility of doing things that use technology Y. The more organisational layers you have between you and…

> The more organisational layers you have between you and the customers - architects, business analysts, and the like - the more disconnected your work will be from the business value. In every company I have worked for in the last 10 years, the layer in between business experts and software engineers has been always: the manager (either product manager or eng. manager). It's a bottleneck. The flow usually goes like…

Well, being the middle man is kinda the manager job. The situation you describe happens when the manager does a poor job and is both submissive to the business requests and unable to comprehend technical issues.

Ideally having a competent person acting as the middle man for most daily operations is desirable though

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#82

Post by CPLX »

j-a-a-p wrote: post #56
danbruc wrote: post #49

In principle, at least for business applications, the middle ground is something like low code - data access, UI, user management, authentication, logging, auditing, ... all taken care of already, you make the data model and business logic. In practice this works up to a point, when you have requirements that do not fit the model or capabilities that the creators of the platform had in mind, when you have to start fi…

Yes, reminds me of about 25/30 years ago when low code was at its high. Back then there were strict guidelines where to put business logic (client, server or both), how to name them. Everything had to originate from the model (model driven development). Since then the developers took over and killed waterfall and 4GL in the process.

Genuine question, what were the low code frameworks that were popular in the late 90’s that you’re referencing here?

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#83

Post by mrphoebs »

safety1st wrote: post #46
bruce511 wrote: post #13

>> There must be a middle ground where developers can focus on the core business logic that yields the most value without incurring technical debt and making the development process a nightmare. I don’t have an answer for that, nor have I worked at a company that found the perfect balance. Plus, I’m not a technical lead, manager, or business owner. So if you are one of them, I’d love to hear how you or your organizat…

As a dev turned entrepreneur one thing I will do when selling projects is talk to clients about software as a depreciating asset. While there are some limitations to the comparison this framing makes sense to business people in general, especially well with finance or operations departments, and can work with internal stakeholders too. The sources of the depreciation are tech debt and general turnover/churn in the me…

This is an insightful way of communicating technical and domain debt that software can accrue over time. Thanks.

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#84

Post by danjac »

lmm wrote: post #22

Developers can focus on the business logic when they're close to the business. Look for places where you sit close to the business people, talk to them a lot, maybe even talk to customers. Where you're part of a team that has a responsibility of delivering product X to customers rather than a team that has a responsibility of doing things that use technology Y. The more organisational layers you have between you and…

The tell-tale sign is when you hear the word "they". "Yes, I know it doesn't make sense, but it's what "they" have been asking for".

As opposed to saying, "Steve from Sales was on the call to a customer and they have this specific problem".

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#85

Post by twic »

NAHWheatCracker wrote: post #16
latchkey wrote: post #10

> There must be a middle ground where developers can focus on the core business logic that yields the most value without incurring technical debt and making the development process a nightmare. I don’t have an answer for that, nor have I worked at a company that found the perfect balance. Personally speaking, the best place that I've worked at that mostly solved that balance, was Pivotal Labs. Technically, it was Clo…

I worked at a health insurance company 6 years ago where they brought in a group from Pivotal for a week and we worked with them to see how they ran a Scrum team. I was amazed. The Scrum master wasn't just some busy body manager who only ran stand-ups, he was constantly floating around throughout the day helping people out. We had 4 developers and 4 consultants, so we mostly paired up and that was super productive. P…

> Unfortunately, the company was picking 4 random employee developers from across the organization each week.

Oh god. I worked at Pivotal, and i saw something like this happen on one project. Four Pivotal Labs devs, four client devs; each client dev was with us for two weeks, so each week, we started with two new people, and two people with one week's experience on the project. Absolute madness. There was some weird politics, and i think the people running the project on the client side wanted it to fail, so this may have been an attempt at sabotage. The client devs were very sharp, and fully cooperative, so we did get some work and some training done despite all that. Common consulting L.

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#86

Post by adrianfanaca »

The whole software development industry has all of a sudden been relegated to what it has always been: just a tool. Like the hammer. Those who promoted the hammer as the holy grail have been reading this article and commenting some shit their alcohol imbued sick brain has been capable of producing in their zero thought process. If you get huge sums to work on linter for years and you use that money to fuck up your brain instead of developing you end up a cripple. Just like the software development industry has become. A cripple that no one wants to meet, touch, see

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#87

Post by vmfunction »

lmm wrote: post #22

Developers can focus on the business logic when they're close to the business. Look for places where you sit close to the business people, talk to them a lot, maybe even talk to customers. Where you're part of a team that has a responsibility of delivering product X to customers rather than a team that has a responsibility of doing things that use technology Y. The more organisational layers you have between you and…

>The more organisational layers you have between you and the customers - architects, business analysts, and the like - the more disconnected your work will be from the business value.

But what about software middle managers? What's going to happen to them??? Honestly, for over a decade that is how I worked on professional software project. I never saw the need of manager. And software development works better when there are NO middle manger just customer and developers. Of course I'm aware most developers don't care about the business logic.

Seem like management stuff in software is just for show. Corps are just trying to impose their process on software developers, which don't really work.

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#88

Post by BOOSTERHIDROGEN »

rob74 wrote: post #70
toyg wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Often it's because getting involved on the business side means doing a lot of politics. Is this problem more urgent than that problem? Who will take credit for solving this problem? If I solve this problem, will they fire half the people who currently solve it manually? If I solve that problem, will it empower a certain scumbag VP who's been clamouring for it? Etc etc. Codemonkey doesn't want to be involved with all…

I don't think GP means getting involved with business side decisions , just understanding the "business logic". Where "business logic" is a generic term for anything, it could also be the rules of a sport, how the competition(s) are structured etc. if you are building a sports website...

Wait, I'm no programmer, How could programmer build if they don't understand that minimal business logic ?

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#89

Post by nine_zeros »

vmfunction wrote: post #87
lmm wrote: post #22

Developers can focus on the business logic when they're close to the business. Look for places where you sit close to the business people, talk to them a lot, maybe even talk to customers. Where you're part of a team that has a responsibility of delivering product X to customers rather than a team that has a responsibility of doing things that use technology Y. The more organisational layers you have between you and…

>The more organisational layers you have between you and the customers - architects, business analysts, and the like - the more disconnected your work will be from the business value. But what about software middle managers? What's going to happen to them??? Honestly, for over a decade that is how I worked on professional software project. I never saw the need of manager. And software development works better when th…

There is a direct proportion between the number of middle managers and the amount of political hoops and engineer might experience.

Re: Oh my poor business logic

#90

Post by christophilus »

gbalduzzi wrote: post #81
danwee wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The more organisational layers you have between you and the customers - architects, business analysts, and the like - the more disconnected your work will be from the business value. In every company I have worked for in the last 10 years, the layer in between business experts and software engineers has been always: the manager (either product manager or eng. manager). It's a bottleneck. The flow usually goes like…

Well, being the middle man is kinda the manager job. The situation you describe happens when the manager does a poor job and is both submissive to the business requests and unable to comprehend technical issues. Ideally having a competent person acting as the middle man for most daily operations is desirable though

This is it. I have had a few really good managers in my career. They were game changers. When they came to me, they’d really done their homework and thought about the problem, or they hadn’t done it at all and were handing it off to me and giving me the contacts and support I needed to do my own research and own a thing entirely myself.

Outside of those managers, managers have been worse than useless. They’ve been an impediment to both me and the business (from what I can see).

So, in my experience, a good manager is worth every penny. All other managers are a net negative.

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