You know it’s going to be a good read when they post a new one
The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
41–50 of 210 posts
Re: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
#42Consider the Business Intelligence/Analyst roles. The industry is trying to replace people who write SQL with people who can use Tableau or similar. "Just connect to whatever datastore you have and non technical people can drag and drop." Its got some problems: 1. They forget you need to hire many more (lower paid) people, because your output now linearly scales. Human hands have to turn the crank because its all UI-…
Sounds like a good business killer. First you fire all the back end folks cause they don't know nothing about the business and tableau is the new backend (nevermind that the backend folks have been absorbing and helping refine business requirements). Then when the business folks get tangled up in the web of shit they call in the tableau consultants who suck em dry and produce nothing of value.
Re: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
#43Programming is still a craft, not engineering, or manufacturing. A software house should work like bespoke tailoring, or fine cabinetry, or glass blowing. There's still no better training for programming than the equivalent of master/journeyman/apprentice. Apologies for the gender specific terms, but they are specific to how tradespeople operated from medieval times. The worst thing to ever happen to the practice of…
> Apologies for the gender specific terms,
It doesn't make any sense to apologize for using a language in its current form.
Re: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
#44Programming is still a craft, not engineering, or manufacturing. A software house should work like bespoke tailoring, or fine cabinetry, or glass blowing. There's still no better training for programming than the equivalent of master/journeyman/apprentice. Apologies for the gender specific terms, but they are specific to how tradespeople operated from medieval times. The worst thing to ever happen to the practice of…
All of those things have value if they are allowed to provide value.
None provide value if management do not allow it to have value.
> t-shirt sizes
The whole point of planning poker is for people to guesstimate how much they think a task will take, and the poi t of doing it in a group is to allow the team to discuss the things they may not have thought about.
> 2 hour sprint reviews
I would agree that 2 hours is vastly excessive, but a sprint review is just a time for people to regularly meet and say what things are pissing them off, and what can be done to fix them.
If management know best and you have to use a shitty Jenkins pipeline with someone else's scripts, then it is pointless. But that's not the fault of the sprint review.
Re: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
#45Programming is still a craft, not engineering, or manufacturing. A software house should work like bespoke tailoring, or fine cabinetry, or glass blowing. There's still no better training for programming than the equivalent of master/journeyman/apprentice. Apologies for the gender specific terms, but they are specific to how tradespeople operated from medieval times. The worst thing to ever happen to the practice of…
All of those things have value if they are allowed to provide value. None provide value if management do not allow it to have value. > t-shirt sizes The whole point of planning poker is for people to guesstimate how much they think a task will take, and the poi t of doing it in a group is to allow the team to discuss the things they may not have thought about. > 2 hour sprint reviews I would agree that 2 hours is vas…
Planing poker is the one ceremony that I find consistently helpful. Listening to different devs discuss why they think something is 13 points or 3 points is helpful to the whole team. You could change the names of all the parts of the meeting, but having the discussion about differing opinions on complexity is so helpful.
Re: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
#46I think every engineering manager has either worked for or interviewed with a company that believes this stuff. Software dev is still at the craftsman[0] level. It might move out of that, eventually. But not yet, and probably not in the next 20 years or so. We haven't solved some intrinsic problems around defining a problem completely, precisely and succinctly without having to write code[1]. And getting five enginee…
craftsperson or artisan both work, but no one cares if you use craftsman
Re: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
#47Re: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
#48I agree that the full commodification of technical work is a bad idea and will, hopefully, continue to fail. However, having read the Phoenix Project twice and hating most of Scrum, I disagree that’s what the Phoenix Project is advocating for. My main takeaways from the PP are: 1. Have clear systems in place to carry out and manage your repeatable work, automate where possible 2. Minimise the time work is in progress…
> hating most of Scrum
I'll just say that if you look at Scrum itself there is really nothing objectionable to it.
https://scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html
It's the other shit people pack on top of calling it Scrum that usually sucks ass. I've found the best way to fight back against shitty-Scrum is not to fight it, but actually feign puritanical allegiance to the actual doctrine, it's much less repulsive. I makes you look like less of contrarian and it's easier to make an impact that way.
Re: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
#49It requires an extreme level of selective amnesia to make McDonald's the operations standard for anyone. Try "the ice cream machine is broken today" on your next I.T. contract and see how far that gets you. But to the author's point, I remember checking out a book from 1980 on software engineering from a highly well-known author (I forget who). I was shocked to read the author state unsarcastically that software deve…
> that software development labor would be fully itemized in a standard catalogue like auto mechanic by the year 2000.
That's pretty dumb... Software doesn't "break" and if it could be itemized to such a degree it could be made self-healing.
Re: The Failed Commodification of Technical Work
#50Well written and enjoyable read. The image of a Burgermaster 5000 operated by a Highschool kid producing burgers is one that really gets stuck in your head. I am wondering to which degree something like this might or might not come true with the advent of AI driven coding. I have built a full swift app using Ai (not writing a single line of code) but it took a lot of coding knowledge to pull it off. I wonder if this…
What was the full app?