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Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

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Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#121

Post by aiisjustanif »

tokyolights2 wrote: post #66
ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

I have seen this multiple times before. Management chastising good work because some externality of that work shows up on a graph that they have to talk about at some weekly meeting. It doesn't even have to make the graph look bad, just stick out.

Could have spent that time more wisely by making a better graph that accounts for this…

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#122

Post by aiisjustanif »

foobarian wrote: post #110
throwaway82931 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they are usually right. This message encapsulates why so many software jobs are terrible. Put your heart and soul into doing your best, earnestly combat NIH and pursue meaningful productivity, and _still_ the culture is such that at many companies, there will never be trust because the prevailing culture is that management is "usually right" that grunts can't be trusted. I've worked for good bosses that aren't like…

Clean up enough messes left behind by grunts that were trusted by management and you will be cynical too :-)

I still blame the management here for not building a team where quality and foresight matter enough to avoid large messes.

Trust from management isn’t all that is needed for good work to be accomplished, good managers of software development also should not shockingly know good software development.

I swear software and tech related roles are one of the few places where the managers don’t also know how to do the job of their reports.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#123

Post by pyrale »

constantcrying wrote: post #84
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level. The team that decided to do this to keep the metrics happy rocks, though :)

>It’s called gaming the metrics and it’s totally a sign of dysfunction at the org level. Have you seen actually dysfunctional organization? Millions being burned over ridiculous mismanagement. Bureaucracy which takes up vast amounts of time. Tracking of completely meaningless metrics. An IT department which needs to be "worked around". Managers who's only interaction point is them asking you what they should write in…

> Have you seen actually dysfunctional organization?

I have yet to see an organization that is not dysfunctional.

Some dysfunctions I can live with, though. I agree with you, if gaming the metrics wastes a reasonable time (say, 5 minutes a week), it's definitely not the worst.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#124

Post by Terr_ »

danaris wrote: post #88
foobarian wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Leadership does not trust the grunts to do productive work Not only that, but unfortunately they are usually right. Without oversight the in-house team has high likelihood of building NIH spaghetti, which causes more problems down the line. To avoid the negative outcome leadership needs to be technically competent and resourced, and that's the other side of the coin - usually they don't have the expertise so in a w…

> Without oversight the in-house team has high likelihood of building NIH spaghetti I think when you see this you need to start digging deeper and questioning why this is happening. Is it because the "grunts" are genuinely bad at their jobs? If this is the case, then who hired them? Or is it because they have been conditioned to believe that if they ask for permission to use an outside tool/library/etc, they will be…

I'd like to add that NIH spaghetti sometimes comes from customer relationships rather than from exuberant developers.

The important customer wants just one tiny convenience-feature that fits their use case and it sorta makes sense... Which somehow keeps scope-creeping over time into a cancerous unplanned product which is expensive to support.

With the benefit of hindsight, you realize it's something the customer should have bought directly for themselves from a completely separate and more-qualified vendor. However they either didn't realize what they wanted or they were able to trick you into building an over-specialized product for their use case--for much cheaper than if they had hired a contractor to customize another better offering.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#125

Post by immibis »

adverbly wrote: post #31
tredigi wrote: post #14

I agree to the overall tone, but there are also counter points. One of them is the Google example. To get promoted beyond a certain level, you must have brought some new product over the finish line. Result? They have so many new things happening all the time, all of them suck, and then just move on to the next. Eg how many chat products do they need to invent before they settle on one and let it mature?

> To get promoted beyond a certain level, you must have brought some new product over the finish line This always confused me. It looked from the outside like Google does so many things right on the innovation front, but after some early success they have had a rough streak. I'd argue that one thing that Google is doing wrong is gatekeeping promotions based on (overly) well-defined criteria such as new products. Good…

You would think that. I would think that. But can you actually name more than a handful of things Google created that were good? Because I can't.

There's search, obviously. Gmail, if that wasn't an acquisition.... What else?

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#126

Post by OldGuyInTheClub »

nonameiguess wrote: post #111
ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

I experienced something like this for many years across several of the big five defense contractors and smaller SBIR contractors working for the US DoD and IC. As someone who 20 years ago had a slightly better understanding of how computers and networks actually work than an average developer and was comfortable at the command line in an era when juniors increasingly couldn't leave their IDE without becoming hopeless…

Excellent and, to me, underappreciated points on HN. Now, expanding into the hardware world of A&D brings different levels of agony. If there's development risk, there's no good way to write a schedule that both accounts for it AND consistent with absolutely mandatory "Earned Value Management" where complex tasks have to be shredded into tiny 1-3 week chunks with metrics that the accounting team can track and report. If you need to fix a broken piece of equipment, if you need to buy a part, you're at the mercy of a procurement system that exists to survive audits and wants to know why the break or purchase wasn't in the plan. If the problem requires evaluating Plans A, B, and C, you have to pick one as the best, baseline, and execute it. Then if you need to consider the other two options that everyone knew up-front were possible, you get to explain why The One Chosen Plan didn't work. "You signed up for it."

The only way I've seen around it is a Risk/Opportunity Management system where risks/opportunities to whatever the baseline plan might be are enumerated, assessed, planned for, and maintained for when things go sideways or when there's a chance to save schedule and/or cost. But, that takes a VERY gifted _leader_ to run at the top level and those are rarer than hen's teeth. Ideally when a risk becomes a problem or an opportunity presents itself, the contingency plan is implemented. When it works, it is great and I've seen tough, ambiguous projects come in ahead of schedule and under budget. The common theme was one guy running all those projects and he's now retired. Usually the result is that the person reporting the problem gets stomped upon by a _manager_ who runs a cargo-cult process that s/he doesn't really understand.

Earned Value Management may be fine and dandy when development risk is done, the transition to manufacturing is complete, and the manufacturing process is relatively stable and the perturbations are small. Of course, that's when the contract SHOULD be Firm Fixed Price and not tracked by an army of accountants on both sides of the contract.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#127

Post by hinkley »

ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

It's funny that my anecdote also comes from a kanban team, but amongst mostly waterfall people and one Scrum nutjob.

When you are showing people up they throw the book at you. Yes you're getting a lot done but you're cutting corners so that's cheating! In an org that is perpetually behind schedule they rely on one team being a scapegoat for why all the other teams are behind schedule, and when your team has never been more than 10 days behind it stings.

One of my proudest moments on that project was when I figured out a judo move to meet (and exceed) the documentation requirements for our part of the project with less than 3 man hours per milestone after I got it working (and half of that was typesetting fixes by one of our tech writers). I got the impression that the person who called it out was really hoping it would cost us 20-60 hours per milestone. I think I spent about 30 hours total, including the initial set up time for the tools and templates. So their gambit only worked for a single milestone and then it was back to the races.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#128

Post by contingencies »

I thought this was going to be about those people with colored glasses and ultra off-putting psychedelic sneakers (often matching) that turn up overcaffeinated with gelled hair as stage-dwelling experts, or multi-day workshopping nothing in particular with ramp-in/ramp-out platitudes and zero content. What do you call those? Innovation consultants?

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#129

Post by mdorazio »

immibis wrote: post #125
adverbly wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To get promoted beyond a certain level, you must have brought some new product over the finish line This always confused me. It looked from the outside like Google does so many things right on the innovation front, but after some early success they have had a rough streak. I'd argue that one thing that Google is doing wrong is gatekeeping promotions based on (overly) well-defined criteria such as new products. Good…

You would think that. I would think that. But can you actually name more than a handful of things Google created that were good? Because I can't. There's search, obviously. Gmail, if that wasn't an acquisition.... What else?

Ones I personally use because they are/were good: Maps. Android (+ Auto). Chrome. Docs/Sheets. Translate.

The issue is that most of these originated a long time ago and recent Google creations, like Bard/Gemini, tend to be mediocre copies of other things.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#130

Post by tkiolp4 »

gspencley wrote: post #103
riskable wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also work at a large financial institution and have had many similar situations. Fortunately, I'm the one in charge (team lead of sorts) and I have a pretty standard response to such "high level" nonsense: "Your inability to adequately track my team's weekly or monthly performance is not my problem." Every "project" has plans, deliverables, and due dates and those are the ultimate arbiters of a team's performance.…

> "Your inability to adequately track my team's weekly or monthly performance is not my problem." I'm an engineer and I can certainly understand and empathize with where that sentiment comes from. However, when people say things like this the first thought that goes through my head is "there is a culture problem." That sentiment underscores an adversarial relationship between teams and leadership/management. That adv…

You are right. Unfortunately, most companies out there do not operate as desired, hence the adversarial approach. I would even go further and say that if one lands in such companies (the not good ones, this is, the majority) with a non-adversarial approach, oh boy, you’re gonna be eaten (specially true for juniors)
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