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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

#131

Post by saulpw »

mdorazio wrote: post #129
immibis wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google Maps: acquired in 2004

Android: acquired in 2005

Google Sheets: acquired in 2006

Translate: launched in 2006

Chrome: launched in 2008

So only 2/5 of the ones you mentioned were started in-house, and all were pre-2010 (pre-Sundar) creations.

edit: Sundar joined Google in 2004 and apparently led Maps, Chrome, and eventually Android before becoming CEO. So "pre-Sundar" is technically incorrect.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#132

Post by oopsallmagic »

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 :-)

Concur. It's an unfortunate race to the bottom which is just indicative of the dilution of ability in this godforsaken industry. Why can't a team of grunts manage a basic CRUD web app? That's what's so frustrating: most of these problems aren't even _hard_, and yet devs screw them up anyway.

Signed, a greybeard sick of cleaning up messes.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#133

Post by oopsallmagic »

aiisjustanif wrote: post #122
foobarian wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#134

Post by morkalork »

cruffle_duffle wrote: post #90
apozem wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is amazing. I worked with a (different?) finance company that did the same thing - every team was judged on their burndown charts. From what I saw, it did no good. Teams simply did not use tickets to track work. If a story surfed sprints, its “ticket” was closed at the end of one sprint and a new one was opened for next. If a priority bug came in mid-sprint, we simply worked on it without a ticket.

> If a story surfed sprints, its “ticket” was closed at the end of one sprint and a new one was opened for next. LOL, just joined a team that seems to be doing exactly what you describe. You start attaching performance incentives to how tickets are estimated and closed... people are gonna game the fuck out of them.

I used to work somewhere that different bug severity levels were a KPI. One day after opening some prod/blocker/whatever level bug, I got a slack message from some useless agile coach arguing over it. After that, I created one kind of ticket in Jira. Fuck it. And when I talked to another senior engineer on another team it turns out they had the same experience and came to the same conclusion.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#136

Post by roenxi »

riskable wrote: post #97
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 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.…

ecshafer's response seemed more productive. He was effectively providing an explicit maintenance budget in his estimates, which in practice seems to be exactly what Mr. Senior Project Manager wanted. No real cost to the team. Everyone a winner.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#137

Post by dmvdoug »

ahstilde wrote: post #54
MichaelRo wrote: post #35

>> Why is it that innovations require heroics to occur in our organization? Why do we immediately assume that innovation = progress? Sure, the things that SURVIVE are useful, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of ideas are just like mutations in evolution more likely to be at best useless and probably damaging in various ways. You see, social constructs are not as dumb as they appear to be to t…

Innovation is required for progress. The alternative to innovation is stagnation. The end result of stagnation is death.

Pithy but, alas, meaningless.

First, define “progress.”

Second, innovation is a new idea, product, strategy, etc. Stagnation is lack of movement or lack of growth. There are alternatives to stagnation that are not innovation. Consider satisficing.

Third, the end result of stagnation may be other than death. It may be a steady state. Surviving, but not growing, is not death.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#138

Post by zmmmmm »

The saddest thing is that this "innovation" was mere automation of:

> reentering data from one spreadsheet to another and annotating it with additional data from another system

Basically pretty much routine informatics - about the lowest bar you could possibly have.

Which is to say the whole article is really about simple baseline competence to implement process. If a place can't do that then they certainly won't be able to implement things that embody actual novel ideas. But framing it as "innovation" understates the severity of the problem.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#139

Post by throwaway82931 »

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 :-)

For what it's worth, I'm actually a senior IC who's cleaned up plenty of messes over decades and who enjoys migrating legacy systems. In my experience, it's the management-level architecture astronauts who don't understand loose coupling who do the most harm. The damage done by low level individuals can be contained if they're working on properly isolated subsystems (which of course requires competent management to set up).

And I'm cynical all right. I used to believe that I could be part of a "we're all in this together" team. But I've realized how rare that is after bad experiences at multiple companies where management sees an antagonistic relationship with engineering as inevitable — because they agree with you that "grunts can't be trusted".

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#140

Post by parkerhiggins »

riskable wrote: post #97
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 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.…

outcomes > outputs

It’s proven time and time again by DX programs (S.P.A.C.E. etc) that focus time is really the only KPI that produces outcomes.

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