Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Getting things “done” in large tech companies

seangoedecke.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 228 posts

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#91

Post by gwbas1c »

Yesterday I pointed out to the founder of the company that I work for, in the context of tech debt:

"Well, since we moved the goalposts on that project, now we're out of 'credit card' tech debt and now in 'Adjustable Rate Mortgage' tech debt. Our goal should be to get to 'Fixed Rate Mortgage' debt."

The problem is that too much tech debt can hold back feature development, or even materially impact hosting costs. In our case, we're a 10-year-old startup, and many parts of our stack were built in a way that makes them very hard to maintain, or on end-of-life technologies that are impractical to hire for. To be quite blunt: The tech debt got to a point where we spent more time on the debt than feature development.

The problem with this article is that it glosses over the impact of tech debt, and how it needs to be handled. An umpteeth refactor for a 3% performance improvement is very different than a 3000x performance improvement that reigns in hosting costs. Backfilling unit tests needed to prevent regressions when building a new feature is also different than rewriting a major UI component because it depends on a UI toolkit that was end-of-life 7 years ago. All have a very different impact to the business and product.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#92

Post by lazystar »

everdrive wrote: post #76
theK wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, fire the Product Managers?

I left the government for corporate work, and we didn't have project managers as a specific role. Of course, people were managing projects, but it was nothing like it was in the government. In my short experience, project managers: - Have no understanding of the technology they're "building." - Don't understand who is responsible for what. - Would have NO idea if things were set up incorrectly. - Are solely working t…

product, not project :-)

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#94

Post by nickysielicki »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #25
agentultra wrote: post #6

> this fact is a trap for competent but unagentic engineers Is “unagentic engineer” a euphemism for human/not-AI? Unfortunately for companies whose engineers work this way, they’re on a one-way trip to expensive cloud bills, data breaches, and frustrated customers. A good amount of that “never done,” work is: - Patching security vulnerabilities - Fixing mistakes made due to lack of planning/testing - reducing costs d…

Of course you're right. But that's the point of the article. Companies, departments and teams operate on a spectrum from reality-centred to status-centred. In a reality-centred culture all the things you mentioned matter. Reality-centred management understands this, manages it, and rewards it. Reality-centred cultures are better at medium/long-term planning and at handling issues rationally. In a status-centred cultu…

> Status cultures don't necessarily implode.

Sometimes they do, though. And while it’s spectacular to see it up close, it won’t make you feel any better.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#95

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

cjs_ac wrote: post #71

> In large tech companies, this fact is a trap for competent but unagentic engineers. They see an infinite queue of tasks that they’re capable of doing, and they start delivering a stream of marginal improvements to a particular subsystem. From their perspective, it feels like they’re crushing it. After all, they’re putting out work at their top speed: no downtime, no waiting on other teams. But they’re not doing the…

> It's my employer's responsibility to allocate tasks to me in order to best suit the organisation's needs and goals.

I don't disagree that your personal employment relationship is like that, but keep in mind that you are describing only you here.

Contrast with another example: It is my employer's responsibility to describe the organization's needs and goals, and to give me the freedom and leeway to figure out how to best accomplish them according to agreed-upon measures.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#96

Post by whstl »

deadbabe wrote: post #79
whstl wrote: post #3

I don't disagree with the article, but after working in big tech, two HN startups, a couple unicorns and others, in two continents, I don't really find this too actionable. In the last ten years (and even in the 20-people HN startups), the day to day work of engineers has become so incredibly specialised and divorced from the needs of decision-makers and the customers that there is almost nothing I can do to influenc…

So you’re saying the only time you were satisfied with your work is when you took the role of a product manager who stepped in between the engineers and the rest of the company and had all their contributions filtered through your ego? Yea, that sounds pretty satisfying…

No.

Keep in mind that:

- I didn't step in between engineers and the company. I am an engineer.

- I didn't step in between my team and the decision makers. It wasn't me who "invented" the requirements, nor it was me who said the projects were complete.

- It was the only time in the last few years where I could actually follow the advice in this article and ship things people need. Because I could TALK with people.

- My entire team got salary increases all across the board.

- Everyone has an ego, and everyone has a personality. But nobody in a team should get to put "more" of their personality over the others. We had brand guidelines and accessibility requirements, but other than that we decided things together.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#97

Post by highfrequency »

> How can you finish things in a world where you can keep improving systems indefinitely? It means getting them to a point where the decision-makers at the company are happy.

Rational mindset for an employee, but the problem (for the company) is that upper management is usually unqualified to distinguish good vs. bad technical work. So under this advice, engineers do the minimal work to “deliver” lots of features in order to check off the OKR for upper management, but the engineering is done poorly. Upper management has no insight into the quality of the work, but over time the bugs and performance degradation pile up, while engineering managers get promoted and OKRs completed.

The only real resolution is to push technical expertise as high up into the org as possible, so that even if engineers are only appeasing upper management, upper management will demand good quality work. Apple is the notable example of this org structure: there are no general managers except Tim Cook; everyone who reports to Cook is a technical expert.

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#98

Post by codingbot3000 »

whstl wrote: post #3

I don't disagree with the article, but after working in big tech, two HN startups, a couple unicorns and others, in two continents, I don't really find this too actionable. In the last ten years (and even in the 20-people HN startups), the day to day work of engineers has become so incredibly specialised and divorced from the needs of decision-makers and the customers that there is almost nothing I can do to influenc…

Out of curiosity: Why didn't you continue being product manager?

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#99

Post by peterldowns »

whstl wrote: post #96
deadbabe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying the only time you were satisfied with your work is when you took the role of a product manager who stepped in between the engineers and the rest of the company and had all their contributions filtered through your ego? Yea, that sounds pretty satisfying…

No. Keep in mind that: - I didn't step in between engineers and the company. I am an engineer. - I didn't step in between my team and the decision makers. It wasn't me who "invented" the requirements, nor it was me who said the projects were complete. - It was the only time in the last few years where I could actually follow the advice in this article and ship things people need. Because I could TALK with people. - M…

Based. Nice work!

Re: Getting things “done” in large tech companies

#100

Post by lazystar »

whstl wrote: post #68
switch007 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do the evade accountability so often and so deeply? It's bizarre.

By shielding decision-makers/customers and engineers. To give an example of when I had to burn political capital: I had to "skip rank" a few times and go directly to CEOs. They are appreciative when you provide concrete facts, such as "I worked for two weeks on the redesign of this page that zero people use and I'm frankly tired of this bullshit".

CEO's and VP's and customers appreciate this type of work, but YMMV. Speaking from experience, you'll be surrounded by more enemies in your day-to-day when the side effect of your customer obsession negatively impacts the KPI's that are used to stack rank your direct management chain against other teams and managers. it is quite kafkaesque to be treated as the black sheep after you save $10m a year for the org, then get a pay decrease + meets expectations 8 months later.
Post reply on HN