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The Enterprise Experience

churchofturing.github.io

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Re: The Enterprise Experience

#91

Post by jongjong »

This article is highly relatable. IMO, everything is done better in startup land except one single thing; enterprise people are willing to concede that everything is complex. This is the one piece of wisdom that enterprise people understand (and often abuse to maximize their billable hours).

Startup people tend to neglect complexity and repeatedly underestimate the harm which comes as a result of 'cutting corners'. The hilarious thing is that once in a millennia, a hot startup like Facebook comes along and grows at such an incredible rate, that they can basically get away with cutting all corners... Proving the exception, not the rule; most startups who try this same approach invariably go out of business because it turns out that technical debt is actually very expensive; not every company can afford throwing hundreds of highly paid engineers at the problem of refactoring a code base over and over... Not every startup can afford to rewrite an entire PHP engine from scratch to achieve a modest speedup.

But the thing which is funny about this is that a startup like Facebook/Meta attracts so much attention that everyone is clamoring for their advice... Literally, everyone wants to take advice about reality from a company whose experience of reality is unlike that of any other company which has ever existed or will ever exist in the foreseeable future... I do believe that the average entrepreneur has more to learn about startups and software development from a bum on the streets of San Francisco than from a tech exec.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#92

Post by lelanthran »

BrenBarn wrote: post #23

Always worth keeping in mind Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ( https://thedailywtf.com/articles/graceful-depredations ): if a piece of software is in any way described as being “enterprise”, it’s a piece of garbage. Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really…

> Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"?

That was not my takeaway, because earlier he alluded (twice) to the fact that titles are a thing:

1. A senior technical person who can't turn on a computer and an analyst not being able to speak english,

2. `I have met no less than 6 (six) people with the title "head of architecture".`

So I am guessing that is what he means by "career development"; you can acquire impressive titles.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#93

Post by al_borland »

pigbearpig wrote: post #86
al_borland wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t have the energy to build anything outside of work. I spend all of my free time trying to mentally recover. I’m left drained after work. If I’m going to do extra “work”, I always think I should do more work stuff, to attempt to get ahead on some project and reduce the stress of things than have been hanging over my head. The only time this shifts is when I have a couple weeks off. During that period I will ine…

It took me a while to realize that there is no getting ahead. Something else is always waiting, so better for my health to prioritize and make those whose job it is to prioritize actually make the hard decisions they're paid to make.

There is always more to do, sure. But I’ve found there is value to being ahead of expectations.

In my experience, no one is willing to make decisions on what is actually a priority.

To channel Peter from Office Space, my only real motivation is to not be hassled.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#94

Post by charles_f »

claw-el wrote: post #35
3eb7988a1663 wrote: post #28

Missing - new leadership will push out the old guard and replace them with friends - groups get renamed for the Nth time in N years. People continue to do the same job, but now the department has an additional "Innovation", "Discovery", or "Leadership" inserted into the title

> - groups get renamed for the Nth time in N years. People continue to do the same job, but now the department has an additional "Innovation", "Discovery", or "Leadership" inserted into the title Sometimes, I wish we name the team ‘Pikachu’ and continue on working. This way, others would know the name does not really matter, so they would stop changing the name. The amount of work to change the documentation and lets…

God do I hate teams and systems with cute names. It's all cute and fun until you're the one from another team who needs to integrate with you and decode what Pikachu and Tyrion are responsible for, and discover that Fassbender is just a nickname for a Postgresdb maintained by the "It's over 9000" team. AuthService, CacheService, Db and EntrypointTeam are perfectly fine names. I don't care that namespaces are still aligned with 4 names ago, as long as I can somewhat infer what things do based on their names

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#95

Post by stroebs »

Pretty accurate having worked for startups and $ENTERPRISE alike.

I recently switched from startup to $ENTERPRISE and the thing I’m struggling with the most is time zones. My manager is 11 hours ahead and infrastructure/security change approvers are 6 hours behind.

Now add the big shift back to on-premises infrastructure and it’ll be impossible to get anything done.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#96

Post by jongjong »

>> ... culture shock trying to reconcile the scale of the monetary waste ... Your entire retirement fund spunked in two weeks on a project that was doomed to fail from the offset.

I can very much relate to this point. I once worked for a company which spent more each month than I could save in my entire career... And they basically did absolutely nothing with it... The same company offered me a 2% raise while saying that I was their top engineer and that me threatening to quit was akin to "holding a knife at the company's throat". I followed through on the threat, the company is still fine, still spending over $1 million per month, still achieving nothing... Meanwhile, I've been desperate to do my own startup ever since, built stuff that would put their puny systems to shame... and yet I never managed to earn above $1000 per month from my own projects.

>> Generational wealth being funnelled directly to Bezos's mega-yacht via AWS

My wife made a similar joke when she saw my recent AWS bill though it was about our contribution to Bezos' wife's massive diamond ring. My wife then said "We can't even afford to do my fillers" to which I responded "Meanwhile, she can afford so much fillers, there's barely any space left for her meat."

Then my wife laughed and said "You're funny, that's why I married you."

Just kidding, she laughed and said "You loser, when are you going to shut your mouth and start earning money?"

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#97

Post by whstl »

Aeolun wrote: post #57
BrenBarn wrote: post #23

Always worth keeping in mind Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ( https://thedailywtf.com/articles/graceful-depredations ): if a piece of software is in any way described as being “enterprise”, it’s a piece of garbage. Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really…

I don’t think enterprise software is by definition bad. You can absolutely make good enterprise software, but doing that while adhering to the morass of requirements is a skill unto itself. And something that most people in an enterprise are just not all that interested in, since they’re never judged on how pleasant the software they deliver is to use. Hell, they not ever see any of the users interacting with the sof…

Agreed. Another point IME is that the problematic requirements are also often non-essential, such as using a certain in-house framework made by some director, or building the whole project inside some abomination, like the workflow system of the Enterprise Content Documentation system.

This is how I’ve seen two-month projects becoming multi-year multi-team behemoths.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#98

Post by jeffrallen »

I once worked for an $ENTERPRISE which made, among other things, office telephones. Like the real physical ones, with buttons. I also found the problem with no one knows what X is or who owns it.

My solution was to just PICK UP THE PHONE and talk to the last person who had a commit in the version control system on that thing. Which worked fine until I tried calling an engineer in Elbownia, when I realized that part of what made offshoring so profitable was that this company, who made phones (and softphones) didn't even give phones to people outside of North America and Europe.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#99

Post by BrenBarn »

lelanthran wrote: post #92
BrenBarn wrote: post #23

Always worth keeping in mind Remy's Law of Enterprise Software ( https://thedailywtf.com/articles/graceful-depredations ): if a piece of software is in any way described as being “enterprise”, it’s a piece of garbage. Joking aside, I was intrigued by the list of good things at the end of the post. Some I could understand, but some seemed to fall into that strange category of things that people say are good but really…

> Does "career development" just mean "more money"? If so, why not just say "there are opportunities to make more money"? That was not my takeaway, because earlier he alluded (twice) to the fact that titles are a thing: 1. A senior technical person who can't turn on a computer and an analyst not being able to speak english, 2. `I have met no less than 6 (six) people with the title "head of architecture".` So I am gue…

I've never understood why anyone would care about titles at all.

Re: The Enterprise Experience

#100

Post by BrenBarn »

Agingcoder wrote: post #80
BrenBarn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Big companies means more opportunities to lead bugger project. At a big company, it’s not uncommon to in-house what would’ve been an entire startup’s product. And depending on the environment, you may work on several of those project over the course of a few years. Or if you want to try your hand at leading bigger teams, that’s usually easier to find in a big company. Okay, so career development means "bigger proje…

projects beyond a certain size in a large org imply things which are very different - people, networking, money, regulations, politics, business, security etc all things which don’t look spectacular when you have three people, but become very important and much harder with hundreds of people. So career development really means ‘learning a completely different skillset which is not technical’

That's a good way to put it and is something I've often thought as well, although not just in the technical realm. I think of it as "doing a different job". You used to be a teacher but now you're the principal; you used to hammer in nails but now you direct the construction crew; you used to be writing software but now you manage other people who write software; etc.

Personally I'd struggle to consider that "development" for my own life, since it often amounts to no longer doing the job I like and instead watching other people do it. I can understand how adding new skills is positive, though.

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