Live data from Hacker News

The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

viktorcessan.com

41–50 of 299 posts

Re: The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

#41
post #25

> The obvious objection is that code produced at that speed becomes unmanageable, a liability in itself. That is a reasonable concern, but it largely applies when agents produce code that humans then maintain. Agentic platforms are being iterated upon quickly, and for established patterns and non-business-critical code, which is the majority of what most engineering organizations actually maintain, detailed human fam…

Ceding the premise that the AGI is gonna eat my job, my job involves reading the spec to be able verify the code and output so the there’s a human to fire and sue. There are five layers of fluffy management and corporate BS before we get to that part, and the AGI is more competent at those fungible skills. With the annoying process people out of the picture, even reviewing vibeslop full time sounds kinda nice… Feet u…

There’s gonna be one guy in charge of you, and he’s going to expect you to be putting out 20x output while thanking him for the privilege of being employed, assuming all goes the way every management team seems to want

I dont think this will happen because AI has become a straight up cult and things that are going well don’t need so many people performatively telling each other how well things are going.

Re: The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

#42

When I see someone just throwing a lot of numbers and graphs at me, I see that there are in to win an argument, and not propose an idea. Of late, I've come across a lot of ideas from Rory Sutherland and my conclusion from listening to his ideas is that there are some people, who're obsessed with numbers, because to them it's a way to find certainty and win arguments. He calls them "Finance People" (him being a Market…

As with any attempt to become more precise (see software estimation, eg. Mythical Man Month), we've long argued that we are doing it for the side effects (like breaking problems down into smaller, incremental steps).

So when you know that you are spending €60k to directly benefit small number of your users, and understand that this potentially increases your maintenance burden with up to 10 customer issues a quarter requiring 1 bug fix a month, you will want to make sure you are extracting at least equal value in specified gains, and a lot more in unspecified gains (eg. the fact that this serves your 2% of customers might mean that you'll open up to a market where this was a critical need and suddenly you grow by 25% with 22% [27/125] of your users making use of it).

You can plan for some of this, but ultimately when measuring, a lot of it will be throwing things at the wall to see what sticks according to some half-defined version of "success".

But really you conquer a market by having a deep understanding of a particular problem space, a grand vision of how to solve it, and then actually executing on both. Usually, it needs to be a problem you feel yourself to address it best!

Re: The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

#43
If you want to understand economics, I recommend watching some of Don Reinertsen's videos on Lean 2.0. He goes into a few concepts quite deeply that are quite intuitive.

Cost of delay: calculating the cost of delaying by a few weeks in terms of lost revenue (you aren't shipping whatever it is you are building), total life value of the product (your feature won't be delivering value forever), extra cost in staffing. You can slap a number on it. It doesn't have to be a very accurate number. But it will give you a handle on being mindful that you are delaying the moment where revenue is made and taking on team cost at the cost of other stuff on your backlog.

Option value: calculating the payoff for some feature you add to your software as having a non linear payoff. It costs you n when it doesn't work out and might deliver 10*n in value if it does. Lean 1.0 would have you stay focused and toss out the option for that potential 10x payoff. But if you do a bit of math, there probably is a lot of low hanging fruit that you might want to think about picking because it has a low cost and a potential high payoff. In the same way variability is a good thing because it gives you the option to do something with it later. A little bit of overengineering can buy you a lot of option value. Whereas having tunnel vision and only doing what was asked might opt you out of all that extra value.

A bad estimation is better than no estimation: even if you are off by 3x, at least you'll have a number and you can learn and adapt over time. Getting wildly varying estimates from different people means you have very different ideas about what is being estimated. Do your estimates in time. Because that allows you to slap a dollar value on that time and do some cost calculations. How many product owners do you know that actually do that or even know how to do that?

Don't run teams at 100% capacity. Work piles up in queues and causes delays when teams are pushed hard. The more work you pile on the worse it gets. Worse, teams start cutting corners and take on technical debt in order to clear the queue faster. Any manufacturing plant manager knows not to plan for more than 90% capacity. It doesn't work. You just end up with a lot of unfinished work blocking other work. Most software managers will happily go to 110%. This causes more issues than it solves. Whenever you hear some manager talking about crunch time, they've messed up their planning.

Stretching a team like that will just cause cycle times to increase when you do that. Also, see cost of delay. Queues aren't actually free. If you have a lot of work in progress with inter dependencies, any issues will cause your plans to derail and cause costly delays. It's actually very risky to do that if you think about it like that. If you've ever been on a team that seemingly doesn't get anything done anymore, this might be what is going on.

I like this back of the envelope math; it's hard to argue with.

I used to be a salaried software engineer in a big multinational. None of us had any notion of cost. We were doing stuff that we were paid to do. It probably cost millions. Most decision making did not have $ values on them. I've since been in a few startups. One where we got funded and subsequently ran out of money without ever bringing in meaningful revenue. And another one that I helped bootstrap where I'm getting paid (a little) out of revenue we make. There's a very direct connection between stuff I do and money coming in.

Re: The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

#44
post #28
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I think it's been a while since I've read an LLM hot take which couldnt have been written by an LLM and this one is no exception. There's a 99% chance that the training materials on sale are equally replaceable with a prompt.

True. And yet, as an organization when you buy OP's training, you don't buy the material. You buy the feeling that you make your organization becomes more productive. You buy the signal to your boss that you are innovative and working to make your organization more productive. And you buy the time and headspace from your engineers that they are thinking if at least for 2 hours about making the organization more produ…

They're buying a defensible (or laudable) justification when the training company's fee appears as a line item in the company budget.

This doesnt mean the training has to be good, useful or original in the slightest but the provider does need to have credentials which arent just "some dev with a hot take" that a fellow executive would recognize.

Re: The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

#45
>Given that software teams are expensive

In many companies there are 3 to 5 other people per developer (QA, agile masters, PO, PM, BA, marketing, sales, customer support etc.). The costs aren't driven just by the developer salaries.

A CEO can cost as much as 10 developers, sometimes more.

Re: The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

#46
One interesting factor that I rarely see discussed is this: Let's say a DevOps person does some improvement to internal tooling and a task that devs had to oversee manually now is automated. Every dev spent about 2 hours per week doing this task and now they don't have to anymore. Now, have we saved 2 hours of salary per dev per week?

Not sure. Because it totally depends on what they do instead. Are they utilizing two hours more every week now doing meaningful work? Or are they just taking things a bit more easy? Very hard to determine and it just makes it harder to reason about the costs and wins in these cases.

Re: The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

#48
post #19
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Flying blind" is a completely standard idiom originating from flying while blinded by e.g. cloud or darkness. Its meaning is a figurative transplant of a literal description.

I know it’s an idiom. The point is that it still uses blindness as a stand-in for incompetence/unsafe guessing . Being common doesn’t make it harmless. Common just means we’ve normalized it. And you defending it shows that weve normalized it to a point where the double-meaning is seemingly only apparent to blind people.

You are equivocating. Blindness as a personal chronic medical condition is not the same as a situational difficulty.

The pilot who is "flying blind" has perfectly normal eyeballs. They are not necessarily a member of any minority group, except for their chosen profession.

_____

As for "blind" being a word that appears more frequently in a negative rather than positive way... Well, I'm not sure what to tell you, that's just 10,000+ years of language from a species that evolved to prefer seeing.

To offer an example of the positive case, the idiom "justice is blind". Yes, there is a popular cultural mascot wearing a strip a fabric over her eyes, but again: The justice doesn't actually involve any (real) personal medical condition, and it's considered a positive feature for the job.

Re: The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

#49
post #5

Using ‘blind’ to mean ‘ignorant’ is like using any disability label as a synonym for ‘bad’—it turns a real condition into an insult.

Why is "ignorant" a synonym for "bad" (as a moral judgement, like "bad person")?

It just means you don't know something, which is usually a relatively bad situation for you, but it doesn't make you a bad person.

If you think otherwise, that's on you.

Re: The economics of software teams: Why most engineering orgs are flying blind

#50
post #46

One interesting factor that I rarely see discussed is this: Let's say a DevOps person does some improvement to internal tooling and a task that devs had to oversee manually now is automated. Every dev spent about 2 hours per week doing this task and now they don't have to anymore. Now, have we saved 2 hours of salary per dev per week? Not sure. Because it totally depends on what they do instead. Are they utilizing tw…

In such a clear-cut example, I think we have saved the two hours.
Post reply on HN