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

Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 24 posts

Re: Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

#11

Post by w_t_payne »

00000000005 wrote: post #7
glanzwulf wrote: post #2

But at the same time it's so much easier (and even encouraged) to do your own thing. There are startups popping up daily. So whilst modern "cog in the machine" software development kills innovation within the company, we live in an age where "anyone" could build the next facebook.

The message however is this: An organized software development process kills innovation That’s true for startups as well as big companies. A company of four people could have a dead software process just because it’s super organized, with jira, tickets, sprints, user stories, CI/CD, testing deployment and monitoring. The more organized your software process, the more dead it is, in terms of creativity and innovation.

I fundamentally disagree. It's entirely a matter of how that process is manifested and the impact it has on the psychology of team members.

A good process can be empowering. It's just that 98%~ish of processes are not good.

Re: Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

#12

Post by w_t_payne »

rini17 wrote: post #6
austincheney wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under utilized yes, but slacking off no. An employee is beholden to the work assigned to them. Large pockets of availability occur for developers when either a developer is substantially more productive than their peers or when internal processes limit increased productivity. In either case the developer is doing all they can to do their job with plenty of availability remaining for personal work.

Are there any corporations that explicitly tolerate personal work during work time?

Are there any corporations that explicitly know everything that each and every employee gets up to during work time?

Re: Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

#13

Post by ch_123 »

As someone who has created several skunkworks projects at large companies which got shipped, I'm wondering what exactly the OP's definition of "Modern organized software" is. I have definitely worked in an environment where creating a skunkworks project was next to impossible due to a toxic micromanagement culture, but in that case I left the company instead of assuming that it was representative of the software industry as a whole.

EDIT: I'm also confused about the talk of "corporate rebels" on one hand, but the complaints about dealing with processes on the other. What do you think corporate rebellion means? Do you think that "rebellion" means not having to deal with any attempt to stop what you are doing? Frankly, trying to sneak around processes is half the fun!

Re: Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

#14

Post by 28304283409234 »

In Ops, I've been in a situation multiple times that I was frowned upon for fixing production outages, instead of working on "The Sprint".

Example: I noticed failing memory banks on the primary postgres server. And got reprimanded for for fixing it (failing over to standby server, replacing mem, etc...), instead of working on the sprint.

Re: Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

#16

Post by rad_gruchalski »

> Modern software processes make this impossible. It would be deeply frowned upon, likely a sacking offence, to create software outside the tightly controlled process.

That’s a hell of an assumption. I guess it depends on the company?

Re: Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

#17

Post by salawat »

00000000005 wrote: post #7
glanzwulf wrote: post #2

But at the same time it's so much easier (and even encouraged) to do your own thing. There are startups popping up daily. So whilst modern "cog in the machine" software development kills innovation within the company, we live in an age where "anyone" could build the next facebook.

The message however is this: An organized software development process kills innovation That’s true for startups as well as big companies. A company of four people could have a dead software process just because it’s super organized, with jira, tickets, sprints, user stories, CI/CD, testing deployment and monitoring. The more organized your software process, the more dead it is, in terms of creativity and innovation.

Bullshit. You don't scale without process and people being able to make safe assumptions about what's going on elsewhere. Process is what enables your maintainers to plug into never before seen code and handle it as just another piece in reasonable time.

You're coming off as someone whose never had to coordinate a large number of people to deliver anything concurrently before.

Re: Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

#18

Post by beecafe »

salawat wrote: post #17
00000000005 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The message however is this: An organized software development process kills innovation That’s true for startups as well as big companies. A company of four people could have a dead software process just because it’s super organized, with jira, tickets, sprints, user stories, CI/CD, testing deployment and monitoring. The more organized your software process, the more dead it is, in terms of creativity and innovation.

Bullshit. You don't scale without process and people being able to make safe assumptions about what's going on elsewhere. Process is what enables your maintainers to plug into never before seen code and handle it as just another piece in reasonable time. You're coming off as someone whose never had to coordinate a large number of people to deliver anything concurrently before.

You're making the same point - liveness, dynamism, unprediability is at odds with scale. Scaling is a tradeoff against agility.

Re: Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

#19

Post by rini17 »

w_t_payne wrote: post #12
rini17 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any corporations that explicitly tolerate personal work during work time?

Are there any corporations that explicitly know everything that each and every employee gets up to during work time?

Yes, some do. They monitor both real and virtual desktops.

But you dodged the question. When doing creative work, having an openly accepting environment makes a lot of difference. Can we agree on this?

Re: Tell HN: There’s no room for skunkworks in modern software development

#20

Post by jasonpeacock »

Nope. Where have you worked to get that impression?

> But what it does mean is any company that runs an organized process

That organized process is for deliverables that the company is investing resources into (and managing the costs of). The existence of such a process does not preclude the development of software/products outside of that process.

I've delivered many "skunkwork" projects, some of which have become critical parts of the company, while still delivering on official projects. It's stuff that I've been passionate about, or a personal pain point, or an experiment.

I've even done it as part of official projects, e.g. "we need to deliver A, but that requires B which is really annoying/slow/expensive - I'm going to solve B first and then A will be trivial". No skunks required.

> It would be deeply frowned upon, likely a sacking offence, to create software outside the tightly controlled process.

Nope. The response is "let's adapt this to fit into our process", not "you're fired!". The worse response is usually "we don't want it" or "we already have a project in flight to build that" and you've just wasted a bunch of time.

> Modern organized software development kills innovation.

It sounds like you're recently frustrated about something? Many companies have delivered innovative software through modern, organized software development. Where do you think AWS came from?

Post reply on HN