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Many software companies are a joke

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Re: Many software companies are a joke

#131

Post by mjburgess »

milkshakes wrote: post #88
mjburgess wrote: post #70

The issue the author is talking about, in my view, is caused by the natural lifespan of corps tending towards bloating middle-management. (Very hard process to fight). At the start the founder group are rutheless productivity-chasers. Then the corp expands to include the its-just-a-job group. Everything ticks along well, and at some point, the rutheless can't manage the group. So they hire followers to listen to thei…

this is the gervais principle

Same phenomenon, slightly different analysis.

The gervais-style analysis mystifies some of the issues it describes. The heart of the group dynamics is "leader vs follower", "rutheless vs clueless" and "transactional vs passionate".

A startup is largely "passionate rutheless leaders", it grows to include "transactional ruthless followers" (its-just-ajob), then to "passionate clueless followers" (middle-management). At this phase its highly stable... you hire in "passionate rutheless followers" (ie., more actual workers)... who also need more middle-management... and at somepoint this becomes unbalanced due to poor executive incentives.

That gives you your large population of "passionate clueless followers" (ie., middle-management), and the death of the productive phase of corp. action, into a more rent-seeking (or death) phase.

In gervais, "losers become sociopaths" in a mystifying way; and likewise the "clueless" population is inexplicably unpromotable. My breakdown, for example, clarifies why: the "clueless" population never become rutheless-leadrs as they arent leaders at all. They're followers.

I think muddling "transactional" dispositions with "rutheless" ones also mystifies the issue, under gervais, the "noble sociopath" is hard to explain. Really, its that they're both passionate (internally motivated) and rutheless.

---

NB., rough definitions: "leader vs follower" (I command vs. I am commanded), "rutheless vs clueless" (success requires it vs. virtue requires it) and "transactional vs passionate" (external-reward vs. intrinstic-reward).

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#132

Post by bayindirh »

brabel wrote: post #118
bayindirh wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a developer (and sysadmin), I want to write less and less code as time passes. It's not I don't enjoy coding, on the contrary. However, I understand that a project is documentation and future planning, too. So, I want to build an artifact complete with its documentation, which can be sustainably moved forward by anyone other than me. If I don't document what I've coded, then the joy project becomes a weight on me,…

As a developer, I've been writing lots and lots of code every day for around 15 years. I write documentation quite rarely, only when it's a customer facing feature (a lot of stuff that I do is in the background where customers have no idea things are happening) or a very technical piece of code that I want future developers to understand better and keep the intended design in mind when making changes (this is much mo…

Ah, no, I didn't mean to share my perspective as "this is the correct way, yo shall do as me". It's just my perspective and formed by my own experience and work structure.

As it comes up here from time to time, I work as a sysadmin, and have my side academic gig, which I'm the solo developer on a serious piece of code. I design, code, test and verify the whole thing, which is immensely satisfying.

My daily job is very connected to my academic gig, and they feed each other. As a result, I can apply what I've learnt from one to the other. We're a small team, doing a lot of big things, hence my work environment is drastically different than yours.

The gist of my comment was actually, "As I get more experienced, I design and write less code because it's more correct from get go. Then I document it at the level needed and I have something concrete and which can be passed over to anyone who wants to maintain or fork it, and this is equally, if not more satisfying".

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#133

Post by ZephyrBlu »

_fizz_buzz_ wrote: post #44
Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

The sad thing is that it’s a joke that many people don’t seem to be in on. You get all these defenders coming out of the woodwork when people wonder what the hell all the programmers at say, Twitter, are doing. Supposedly you puny mind can’t comprehend the challenges of developing a website “at scale” The real answer is, almost nothing. People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.

That's what I am thinking. E.g. I am looking at lichess which has a massive user base and is developed by one full time developer and a few dozens volunteers. Twitter is obviously bigger, but I simply don't buy that you need more than 7000 people to run that site.

Maybe you don't need 7000, but software is even worse than icebergs (Only 30% visible). How many people at Twitter are there to fulfill functions we aren't even aware of? Compliance, privacy, legal, internal tooling, etc and god knows what else.

My experience at a tech company with around the same number of employees is that it actually feels understaffed in some of the areas I've seen. It's surprising how much responsibility some teams have.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#134

Post by aurbano »

reallscoliosoi wrote: post #57
lurker531 wrote: post #42

Imagine actually caring, my aim is to get away with as little work as I can while still earning good money. ‘No nonsense coding and learning’ cringe, imagine actually liking to write software. After 11 years of embedded dev, I can safely say I rather not write a single line of code ever again. This whole industry is 99% bullshit. Thankfully I could exploit it for a lot of monetary gains

I agree. Actually, I have never met anyone who has liked writing code. How much code do any of these high profile programmers even write anymore? Linus, etc? If the leaders of the industry don't even write code, it says a lot.

I've been writing code for 16 years, which is now over half of my life.

I've been a full time software engineer (now lead) for the last 9 years. I've been in similar situations to this article where most of my time was spent in useless meetings that I disliked, I tried to improve things, to focus meetings, to improve our efficiency.

And all that aside I still love coding. Granted not all types of code, not the one I have to write sometimes at work.

Just now I'm starting another little fun side project that I've been coding on my free time these last few weeks.

All this is to say that coding is just a little tool, what you build with the tool is what can be fun. I think it can be healthy to write code that does fun things from time to time, even if the code you write at work is for the most boring aim.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#135

Post by mrcartmeneses »

scotty79 wrote: post #37
batiudrami wrote: post #7

Astonishing to me that someone with 20 years' experience in any industry could have so little perspective. Obviously there are inefficiencies with big companies, but complaining about needing to do documentation, or basic project management? The writing is smug and shows no self awareness - it seems to me that the author cannot recognise that there may be other priorities than exactly what is in front of them and the…

Working directly for clients and being personally responsible for the entirety of the development process gives you this perspective. You can have successful multi-person projects with almost no documentation and project management contained entirely in a single trello board with basic features. Then, when you land in a corporation you can see how large teams barely manage to match your former personal productivity b…

“ So the game is no longer about building stuff efficiently. It's about raking in as much money as you can for as long as you can and every inefficiency that justifies further work is actually best friend of everybody involved.”

You’re describing the goals of the individual becoming divergent from the goals of the company.

In the article the writer described his team’s goals at the VFX software company as being well aligned with the goals of the company and the customers. They even stayed late because they were enjoying solving the problem so much.

The same misalignment in goals is what made Communist Russia so awful. The stated goals were about providing prosperity to all workers and citizens of the USSR, but the goals of the committees became about personal advancement and the preservation of the party. It could be argued that the extreme job security of the dictatorship allowed this situation. If there had been a way to democratically fire officials, they would have been more aligned with the goals of the people. (A politician is only as good as your ability to fire them.)

Many large companies end up like the USSR. The way to solve this is to allow teams to fire their managers.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#136

Post by blowski »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #124
blowski wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with the article is that it's the perspective of an engineer who hasn't had to think about higher-level problems. If I had to summarise their perspective it's "if engineers are writing code, that's a good thing, and anything else they do is probably a waste of time". But what if engineers are writing bad code? What if their code doesn't solve any customer problems? What if the other thing they're doing is…

We've figured out 20 years ago that writing code, showing the resulting program to customers and getting feedback was the most effective way to find out if you're actually solving customer problems. Some group of people wrote about it in something called the "Agile Manifesto" or some such.

How do you think an author of the Agile Manifesto would respond to the original article?

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#137

Post by ethbr0 »

Jensson wrote: post #129
ethbr0 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author is every software engineer I hate to work with. One who thinks that code is the only truly important part of a project. It's not. "Delivering a product that solves end user needs and is as maintainable and reliable as possible" is the only truly important thing, and only some of that is code. Meetings generally aren't for developers. They're to keep everyone else involved with the project sync'd up. Do I and e…

> Meetings generally aren't for developers. They're to keep everyone else involved with the project sync'd up. But if every project has non-developers deeply involved in them then the software is very shallow. So to me anyone who thinks that every developer needs to be involved in such meetings just shows they have never worked on anything deeper than a crud app with some basic business logic. If you work on anything…

> If you work on anything like a compiler, a garbage collector, a database engine, a load balancer, any kind of software framework etc then you will have plenty of teams never needing to talk to non-developers.

Replace non-developers with "people outside your immediate team". In a developers-all-the-way-down shop, there are still people who are intricately dependant-on but not involved-in your work.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#138

Post by mattmanser »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #125
amitport wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would even add that sometimes "maintainable and reliable" are overrated. Sometimes being quick to market is more important then having to maintain the product. Sometimes providing a bad product is only relative to the competition (which may have a worse product). Sometimes having a good customer service is more important than the reliability of the product. etc.,. I do agree with solving the end user needs... if a…

>"maintainable and reliable" are overrated That is popular opinion among the unemployed, as hoisting that BS on your project lead has real world consequences after your code audit. =)

It was Facebook's philosophy and also Twitter used to go down a lot in the early days. So I'm not sure I'd agree with your statement. It depends on your company culture.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#139

Post by Jensson »

fy20 wrote: post #15
Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

The sad thing is that it’s a joke that many people don’t seem to be in on. You get all these defenders coming out of the woodwork when people wonder what the hell all the programmers at say, Twitter, are doing. Supposedly you puny mind can’t comprehend the challenges of developing a website “at scale” The real answer is, almost nothing. People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.

How do I get in on this? For the 10 years I've been in this industry I've never been in a job where I felt like I had it easy. It's always been a rush to get one project done then there's always something else in the pipeline. Whether those projects are actually worth doing is a different question...

Manager pay correlates with how many reports they have. So all of them are incentivised to making it look like their team is spread thin, so even if you don't have to work hard he will make you work hard so that he can tell his manager that he needs more headcount.

Re: Many software companies are a joke

#140

Post by ratww »

Negitivefrags wrote: post #6

The sad thing is that it’s a joke that many people don’t seem to be in on. You get all these defenders coming out of the woodwork when people wonder what the hell all the programmers at say, Twitter, are doing. Supposedly you puny mind can’t comprehend the challenges of developing a website “at scale” The real answer is, almost nothing. People are being paid very high salaries to do nothing.

Yep.

With an addendum: it's not that they do "nothing", and that's the "problem". The end result is minimal, but the amount of work is still significant.

In any saner place it would amount to almost nothing, but for certain companies it is an Herculean task. And developers know it.

However due to the fact that the company hired thousand of coders, their communication overhead is now too massive. Their architecture also suffers due to the needs of handling those thousands of developers, so there's also a lot of work to be done in coding.

But the pressure is still there. Why hasn't your team changed the color of the button yet? "Why is it so hard?", "Why is it taking so long", etc etc

Jokes have been made about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

The answer to all that was known since the 70s. Fred Brooks wrote a great book about all that.

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