Why senior engineers let bad projects fail

From a creator's standpoint, a software project exists to solve a problem - or at least make the lives of the software users easier. But the moment a company bigwig clique decides to make money out of company, "bad" projects pop up.

To my chance, I experienced this for three times. The signs are nearly the same. The company has a lot of workflows - usually handled by excel and/or internally developed apps that actually reflect those workflows. Then comes the buzzword team proclaiming miracles, snake oil and an app that will even cure the dandruff - just sign here. Of course, the clique has their cut - that's why they say yes or advice the board to say yes.

Then begins the grueling process of "analyzing workflows". Do they contact the actual users who are doing the work? Hell. No. What they do is, create a "Project Team" - usually hired anew, with no information about how the company does its work - and they try to "understand" the workflows. Then it becomes like that game, user says one thing, project team understands another and says a different thing and the outcome is a different product that solves a problem but not the user's problem.

Of course, this process burns money. You gotta do development, you gotta have a server to run the app, you have to book meeting rooms in hotels to train the users, you have to create fliers internally to promote the app - and create pdfs, many many pdfs to make the users understand how the app works. And no one asks "hey, if this app is reflecting our workflows... why are we getting this training?"

Because at the end of the day, this app only exists to make some people money. And after a certain point, no one dares to say anything because of all the money spent. An ambassador who says "the app we spent $10M does not work" will be get shot. People get retired with the f-you money they gained and the company tries to work with the app they "built" usually it ends up hiring an internal team and do it from the zero - and the expensive shit becomes a thing nobody talks about, a company omerta so to speak.

At large companies, I've rarely found a reason to speak out on a project. Unless it has a considerable effect on my team/work (read: peace of mind), it just doesn't make sense to be the person casting doubt. There's not much ROI for being "right".

If you manage to kill the project before it starts, no one will ever know how bad of a disaster you prevented. If the project succeeds despite your objections, you look like an idiot. And if it fails - as the author notes, that doesn't get remembered either.

As a senior IC, the only real ROI I've found in these situations is when you can have a solution handy if things fail. People love a fixer. Even if you only manage to pull this off once or twice, your perception in the org/company gets a massive boost. "Wow, so-and-so is always thinking ahead."

A basic example I saw at my last company was automated E2E testing in production. My teammate had suggested this to improve our ability to detect regressions, but it was ultimately shot down as not being worth the investment over other features.

A few months later, we had seen multiple instances of users hitting significant issues before we could catch them. My teammate was able to whip out the test framework they had been building on the side, and was immediately showered with praise/organizational support (and I'm sure a great review as well).

If you have the power (as the post mentions - like a CEO) you can suggest, direct or butcher a project and no one would see you as a negative person.

But you can get butchered when you don't have the authority to poke around your concerns.

I would prefer to see the ship sink instead of shooting myself in the foot and risking my influence and credibility - as another comment on this thread said "Sometimes, you have to let people fail".

That's true. And it is currently one of the main reason why startups are so efficient compared to MegaCorps.

In small companies, it takes few engineers voicing out ' this is bullshit ' to stop a disaster.

In large corps, it takes 2y, 10M USD and a team in burnout to reach the same result.

And the main reason is the usual source of all sins: *Politics*.

That is the point where suddenly people listen.