Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts • Hacker News Board

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#21

Post by wayoutthere » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 8:55 PM UTC

jjtheblunt wrote: post #20

> Fortunately for us, the realities of flat organizations are pushing them out of favor and lively conversations about engineering leadership as a craft are taking over. Flat organizations are a nice idea, but they just don’t reflect how people behave. this makes me wonder who "us" means. i make the educated guess it's "managers", which were dead weight in the Apple engineering scheme I joined, which functioned super…

Flat organizations over a certain size just develop their own hierarchies usually based on seniority. If you can’t see them, you’re just on the bottom.

Flat organizations also end up building the same thing 4 or 5 times because nobody talks to eachother. As a consultant, I love flat orgs — it means we’ll be there for a while because nobody can really tell us to leave.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#22

Post by jodrellblank » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 8:56 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #6

ryanmcbride wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can attest to this because the company I currently work for has the highest turnover I've ever experienced. People are barely making it 8 months, meanwhile the bosses are pushing for faster growth to match our newish funding. That's leading to people who have been here for 2 months hiring _more_ people to replace the people who left at 8 months. Just about every project is suffering from simply not understanding wh…

The current job market is punishing poorly run companies. It's too easy to pick up the phone and get a new job quick these days if you're unhappy, contributing to churn.

How is everyone moving and also moving somewhere better? Is it not the case that the majority of open job opportunities are ones other people have recently left from unhappiness?

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#23

Post by jodrellblank » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 8:59 PM UTC

collaborative wrote: post #19

criticaltinker wrote: post #2

Had to read quite a bit before Conway’s Law was mentioned, but glad it was. Viewing organizations and software engineering through this lens has been a game changer for me personally. As an individual contributor I now appreciate horrendous technical debt and glacially slow development as systematic organizational issues, rather than blaming burnt out or lazy engineers. Now I’m much more aware and critical of technic…

This is why my dream is to work completely alone. I still need employment to survive but hope one day I won't Another good quote is "a cow with 2 owners gives no milk and eats no grain" (castilian proverb)

DuckDuckGo and Google give me no results for that proverb in English; what does it mean?

Each owner steals the other's grain intended for the cow and the cow dies and gives no milk?

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#24

Post by xapata » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 9:02 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #16

echelon wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When does the market for engineers turn into a buyer's market? If the economy goes into recession or worse, do those playing hot potato get stuck out in the cold?

It's a cycle, like anything else. Tech was largely spared during the last recession. Who knows what's going to happen during the next?

Cycles of arbitrary periods are nearly indistinguishable from a random walk. My guess is the latter.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#25

Post by zippergz » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #22

jcadam wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The current job market is punishing poorly run companies. It's too easy to pick up the phone and get a new job quick these days if you're unhappy, contributing to churn.

How is everyone moving and also moving somewhere better? Is it not the case that the majority of open job opportunities are ones other people have recently left from unhappiness?

I think there's a lot of "grass is greener" moves happening. Unless you have trusted friends working in a company, it is very hard to tell if it actually is better than your current situation until you've tried it. None of the sources of information available to an outsider (including Glassdoor reviews and HN posts extolling the virtues or sounding off about the horribleness of a given company) are particularly predictive of what your individual experience will be, from what I have seen. There's just too much variability, and too much bias in each narrator.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#26

Post by lazyasciiart » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

jodrellblank wrote: post #23

collaborative wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why my dream is to work completely alone. I still need employment to survive but hope one day I won't Another good quote is "a cow with 2 owners gives no milk and eats no grain" (castilian proverb)

DuckDuckGo and Google give me no results for that proverb in English; what does it mean? Each owner steals the other's grain intended for the cow and the cow dies and gives no milk?

I'm guessing it means that nobody actually feeds it or milks it: there's somebody else who can do it.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#27

Post by jakub_g » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #18

Is there another way to view the full article? I'm only seeing the first paragraph with no errors or popovers, and I'm not about to disable uBlock for medium.

Tip: if you can't read some URL, just prefix it with 'archive.is/' and it will take a snapshot of find existing one

https://archive.md/Cr6F2

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#28

Post by neonate » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

denton-scratch wrote: post #7

I thought that was a pretty good essay. I've never had Security running the show, but the other scenarios he discusses match my experience.

*she

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#29

Post by nijave » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 9:56 PM UTC

jcadam wrote: post #4

High turnover also contributes to tech debt. When turnover becomes ingrained in company culture, engineers have no incentive to care overly much about the overall health of the code base.

Not only that, but they lose important context. The goals and priorities are often lost and the new guys end up relearning the hard way

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#30

Post by nijave » Mon, Dec 20, 2021, 9:57 PM UTC

zippergz wrote: post #25

jodrellblank wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is everyone moving and also moving somewhere better? Is it not the case that the majority of open job opportunities are ones other people have recently left from unhappiness?

I think there's a lot of "grass is greener" moves happening. Unless you have trusted friends working in a company, it is very hard to tell if it actually is better than your current situation until you've tried it. None of the sources of information available to an outsider (including Glassdoor reviews and HN posts extolling the virtues or sounding off about the horribleness of a given company) are particularly predi…

Not only that, jobs seem to have a "honeymoon" period after which you start to notice more issues you might have originally ignored (so things seem fine for the first few months)