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If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

jamesshore.com

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Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#21

Post by Sevii »

I appreciate that they have a programming philosophy that they want people at the company to adopt. A common problem I see at companies that don't have onboarding is that people join the team with assumptions from previous jobs but you never level set them with the company. So 12 months down the line the new guy wants to change the process and you have to repeat the same discussions about what agile means for the nth time.

Amazon does a good job of training new hire on the 'Amazon way'. Amazon does 6 pagers, they do design docs. Amazon does SOA. Amazon does not use relational databases. Everything has an API. Because of the 'Amazon way' and the training they do new team members understand at least some of the context and expectations.

Is it the best way? Probably not but no one knows what the best way is anyway. At least they have a way. Saves a lot of effort compared to every new hire relitigating the process and architecture.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#22

Post by rrr_oh_man »

Sevii wrote: post #21

I appreciate that they have a programming philosophy that they want people at the company to adopt. A common problem I see at companies that don't have onboarding is that people join the team with assumptions from previous jobs but you never level set them with the company. So 12 months down the line the new guy wants to change the process and you have to repeat the same discussions about what agile means for the nth…

> Amazon does not use relational databases

Huh?

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#23

Post by mft_ »

A great post, well worth reading. The principles in the section on 'people' are applicable to any organisation in any industry.

I especially liked the simple 'career ladder' example, for a) focussing on mostly on behaviour rather than knowledge, and b) for being simple to use and track progress with. (I've never seen anything like it in any of the large organisations I've worked in to date.)

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#24

Post by deskglass »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #22
Sevii wrote: post #21

I appreciate that they have a programming philosophy that they want people at the company to adopt. A common problem I see at companies that don't have onboarding is that people join the team with assumptions from previous jobs but you never level set them with the company. So 12 months down the line the new guy wants to change the process and you have to repeat the same discussions about what agile means for the nth…

> Amazon does not use relational databases Huh?

Friends say they typically use Dynamo and that using a relational database requires approval from a vp (because of scaling concerns).

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#25

Post by theideaofcoffee »

This was a really great read, lots of insight and things to think about.

But it's also depressing to see how good things could be and how poorly (IME) most orgs are run now. I know I've seen the exact 180-degree opposite of almost everything mentioned here: no team leadership or empowered people, no clear path to the next level for those interested, lack of communication, no emphasis on internal quality, overall pathological product choices (or lack thereof) and on and on. I'd kill to be part of an org that puts this much thought into everything.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#26

Post by Salgat »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #4

There’s a weird disconnect because on the one hand I agree you can’t measure productivity and on the other hand we all know that some engineers are vastly more productive than others. So what gives?

It's an extremely complex mixture of many factors (which can vary wildly between two different productive engineers), and trying to make that into some magical formula ends up creating a system that can be gamed to superficially appear productive to managers.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#28

Post by Salgat »

Trasmatta wrote: post #19
mrbluecoat wrote: post #18

+1 for Extreme Programming. I've been a fan from the beginning when Agile was all the rage and my recommendations for XP were met with blank stares.

I'm glad that it works for some people, but I did not like the forced pair programming in XP at all. And I found adherents to XP were even more cult like than Agile teams.

Does XP and pair programming actually require two people to be simultaneously working together at the same time? My understanding is that this includes one person who codes while another person looks at the results and reviews them afterward. The two are still working closely together and exchanging feedback, just at different points in the process in an iterative loop.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#29

Post by jh00ker »

joeldo wrote: post #27

> There’s more details here than I can explain today, but you can use the QR code to find a detailed article, including the documentation we use for the skills. Why not just provide a clickable link given this is an article on the web?

> This is a transcript of my keynote presentation for the Regional Scrum Gathering Tokyo conference on January 8th, 2025.

Because the images are slides from a presentation that the audience could scan.

>Thank you for listening.

The text of the article appears to be the "talk-over."

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#30

Post by nine_zeros »

This is a very nice post - not because the actual suggestions are good, but it demonstrates what a really technically sound VP looks like.

In most large tech companies, VP level people are so detached, delusional, and unskilled in engineering, that they end up undervaluing what engineers really do. They are unable to explain it beyond stack ranking them.

As an example, this post talks about how simplicity and maintenance brings value. But my VP literally fired people who did not produce new complex impact.

Just goes to show why so many people hate the big tech industry as employees. It is being run by charlatans who abscond from any real leadership.

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