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How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

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Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#261

Post by linza »

A small team in a company I worked for got into machine learning a few years back. They had some success with some toy examples and were now looking for applications. They tried to use it for optimizing some specific engineering procesess.

Two people (one was me) were warning them that this is a waste of time and will cost the company a fortune and then no one will want it because the quality will be so much poorer. And the whole thing looked like an instance of hammer-looking-for-a-nail.

Fast forward a few years, the team tripled in size, built a multi-million-euro product, and some very large customers now trust their operations research to that new thing.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#262

Post by [deleted] »

malux85 wrote: post #159

Yes, so I put analytics in to prove it. I told the project leader that nobody wants a share button there, because of the nature of the data, nobody will share it. They disagreed strongly, suddenly the share button was super important. So I put tracking on it. A year after launch, guess what? Yep that’s right, nobody clicked the button. Not a single user. So I showed them the data and told them I was right. I told the…

[deleted]

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#263

Post by kevsim »

rheotron wrote: post #238
kevsim wrote: post #214

This article makes me feel very fortunate to work the way we do in my company. We have tight feedback loops with our users, we plan work together as a team (not just a PM dictating things), we're not forced to give finger-in-the-air estimates (we work on stuff until it's good enough to ship and then ship it) and we follow up with analytics and user interviews to figure out if we achieved the outcome we were after. We…

Can you say more about how you plan work as a team? Interested to hear how you keep this fast and productive and avoid getting caught in the weeds of other's opinions.

I'd say the main factors that avoid getting stuck in the weeds of opinion vs. opinion are:

- Focus on the outcomes you want to achieve, not the exact thing you're building or the way you're building it. This should be based on the needs of your users. Of course there are exceptions like refactoring tasks, infrastructure improvements, etc.

- Give people a lot of autonomy on how they achieve the desired outcome

- Work together across product, engineering and design so people's opinions are heard early and often

- Ultimately have a "boss" who can stop the endless discussions if it comes to that (doesn't happen often)

Another thing is if you feel like you're iterating quickly, you feel less like stuff is set in stone and that results in less analysis paralysis and less bikeshedding.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#264

Post by TedShiller »

I'll share a disturbing anecdote about one of the largest and most influential software companies in the world, based in the Bay Area, and I'll leave it to you to guess which one. I know of several people who work there who are ranked very highly and are paid extremely well, who have told me personally that the work they do there is terrible for the users (i.e. it's exploitative) and terrible for the internet (it interferes with open standards and access). But it also creates profits for the company. The individuals feel that it just pays too well, and for that reason, they could never voice their true feelings inside the company, and neither could their colleagues. It would mean giving up humungous paychecks. Inside the company, it's like the Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone pretends that they are making the world a better place, when they know without a doubt that in fact, they are making the world a worse place. They are not bad people. This company is filled with people who are making that silent tradeoff every single day.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#265

Post by rawoke083600 »

malux85 wrote: post #159

Yes, so I put analytics in to prove it. I told the project leader that nobody wants a share button there, because of the nature of the data, nobody will share it. They disagreed strongly, suddenly the share button was super important. So I put tracking on it. A year after launch, guess what? Yep that’s right, nobody clicked the button. Not a single user. So I showed them the data and told them I was right. I told the…

Ohhh been there ! Executives and managers always think we need a share button ! This will bring in the traffic they say ! I asked would you share this ?? Ja of course they say... Then I asked them when was the last time they "shared" ANYTHING via a share-button, not just this-thing... ANYTHING... They all fell silent. We still don't have a share a button :)

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#266

Post by wongarsu »

blauditore wrote: post #210
dkersten wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my own experience, often non-technical people will attribute things as AI that we wouldn’t, eg any basic automation. Really anything that’s in any way intelligent or seems that way. I had a project where people were excited about a feature that was basically just alerting when one value crossed over or under another... I wonder if your team could provide real value to customers providing some smart “AI” feature th…

The line of were AI starts is not well-defined. If you think about it, virtually all software can be considered AI if you put expectations low enough. From the other end, one could argue that once you understand the inner workings of a piece of AI, it just becomes a fancy algorithm to you. In the end, everything is just a piece of software converting input to output. My experience is that people tend to consider thin…

One interpretation of AI is "things we didn't think computers could do". Chess used to be considered an AI problem, now it's something we just expect.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#267

Post by willcipriano »

noizejoy wrote: post #236
ashtonkem wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they mean a dedicated thick client using the OS’s UI framework, rather than a web browser.

Not only the UI, but all of the business logic - so a very thick client indeed.

I've always called these direct database applications. The implication that the client directly connects to the database without the benefit of a middle tier.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#268

Post by amelius »

malux85 wrote: post #159

Yes, so I put analytics in to prove it. I told the project leader that nobody wants a share button there, because of the nature of the data, nobody will share it. They disagreed strongly, suddenly the share button was super important. So I put tracking on it. A year after launch, guess what? Yep that’s right, nobody clicked the button. Not a single user. So I showed them the data and told them I was right. I told the…

> So I showed them the data and told them I was right.

I think we should do this more often. Measure the performance of our managers and confront them with the data.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#269

Post by hejja »

throwawaywrench wrote: post #45
robocat wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That advice is OKish if you only ever want to be a mediocre employee clocking in to get your wages. I think you need to be far more proactive in training your mind if you want to become a founder [edit: of a successful business], or move into more responsible roles, or even just to get satisfaction from shipping great software.

>if you want to become a founder Why do you need to work up to being a founder? Any bozo can start something new especially given that the vast majority of start ups either never go anywhere or flame out somewhere in the first year or two. Even I've "become a founder" a couple of times.

a lot of people see being "a founder" as a goal because it gives you complete agency in your work.

you could in theory define it as having a sole-proprietorship type lifestyle business.

it's poignant in this thread because many people have worked on "meaningless" projects within a company for years on end - and you don't have a choice.

Re: How many of you know that the team is working on something that no-one wants?

#270

Post by hjnilsson »

alkonaut wrote: post #211
worriedformyjob wrote: post #13

Obviously using a throwaway here. Our board members got it into their heads that successful companies must have an AI "play", so they instructed the CEO to invest about 10% of our development budget on AI. We are doing absolutely inane projects that have no hope of succeeding. We serve a niche industry where certified professionals have to do certain tasks personally, instead of being able to delegate to secretaries.…

Many of us have been there. I think what struck me was how low the treshold really is for what's accepted as "AI" in most industries. Do this: 1. make something that has some "modern" AI such as deep learning in it, but that doesn't do anything much useful (because that's almost impossible in most cases). E.g. predict something trivial based on a time series, and repoort it. We all know how hard this is, so just take…

It cracks me up that on the new LG TVs (I have a C9), it has “AI preview”. Which means: when I hover the Netflix icon in the dashboard it presents a list of the most recently played shows.

I think the “Open Recent” menu debuted in 1980s? But now it is AI!

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