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Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

ludic.mataroa.blog

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Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#31

Post by lr4444lr »

pdimitar wrote: post #8
smokefoot wrote: post #4

This is a painfully cynical take and beyond that I’m not sure what he’s trying to say. If it’s all crap, make it better. Do something, don’t just complain!

How? Programmers don't have executive powers. You are very often told that this is not your job and you should be doing yours and leave the "experts" to theirs. Well, they are not experts. They are not even at the level of informed amateurs. But they have the power. What would you do? Sure, there are good companies and you can switch until you find one but let's recognize that statistically speaking this absolutely d…

I'd leave, and prioritize a functional organization in my next job requirements.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#32

Post by pythonaut_16 »

coolmitch wrote: post #14
brilee wrote: post #6

In this long rant, there is only one concrete thing named that is supposedly bad: > I saw someone that was working on a few Git branches, twenty years my senior, and they decided to clone the entire repository ten times, then checkout a different branch in each repository clone "because it's easier". > Can you imagine the kind of havoc such a person could wreak upon infrastructure and code if left unchecked? But I'm…

i see a lot of people doing this, and especially if theyre shallow clones, its really not a big deal and anyway git-worktree is basically this workflow wrapped in nicer UX

Worktrees are super useful to avoid interrupting your work in progress when you need to load another branch to help someone debug something.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#33

Post by pdimitar »

lr4444lr wrote: post #31
pdimitar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? Programmers don't have executive powers. You are very often told that this is not your job and you should be doing yours and leave the "experts" to theirs. Well, they are not experts. They are not even at the level of informed amateurs. But they have the power. What would you do? Sure, there are good companies and you can switch until you find one but let's recognize that statistically speaking this absolutely d…

I'd leave, and prioritize a functional organization in my next job requirements.

I did that. A number of times, because it turns out people lie through their teeth that their organization is functional (during interviews).

At one point people started asking why I have 3 contracts in a single year.

Checkmate.

What would you do?

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#34

Post by hooverd »

campbel wrote: post #28
pdimitar wrote: post #7

That article was a very nice surprise and apart from how crushingly accurate it is (before somebody jumps in to defend all the corporate chaos, of course) it also had me giggling several times while reading it. The answer of course is financial incentives. It is the answer 99% of the time, I know quite a few high-profile managers at this point and they are all very smart and get stuff done people and yet they allow t…

Part of the problem has to be that as an individual in an organization it seems like a better ROI for your effort to grow your share of the pie than the entire pie itself. Individual incentives are naturally going to be aligned by advancement and "being difficult" is something everyone wants to avoid. Easier to shed blame and avoid accountability than try to fix the social and political structure of your organization…

Your reward for growing the pie is one (1) pizza pie.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#35

Post by aeturnum »

ludicity wrote: post #21
addicted wrote: post #16

> My current organization has 8000 staff members, and I used to glance over the usage metrics of the dashboards my old team produced. I believe three dashboards were used, out of somewhere around 50 - 100. Of those being visited, it usually turned out they were being visited by members of our team checking to see if the data had refreshed for the day. I'd estimate the cost of maintaining our team was approximately $1…

It's slightly more complicated, and the numbers are somewhat obfuscated to hide my actual employer. You're right that these numbers are not a huge deal - that much is obvious, or we wouldn't be wasting that money. What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a co…

But again - isn't the antithesis of this that the company never does the work to look into any of this and, in doing so, misses a huge but non-obvious problem that these tools might reveal? So you need to build it to do the work and check, and then you need to maintain it (because you already built it and the possibility still exists, etc, etc)....

Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line below which the org does not care about the data. But also there's probably a point where they would care! Being data driven is not about spending all of your energy optimizing for exactly the scenario you have data to optimize for (see: the post-covid logistic crisis).

To me - it seems like you need to "waste" a certain amount of money tracking down problems that don't happen to exist - but you can't know for sure they didn't exist before you tracked them down.

I guess like...do you have the impression the data should drive people in a direction they are not going? Like...if the systems you work on are saying things are ok aren't they ok?

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#36

Post by adastra22 »

pdimitar wrote: post #12
ludicity wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello, hello, I am the original poster. I had surmised why this person was doing this, but didn't want to spend ages venting about a particular person, especially in a way that might actually cause that person to realize they're reading about themselves one day. Suffice it to say that there are other serious issues. Here's a more concrete thing - I work on a product that took years and a spectacular sum of money to g…

Truth be told, I liked your article a lot but that particular example definitely should have been replaced with something more concrete and a bit more convincing. Having several copies of a GIT repo for different branches is a viable strategy as long as one does not do force-pushes.

Yeah I do this on a daily basis. Sometimes I want to have two different branches open simultaneously. Maybe there’s some fancy git hackery to have two open workspaces from the same .git local repository. But you know what? My time to figure that out is worth more than the measly megabytes of saved disk space.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#37

Post by adastra22 »

pdimitar wrote: post #33
lr4444lr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd leave, and prioritize a functional organization in my next job requirements.

I did that. A number of times, because it turns out people lie through their teeth that their organization is functional (during interviews). At one point people started asking why I have 3 contracts in a single year. Checkmate. What would you do?

Make my own organization.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#38

Post by zoomablemind »

ludicity wrote: post #10
brilee wrote: post #6

In this long rant, there is only one concrete thing named that is supposedly bad: > I saw someone that was working on a few Git branches, twenty years my senior, and they decided to clone the entire repository ten times, then checkout a different branch in each repository clone "because it's easier". > Can you imagine the kind of havoc such a person could wreak upon infrastructure and code if left unchecked? But I'm…

Hello, hello, I am the original poster. I had surmised why this person was doing this, but didn't want to spend ages venting about a particular person, especially in a way that might actually cause that person to realize they're reading about themselves one day. Suffice it to say that there are other serious issues. Here's a more concrete thing - I work on a product that took years and a spectacular sum of money to g…

Re: Git usage

Your colleague, well, maybe you as well, could instead make use of 'git worktree'

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

It allows exactly that, use a single repo yet have parallel checkouts in separate directories.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#39

Post by reactordev »

While I don’t disagree, I think labeling and calling people “bad” is wrong. Derek is doing the best he can. He hired you to help make the company better, more profitable, etc etc. He’s trying anything to get you to understand that you need to deliver value, a product, a service, research output, something so the Bob’s have something to sell/offer/justify grant money. I’ve met a lot of engineers that think they were hired to perfect the art of software engineering. Not the case, not unless that is your mantra and you work at FAANG or Big Blue.

The rest of the 90% have to deliver value. For managers, that’s getting the product/service/research out the door. For directors, it’s that X N where N is the number of managers, for VP’s the same - Product/Service/Output X Directors X Managers.

Often the more inception you have (higher up you go) the more confusing the management and meetings as everything becomes strategic.

I usually work a bit with the team to prove myself, talk the talk and walk the walk, before I ever ask to lead them. Let me solve a hard problem with you so we both know how we problem solve and I’ll handle “The Business”. I’ve taken my fair share of punches.

What doesn’t help is the black and white thinking that this article is written in. If 98 of 100 dashboards aren’t used or even viewed. Build a grafana dashboard of stuff that is useful and present it as a means for cost cutting Power BI. Build a bunch of widgets they can use if they need it. I’m saying - take a step back and look not at the individuals behavior but at the situation that drives it. How can you, the engineer, provide better tooling so Derek looks like a genius. They clearly know what you’re working on, how production is going. Bob has stuff to sell and people to drink with. You get more time to work on perfecting the art of software engineering.

Stop looking at ineptitude as someone’s failure and start looking at it as an opportunity to provide solutions to help those who can’t Rust, rust. Or those who are stuck on C++. Or Brian who keeps committing small revisions to PRs and makes 30-80 commit PRs in a sprint. These are not signs of individual failure, they are symptoms.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#40

Post by erano »

adastra22 wrote: post #36
pdimitar wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Truth be told, I liked your article a lot but that particular example definitely should have been replaced with something more concrete and a bit more convincing. Having several copies of a GIT repo for different branches is a viable strategy as long as one does not do force-pushes.

Yeah I do this on a daily basis. Sometimes I want to have two different branches open simultaneously. Maybe there’s some fancy git hackery to have two open workspaces from the same .git local repository. But you know what? My time to figure that out is worth more than the measly megabytes of saved disk space.

The official way to do this is using git worktrees[0], but, as you say, it may not be worth the time to learn if what you have is working for you.

[0] https://git-scm.com/docs/git-worktree

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