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Common misunderstandings about large software companies
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Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies
#32[dead]
Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I've ever worked at a company where slacking off was the problem. The vast majority of people want to do good work. What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made. You can't run…
Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer. Larry Ellison The CEO of the biggest bank in my country holds a masters degree in business economics, but nothing related to finance, econometrics or risk management. The CEO of US steel is an accountant. Don't even get me started on the (non)education of some politicians. Understanding the product is often important,…
I agree fully with your comment, but I wish to point out that Larry Ellison's was a programmer at the time that the company that became Oracle was founded by him and his co-founders.
Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think I've ever worked at a company where slacking off was the problem. The vast majority of people want to do good work. What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made. You can't run…
Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer. Larry Ellison The CEO of the biggest bank in my country holds a masters degree in business economics, but nothing related to finance, econometrics or risk management. The CEO of US steel is an accountant. Don't even get me started on the (non)education of some politicians. Understanding the product is often important,…
> Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer. Larry Ellison The CEO of the biggest bank in my country holds a masters degree in business economics, but nothing related to finance, econometrics or risk management. The CEO of US steel is an accountant.
Specifically the CEO is more like the figurehead of the company; this role is to present and "sell the value" of the company to investors, important customers and partners. So often it is not too worrysome if the CEO has a different background; sometimes this can even make sense.
What should worry one much more is if the leadership layers below come from a very different background than what the company's industry is.
Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies
#35Many of the author's rebuttals hinge on the assumption that everyone in an organisation is acting in its interest first - and not their own, often conflicting, self-interest. As such, they are not particularly convincing. Large organisations absolutely do, as a function of their scale, produce pockets where slackers and incompetents can hide. They'll surround themselves with a web of process, pointless meetings, and…
I don't think I've ever worked at a company where slacking off was the problem. The vast majority of people want to do good work. What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made. You can't run…
> The vast majority of people want to do good work.
The vast majority of people have convinced themselves they’re doing good work. Then reject any suggestion they could do it better (including me).
Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies
#36I did not expect to see big-company apologia on Hacker News. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apologia The thing this (very good) post doesn't mention is that big companies select for blub languages because that's where the most low-cost labor is, in that you can hire multiple Java developers for the cost of one Haskell developer, even if Haskell might be objectively a better choice for the project.
>
I did not expect to see big-company apologia on Hacker News.
In the comments I see little apologia. The article rather brings up some points which are contrarian to the common view on HN, and the people on HN discuss whether these points have some truth in them, or the author missed some important considerations, or whether the author is wrong.
Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies
#37The author talks about how software creation processes at large organizations are an artifact of how large organizations operate, but in all 3 of the 3 cases, I would ask “why does the large organization need to be that way?”
Most obviously, why do executives need to be the proxy to customers? Why can’t development teams simply talk to real customers? This isn’t just an abstract idea in agile, it grew out of actual Japanese product development practices practiced at large organizations: Toyota, Canon, and others, and documented in “The New, New Product Development Game” HBR review article that was so influential to early agile.
The point that in large organizations, most of the work is coordination, again demands the question, why? It’s been understood since at least World War I by some military planners (with organizations far larger than Google) that coordinating dependencies was far more complex than reducing or minimizing them. Goldratt wrote about it when designing a project management system for Theory of Contraints (indeed, you could argue this is a fundamental learning of ToC). And one of my favorite software conference talks of all time is Mary Poppendeck’s excellent “Tyranny of the Plan,” where she notes that as computer systems have been used in planning, we seem to have become more confident but no more competent in coordinating, rather than focusing on flow, in large-scale projects.
Finally, on the importance of software created at large organizations, I agree, something that will have millions of users on day one has a greater responsibility, but that doesn’t mean that loads of bureaucracy and checking are the pathway to quality software. First of all, does anyone believe that highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions are general high quality services? The often provide access to even the most extreme edge cases, but they do so by reducing the quality of service to everyone else. Anyone who’s ever filled out their own tax forms in the United States knows that it covers every base of possibly income, but 80% of people really only need to be concerned with 2-3 common forms, and 99% could simply be asked about 10 forms or so. Instead we have to answer questions for “directors of foreign corporations who also happen to be Us citizens,” instead of just requiring those people to fill out an additional form. And, of course, to (probably badly mis-)quote Deming, “you can’t check quality into a product.”
I would turn it around in the author: yes, the software practices operate this way in large orgs because large orgs are structured differently—but why do large orgs need to be structured that way? Is it inherent when absentee owners with low domain context (shareholders) pass ownership over to a manager? Is it because hierarchies insulate good but not great managers from genuine value creation as long as they play politics well? Is it because these are first order ways to understand complexity, and again, low-context absentee owners aren’t going to do the work to understand the more complex dynamics at play?
Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies
#38Many of the author's rebuttals hinge on the assumption that everyone in an organisation is acting in its interest first - and not their own, often conflicting, self-interest. As such, they are not particularly convincing. Large organisations absolutely do, as a function of their scale, produce pockets where slackers and incompetents can hide. They'll surround themselves with a web of process, pointless meetings, and…
I don't think I've ever worked at a company where slacking off was the problem. The vast majority of people want to do good work. What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made. You can't run…
Knowing how your product works does not actually solve the problem of running a large company.
Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are you in a completely different world than me? Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer. Larry Ellison The CEO of the biggest bank in my country holds a masters degree in business economics, but nothing related to finance, econometrics or risk management. The CEO of US steel is an accountant. Don't even get me started on the (non)education of some politicians. Understanding the product is often important,…
I agree fully with your comment, but I wish to point out that Larry Ellison's was a programmer at the time that the company that became Oracle was founded by him and his co-founders.
I get the point of his comment but it’s just nonsense… plenty of good CEOs aren’t SMEs in the field and plenty of bad ones are. the CEO of Boeing is absolutely an engineer - and so was the CEO during most of the years people consider the worst in Boeing’s quality history with the 737 Max (Muilenburg).
Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies
#40Many of the author's rebuttals hinge on the assumption that everyone in an organisation is acting in its interest first - and not their own, often conflicting, self-interest. As such, they are not particularly convincing. Large organisations absolutely do, as a function of their scale, produce pockets where slackers and incompetents can hide. They'll surround themselves with a web of process, pointless meetings, and…
I don't think I've ever worked at a company where slacking off was the problem. The vast majority of people want to do good work. What I _have_ seen is several companies afflicted by this really strange characteristic of the software development industry: We appear to be the only industry on the planet where it is common to pick leaders (executives) that know nothing about the product or how it's made. You can't run…
It's not always consciously slacking off. For example when I was at Google most of the team was simply incompetent. They thought they were smart (PhDs!) and working hard. But they refused to work together. They estimated tasks in weeks and months and at the end of my time there after I'd done very little due to obstruction by other teams I was praised for my high productivity.
I never saw anyone just sitting around or really slacking. But they couldn't execute anything. It was depressing.