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Common misunderstandings about large software companies

philipotoole.com

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Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies

#51

Post by EagnaIonat »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #11

> “There are too many meetings” At very large software companies, programming ability, technical expertise, and raw resources are not the limiting factors. Coordination is. In my opinion there exist much more efficient ways for coordination: for example, write down some really good documentation and explanations that are then read by the other stakeholders, so that these, at the end, also have a very deep knowledge a…

> write down some really good documentation and explanations that are then read by the other stakeholders, so that these, at the end, also have a very deep knowledge about the topic.

I wish. The reality at the moment is someone gets an LLM to do it and the other person uses an LLM to read it.

Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies

#52

Post by jiggawatts »

WJW wrote: post #30
simonask wrote: post #26

Earlier 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.

Which is widely recognised as the root cause of that once venerable company's slow but inexorable downfall.

Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies

#53

Post by danabrams »

otoolep wrote: post #42
otoolep wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blog post author here, thanks for your thoughtful comment. You raise some interesting things to think about.

>First of all, does anyone believe that highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions are general high quality services? This is the only part of your response that doesn't quite sit right with me. There could be many "highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions" out there that are working very well, you just don't notice because they work so well. There could be a selection-effect here. Quality is a big deal for m…

Oftentimes, broadly accessible services are lower quality than more personalized ones, to the consumer.

As an example in US government bureaucracy, government software teams digitizing forms at one point weren’t allowed to utilize features like autofill or automatically filling fields based on previous answers because it would relatively disadvantage users using paper forms.

Government capabilities do need to serve everyone, and from the perspective of the whole society that is beneficial, but they are often are of low quality to the individual consuming them for this very reason.

Let’s exclude taxes, because obviously many people would hate them under any circumstances. Does the government do a good job providing the other services people interact with regularly? Do people love their visits ti the DMV? Are they satisfied with their interactions with the police? Heck, in my town, just renewing a dog license is a pain.

Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies

#54

Post by RaftPeople »

WJW wrote: post #30
simonask wrote: post #26

Earlier 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,…

> Because even the CEO of Boeing is not an engineer.

Kelly Ortberg, CEO of Boeing, is an engineer. He has a mechanical engineering degree and started his career as an engineer at Texas Instruments.

Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies

#55

Post by jbn »

bluehex wrote: post #46
otoolep wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>First of all, does anyone believe that highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions are general high quality services? This is the only part of your response that doesn't quite sit right with me. There could be many "highly scrutinized and bureaucratic functions" out there that are working very well, you just don't notice because they work so well. There could be a selection-effect here. Quality is a big deal for m…

> The US Tax Filing system (and its associated software) meets that goal. I disagree with the argument that the US Tax Filing system meets the goal of: > "allows everyone, at scale, reliably, to do what they need to do." It may do so for easy / common cases of W2 salaried employees but step a little outside of the norm (foreign sourced income, tax treaties etc.) and software gives up and shows you a PDF of relevant f…

my anecdata is that I have always filed manually by myself, but every time had a small adjustment made by the IRS... indeed filing a correct return the 1st time seems close to impossible.

Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies

#56

Post by antonvs »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #16
kbos87 wrote: post #13

As a technology company scales up, making great software becomes one of a hundred things the company needs to do right in order to survive and grow. Doesn’t mean it isn’t absolutely essential, but so is having a strong GTM machine, finance competency, operational rigor, HR, and a long list of other essential functions. It’s only the tech industry where the voice and ego of small companies hold outsized share of voice…

> It’s only the tech industry where the voice and ego of small companies hold outsized share of voice and love to claim the contrary. I'd be a little bit careful with this claim: The fact that small companies can have such opinionated opinions without going bust is to me a sign that in particular for software development (but I don't claim that this is transferable to other industries) small teams/companies do have a…

> other, more established industries

Tangential, but companies have been routinely writing and selling software since at least the 1980s, and longer depending on how you draw the line. That's roughly half a century.

At what point will being "less established" stop being an explanation for the way the software industry works?

Re: Common misunderstandings about large software companies

#57

Post by antonvs »

danabrams wrote: post #37

The 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 J…

> The point that in large organizations, most of the work is coordination, again demands the question, why?

You could say something similar about large-scale distributed software systems. A lot of it is just the nature of distributing and managing work across a collection of "nodes" or, as the case may be, people.

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