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Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

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Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#61

Post by xapata »

jmercouris wrote: post #39
xapata wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cycles of arbitrary periods are nearly indistinguishable from a random walk. My guess is the latter.

What does this mean? Can you please rephrase?

Many people look at a chart that goes up and down and imagine they see cycles. It's popular to speak of business cycles, for example. Unfortunately, it is not clear that anything in the economy oscillates such that it's appropriate to describe the system as having cycles.

You might have heard of Fourier transforms. Any time-series can be transformed into its sinusoidal components, even if a composition of waves is not a good model.

It's possible, and in my opinion more likely, that the business cycle is not a cycle at all.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#62

Post by xapata »

late2part wrote: post #56
jmercouris wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this mean? Can you please rephrase?

Here's what I think he means. If you look at trends over an arbitrary period, they may look useful. If you look at the similar trends over a larger period, they look different. Therefore, the smaller periods are just random variations relative to the larger periods.

Close. It's more a comment on the structure of those random variations, and whether it's appropriate to describe the system as periodic at all.

For example, sometimes it rains, and sometimes the sun shines. Is the weather cyclical? Depends on the place, time, and time-scale you're considering.

Maybe a better example is roulette. If you watch the "cycles" of red and black, you might imagine you could make predictions. Gamblers are often fooled by this randomness.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#63

Post by idiocrat »

siliconc0w wrote: post #57

Lots of re-orgs is also a pretty big indicator. A lot of VPs/directors need a reason to exist and they create that reason with reorganizations. This is basically the enterprise equivalent of pushing the food around the plate to make it seem eaten. With a re-org you can shed or minimize expensive to operate systems that don't generate a lot of clear value(i.e most tech-debt).

For that I always remember the fable, where animals have bought all those expensive shiny musical instruments, but nobody knows how to play.

They are trying to emulate an orchestra, by rearranging the seats, in the hope that the right seating will make make them sound good. But the orchestra cannot play for the lack of individual skills and lack of the leadership.

I saw in enterprises, they are buying all possible software licenses, but nobody knows how to use them. So the management is constantly shuffling people and churning technologies, in the hope something sticks.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#64

Post by jjtheblunt »

wayoutthere wrote: post #21
jjtheblunt wrote: post #20

> Fortunately for us, the realities of flat organizations are pushing them out of favor and lively conversations about engineering leadership as a craft are taking over. Flat organizations are a nice idea, but they just don’t reflect how people behave. this makes me wonder who "us" means. i make the educated guess it's "managers", which were dead weight in the Apple engineering scheme I joined, which functioned super…

Flat organizations over a certain size just develop their own hierarchies usually based on seniority. If you can’t see them, you’re just on the bottom. Flat organizations also end up building the same thing 4 or 5 times because nobody talks to eachother. As a consultant, I love flat orgs — it means we’ll be there for a while because nobody can really tell us to leave.

I think the critical Apple enabler of flat orgs was size limits by division, preventing what you saw. (And I was a couple jumps from the top, nowhere near a bottom, which as size was limited wasn't so much a thing it seemed.)

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#65

Post by Spivak »

rendall wrote: post #9

In most organizations that has one, the sales department has an outsized influence on every other department including tech.

I personally don't really mind this since at the end of the day the entire org exists to support sales, marketing, and retention. Within reason, if those groups say they need something to bring in revenue then they get it.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#66

Post by foobiekr »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #33
jimnotgym wrote: post #31

> Engineering First Organizations > Like Google or Facebook these are organizations where engineering trumps everything else. If you’re not in engineering, your pathway to promotion is limited. Just browsing Facebook's board... MZ-dropout SS-MBA Mckinsey etc PA-Accounting and Business studies NK- economics & management, Mckinsey again RK - lawyer PT- lawyer Not being engineers sure held them back! https://investor.fb…

I know as many non-engineers as engineers at Google right now. The idea that non-engineers are sidelined is wrong.

The quality, in my experience, is very substantially lower. It is peculiar.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#67

Post by wefarrell »

jcadam wrote: post #6
ryanmcbride wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can attest to this because the company I currently work for has the highest turnover I've ever experienced. People are barely making it 8 months, meanwhile the bosses are pushing for faster growth to match our newish funding. That's leading to people who have been here for 2 months hiring _more_ people to replace the people who left at 8 months. Just about every project is suffering from simply not understanding wh…

The current job market is punishing poorly run companies. It's too easy to pick up the phone and get a new job quick these days if you're unhappy, contributing to churn.

Some industries are so backwards and difficult to disrupt that many companies can just continue operating this way for many generations of staff turnover.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#68

Post by samus »

resonious wrote: post #60
siliconc0w wrote: post #57

Lots of re-orgs is also a pretty big indicator. A lot of VPs/directors need a reason to exist and they create that reason with reorganizations. This is basically the enterprise equivalent of pushing the food around the plate to make it seem eaten. With a re-org you can shed or minimize expensive to operate systems that don't generate a lot of clear value(i.e most tech-debt).

Out of curiosity, are you saying that most tech debt is systems that don't generate much value? If you had asked me, I'd probably say that tech debt is mostly systems that do generate value but are built poorly or in a rushed manner. Deadlines creep up, devs crunch, they ship a "working" product but it has design flaws that manifest as technical debt. But now that I think of it, I've definitely also experienced what…

Sometimes, there is also functionality grafted to the wrong place in the system, or on to the wrong system. This can happen for a lot of reasons: expediency ("we have to foo the bar, why don't you implement it there as the release window is just right for our purposes"), bad design, or changing requirements.

If it stays there for too long, it will complicate the design of the underlying system because it has to be kept alive for daily business to go on. Such features are sometimes hiding in plain sight, and are actually causing a lot of pain or cause long-term risks, but we are too shy or spread too thin to address the issue. And why should we? After all, it works at the moment.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#69

Post by jollofricepeas »

Tech debt isn’t a thing.

I mean it is because it’s a thing that engineers worry about mainly because of ego and pride. I know that’s triggering but let me explain…

As humans we all have ego and want our work to be important which is why tech debt is important to engineers who have a myopic view of their value and what businesses can actually bear.

- I have seen companies with loads of tech debt lose 60% of their engineering staff in a year with no impact to business.

- I have seen companies with loads of tech debt cause production deployment slow to a snails pace AND still have rapid consumer growth.

Engineering is important when it’s important but once product-market fit and a great moat has been achieved that value diminishes considerably.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#70

Post by thinknboutstuff »

jollofricepeas wrote: post #69

Tech debt isn’t a thing. I mean it is because it’s a thing that engineers worry about mainly because of ego and pride. I know that’s triggering but let me explain… As humans we all have ego and want our work to be important which is why tech debt is important to engineers who have a myopic view of their value and what businesses can actually bear. - I have seen companies with loads of tech debt lose 60% of their engi…

Neither of these points argue that tech debt isn't a thing, just that it's impact is poorly understood.

Companies have plenty of real debt, but still grow. Accumulation of tech debt might be a necessary cost much like servicing financial debt.

Now the question really is - what is the interest rate of your tech debt? And that's harder to know.

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