61–70 of 482 posts
1. Improving dashboard engagement through awareness. Maybe through something like periodic email blasts that showcase metrics from the dashboards.
2. Mentoring some of the subpar engineers to help them improve so that future issues ebb and overall quality increases.
But, no, the author is too smart for that nonsense...
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…
We might wake up tomorrow to a startup marketing just such a detector. It certainly doesn't require AGI to determine who is adding value. Everything is online now, patterns of git commits, slack communications, call transcripts. It's totally feasible that AI can figure out who is good at solving problems before it can solve those problems directly.
The upside to all of this is that large monopolistic corporations in an industry can be utterly vanquished by much smaller competitors who focus on hiring productive, capable people who work really well with one another. And it doesn't take a lot of them, because the org. described in this post is often getting in its own way, and is unable to deliver a sustained defense on quality or efficiency. So they often try to…
> 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 only takes someone in management to realize that you increase the revenue by selling more of an existing product or raising its price. You reduce your costs by firing people or renegotiating the prices with suppliers. "Increasing efficiency" is mostly a theater meant to demonstrate effort during low/no growth periods and without viable products in development to validate such dynamic.
That really depends on the business. I worked with a manufacturing client a few years back, and millisecond process improvements could translate into millions of dollars increased annual profits. They manufactured parts that would sell for about $0.75 a piece at razor thin margins.
This is a powerful insight. Very important article.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> not hiring anybody who actually has a background relevant to the original system so that it can be maintained, not allotting any devs to groups which desperately need a code monkey to automate things, then assigning a senior to be that code monkey An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing…
> An example of saying one thing and really meaning another, in organizations, is when they bring a tech Expert or Very Senior person in that tech on the grounds of needing a person to shore up their team, but then assigning that Very Senior some code monkey tasks. Happened to me about 2 years ago, and it was my shortest contract ever. Lasted 3 months. And it was not my imagination, I was complimented and groomed int…
The organization, at some level, clearly never wanted me to solve the issues I was supposedly brought in to address, but give them cover to say they hired help. After some reflection, I'm starting to think the project was never really expected to succeed in any significant way. The company claimed they were trying to build an in-house replacement for a third party system the vendor no longer supported, but it's possible they just wanted a stop-gap while they found another turn-key vendor. The interim system didn't have to be all that good, it just had to have enough structural integrity to carry the organization over the gap.
Unreadable. Organize your thoughts, write concisely. You believe you have something to say; we would love to hear it. But we aren’t willing to wade through a sewage of words.