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Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

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Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#81

Post by jimnotgym »

fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #50
jimnotgym wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thiel arrived in year 1. Sandberg in year 4. Facebook has been an investor led organisation from the beginning.

Facebook has produced the best open source software seen in the last 20 years. React basically solved front end frameworks, and pytorch steam rolled tensorflow.

So what? The quote above says that not being an engineer will stop promotion...It is clearly not true.

The fact this structure can still produce good software is neither here nor there.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#82

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

jimnotgym wrote: post #81
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has produced the best open source software seen in the last 20 years. React basically solved front end frameworks, and pytorch steam rolled tensorflow.

So what? The quote above says that not being an engineer will stop promotion...It is clearly not true. The fact this structure can still produce good software is neither here nor there.

> The quote above says that not being an engineer will stop promotion.

Speaking as a DS who knows a lot of FB people, this is totally true. If you have a product team deliver something cool, the engineers on that team will normally (modulo variability) be rewarded a lot more than the DS people. Sometimes PM's get some of that, if the product is very successful, but the variability is lower and the mean is higher for engineers at that company (apparently).

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#83

Post by joshuamorton »

jimnotgym wrote: post #81
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has produced the best open source software seen in the last 20 years. React basically solved front end frameworks, and pytorch steam rolled tensorflow.

So what? The quote above says that not being an engineer will stop promotion...It is clearly not true. The fact this structure can still produce good software is neither here nor there.

Did anyone on the board get promoted within Facebook?

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#84

Post by AnAnonyCowherd »

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…

Bologna. I've seen monstrous tech debt all over my Fortune 250, and it's pushing us further and further away from competitiveness and profitability. And it's not just the approach to software. They're also sabotaging long-term strategic viability by only hiring product engineers who are fresh grads from overseas, who never stay in one position long enough to develop or pass on institutional knowledge. Unfortunately/fortunately, it's a business that is ultimately doomed in the face of newer technologies that WILL, eventually, take over our market, so I guess it won't matter. However, I still think we could turn the corner of renewable tech if we hadn't sacrificed properly investing in people and tools. But that would have required serious leadership from several C-levels, and, well, that's just not how the world works.

"Well, who could have seen this coming?"

"Uh, me. 20 years ago."

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#85

Post by Dave3of5 »

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…

This is hyperbole and based upon anecdotal evidence.

As a counterpoint I've been part of a company that "failed" due to overwhelming tech debt. I was one of the "lucky" few that was kept on after the redundancies in what was a shell of the former company (50 employees down to 10).

I should have left with everyone else but I had only just started at the company 3 months prior and didn't want to look like a job hopper.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#86

Post by robjan »

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…

Tech debt is a thing for any non-trivial product. The more tech debt, the slower it is to create working increments of a product and the more risky changes are.

I have experienced products of which the development has ground to a halt due to the system having such complex interconnections that every change required everyone in every meeting to assess the impact of a change. The root cause was constantly churning out MVPs with no thought of architecture and no overall management of the product or teams. I was the architect hired to clean up the mess.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#87

Post by etripe »

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…

Not being able to use the shiniest version of everything isn't tech debt, it's brownfield development or maintenance mode. Using deprecated versions (beyond LTS), ignoring security advisories, and not replacing unmaintaned OSS packages are. It's a bit facile to reduce all of that to developers just being juvenile divas.

In some cases, tech debt is as small a threat to business continuity as IT security is. That is, it isn't a problem till it's suddenly a massive problem. In other cases, it causes development cost to slowly increase over time, at which point it depends whether the organisation/cash flow can bear it. Your proverbial moat, or perhaps corporate momentum.

I would question whether incurring tech debt is generally really part of a greater strategy at the organisational level. It's a symptom of myopia. In any place I've worked, it wasn't a balancing act, but rather being willfully ignorant about the application lifecycle, technology, security implications and knock-on effects. No one said "let's move fast and fix 'er up later". At least not in earnest.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#88

Post by xapata »

lordnacho wrote: post #75
xapata wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

This is a good observation that I upvoted because it's very relevant. A lot of things look like cycles but have no oscillating dynamic, it's true. But you could suppose that business cycles are caused by a build-up of bad debt. Things to well, debts can be paid, collateral gets worth more, more investment, etc. This can't go on forever and the reverse cycle then occurs, often as rates come up. Soros store about this…

> caused by a build-up of bad debt

Why does it build up? A generalized autoregressive model explains that just as well as an oscillator does. The key difference is how predictable the periods are. The more waves you're composing to force the oscillator model to fit, the less likely it's appropriate.

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#89

Post by fdgsdfogijq »

jimnotgym wrote: post #81
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook has produced the best open source software seen in the last 20 years. React basically solved front end frameworks, and pytorch steam rolled tensorflow.

So what? The quote above says that not being an engineer will stop promotion...It is clearly not true. The fact this structure can still produce good software is neither here nor there.

Facebook rains money on engineers that produce value, more than anywhere else in the industry. Clearly you don't know about this

Re: Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts

#90

Post by grey-area »

jimnotgym wrote: post #80
grey-area wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said usually, there are sometimes one or two but the board is there to supervise and thus is outside the normal corporate structure.

In the UK corporate governance code it is quite clear that a board should have an exec CEO and a non exec chair. The chair runs the board the CEO runs the company. The board oversees the CEO. It would be extraordinary (and pointless) not to have some execs on the board.

And it would be extraordinary and pointless if the board members were all employees, it has a separate function of supervision and thus is usually mostly non-employees outside the CEOs chain of command.
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