Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

ludic.mataroa.blog

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 482 posts

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#81

Post by steve_gh »

justin_oaks wrote: post #20

Of course the organization doesn't want to improve things. The bosses would have to be humble enough to receive feedback. Most people can't take feedback, let alone the bosses who feel that those under their management are beneath them. At my last job, the bosses ignored everything even the smartest employees suggested. Changes only came when customers, news outlets, vendors, or auditors made suggestions. Anyone exte…

> Anyone external had more influence on company direction than the most experienced employees.

That's one reason why people employ consultants. A consultant is someone an organisation employs to tell it what it already knows. Sometimes it doesn't know that it knows it, but more often it already knows what needs to be done, but an external entity gives a veneer of respectability to grasping a difficult nettle.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#82

Post by jiggawatts »

> “This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.”

Ha-ha… haaa

Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up some fancy DevOps thing and then see that the all-time logins are a big fat zero for 70% of the people that should checking the system daily.

This is reality: the DevOps team lead, the entire sysops team, and all but one developer literally never even looking at any of: APM, deployment pipeline, log analytics system, issue tracker, or dashboard.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#84

Post by jiggawatts »

js8 wrote: post #78
pdimitar wrote: post #7

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…

That's why I am a fan of democracy, even in economic sphere (aka socialism or cooperatives). Giving everybody the same single vote (same power) about the organization (and making it into an unchangeable fact) removes lots of these incentives that prevent improving the organization. But lot of people are blindly accepting capitalism, because.. well it's incidentally also explained in the article, why.

Corporations from the perspective of most employees are communists dictatorships.

Think about it: you use a communal means of production, distribute profits centrally, and you don’t get to vote for who gets to be your manager.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#85

Post by juped »

ludicity wrote: post #10
brilee wrote: post #6

In this long rant, there is only one concrete thing named that is supposedly bad: > I saw someone that was working on a few Git branches, twenty years my senior, and they decided to clone the entire repository ten times, then checkout a different branch in each repository clone "because it's easier". > Can you imagine the kind of havoc such a person could wreak upon infrastructure and code if left unchecked? But I'm…

Hello, hello, I am the original poster. I had surmised why this person was doing this, but didn't want to spend ages venting about a particular person, especially in a way that might actually cause that person to realize they're reading about themselves one day. Suffice it to say that there are other serious issues. Here's a more concrete thing - I work on a product that took years and a spectacular sum of money to g…

This is a good example of why you shouldn't listen to the Hacker News peanut gallery, because it is about as silly as you originally implied it was; a tiny bit of documentation reading will let you know you can check out as many worktrees into different directories as you like.

I would advise you to instead eliminate class prejudice from your writing. A common type of class prejudicial remark programmers make is sniping at "spreadsheets", i.e., the programming tools of the outgroup not initiated into nonsensical programmer esoterica, aren't those nonprogrammers benighted and silly? But really, spreadsheets are so valuable to them because they're one of the only ways they can tell a computer (a machine that ostensibly serves them) what to do without interacting with the priesthood.

But you shouldn't listen to me either. I'm just some fucking moron on a website. Please understand this.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#86

Post by watwut »

aeturnum wrote: post #35
ludicity wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's slightly more complicated, and the numbers are somewhat obfuscated to hide my actual employer. You're right that these numbers are not a huge deal - that much is obvious, or we wouldn't be wasting that money. What is more relevant to the average reader is that we have a large department in this space, and almost all (not all) the work is pointless because the numbers just don't matter at this scale. We have a co…

But again - isn't the antithesis of this that the company never does the work to look into any of this and, in doing so, misses a huge but non-obvious problem that these tools might reveal? So you need to build it to do the work and check, and then you need to maintain it (because you already built it and the possibility still exists, etc, etc).... Like, absolutely, there's some impossible to define line below which…

Company does look onto this. And those queries have pretty much zero results and just waste additional money.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#87

Post by semi-extrinsic »

jiggawatts wrote: post #82

> “This is because Power BI tracks usage metrics and almost all dashboards are completely unused.” Ha-ha… haaa Yes, I know that feeling all to well: I set up some fancy DevOps thing and then see that the all-time logins are a big fat zero for 70% of the people that should checking the system daily. This is reality: the DevOps team lead, the entire sysops team, and all but one developer literally never even looking at…

IDK, but a possible counterargument to some of your observation is that you could have a team where every day/week they have a meeting to look at the dashboards, and it's always Sam who opens the dashboard and shares on the big monitor/group call.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#89

Post by jalapenos »

This is feelgood venting, but without addressing the root of the problem.

All these managers are paid to do this BS. By the company. And that company is owned by people, who ultimately have the final say how it will be run, and who are paying the price.

There needs to be a lot more discussion around corporate governance with regards to this topic. I.e. how is it allowed to happen.

Why aren't companies adequently training and selecting managers, when it's the biggest effector of their performance vs their competitors? To the extent that dysfunctional management is nearly ubiquitous?

Why do we frequently hear stories like Icahn goes and fires a floor of staff with no effect on operations?

Because it sounds like a huge opportunity in the M&A space. Perhaps new tech can be developed to detect companies like these, to target them for acquisition and then purge them of BS.

Re: Organization probably doesn't want to improve things

#90

Post by patmcc »

pdimitar wrote: post #8
smokefoot wrote: post #4

This is a painfully cynical take and beyond that I’m not sure what he’s trying to say. If it’s all crap, make it better. Do something, don’t just complain!

How? Programmers don't have executive powers. You are very often told that this is not your job and you should be doing yours and leave the "experts" to theirs. Well, they are not experts. They are not even at the level of informed amateurs. But they have the power. What would you do? Sure, there are good companies and you can switch until you find one but let's recognize that statistically speaking this absolutely d…

>>>How? Programmers don't have executive powers.

The secret is - and this is wielded a million times a day in a million small ways - of course we do. Lots of people do in lots of jobs, whether intended or not.

You just do the thing. You don't ask about doing the thing, you don't put in a project planning proposal, you don't beg your manager to devote 20% of your time to the thing, you just go and do it because you probably can. And as long as you do it, and it goes well, and nobody really notices until it's working, then it turns out you did have executive powers the whole time.

Just do the thing. Ask forgiveness, not permission.

Post reply on HN