81–90 of 265 posts
Today, for many businesses accounts is still the main driver behind software, and also the budget.
I don't understand our modern tech culture of saying maintenance is the last on the list; always getting chopped and cut; never getting a decent budget. In 20 years and several different companies I have always heard this but never agreed with it. Sure, the company wants new features to market, but the company also wants things to freaking work. During layoffs and hiring freezes I have seen SRE type orgs fair better…
Both maintenance and testing are not valued by business. Because you cannot sell maintenance to the customer, you only can sell features. From the developer's point of view maintenance also a thing to avoid. You cannot put a maintenance as a shiny point to your CV. Everyone wants to see your achievements, projects you shipped, and with modern technology, of course.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would you have done differently? Built a better relationship with the middle managers? Kept your ear to the ground and left before the CTO did? Interviewed every quarter so you'd be able to leave and land elsewhere? Something else?
I think better relationship with middle managers and maybe leave with the CTO if it made sense (it didn't, in my case). I was too focused on doing things and assumed the CTO was taking care of "winning the hearts" of middle managers. He wasn't. It was a very top-bottom initiative and that rarely works when culture is involved. So yeah, I think I should have "managed up" so this initiative wasn't tied to the specific…
I work at a very large organization where the top is too scared to give any direction whatsoever, so it's middle managers and their lower staff henchman, that battle it out over major decisions with politics and schemes to get their preferred stuff implemented. It's more terrible than you can imagine, I never seen a more chaotic place.
So, I just want to say top-down management isn't the worst thing. I'd prefer that to no top down management at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salesforce layoffs had no internal cause - just "investors want us to cut costs". They selected people at random, and we lost tons of people who were essential and difficult to replace. Then they said "we can't guarantee there won't be more, and we can't tell you any way to avoid being hit". And then they said stuff about productivity going down but I didn't care, surprise!
Same situation at a different company, except they kept telling us "we made sure this won't keep happening". Of course few people believed and we lost many good engineers that simply left because they couldn't have a major source of income coming from such unstable place. I like to believe executives know their workforce will shrink more than the layoff numbers. They must know this. They also must know it will be har…
What time horizon are you thinking? People will forget '22/'23 layoffs very quickly. This is especially true if you made it through these last years, the market picks up and you want to move.
I don't understand our modern tech culture of saying maintenance is the last on the list; always getting chopped and cut; never getting a decent budget. In 20 years and several different companies I have always heard this but never agreed with it. Sure, the company wants new features to market, but the company also wants things to freaking work. During layoffs and hiring freezes I have seen SRE type orgs fair better…
Imagine an organisation where developers are adding features to the service, where each new feature uses $1000 of disk space and enables $10,000 of new sales.
And imagine the sysadmins buy huge file servers, each new file server costs $500,000
In a highly bureaucratic organisation, the sysadmins will cross-charge the developers for disk space, and they'll already have the money ready when a new file server is needed.
In a well run and less bureaucratic organisation, the bosses will realise that $500,000 bill enables projects that will return $5M, so they'll gladly pay it.
In a poorly run organisation, the bosses will blanch at the $500,000 bill because it's expensive and not linked to a project; the sysadmins will ask the next person who needs $1000 of disk space to pay $500,000 for it (they'll refuse); then the sysadmins end up having to refuse requests and cajole developers into only keeping 3 days of logs instead of 7 to free up disk space. Before you know it, the bosses are hearing bad feedback about the sysadmins...
I don't understand our modern tech culture of saying maintenance is the last on the list; always getting chopped and cut; never getting a decent budget. In 20 years and several different companies I have always heard this but never agreed with it. Sure, the company wants new features to market, but the company also wants things to freaking work. During layoffs and hiring freezes I have seen SRE type orgs fair better…
Do you mean your companies didn't act like maintenance was last on the list, you didn't agree with descriptions that said they would?
Or they indeed did, you just didn't agree this was appropriate, you thought they were acting inappropriately?
Because you seem to be describing environments where indeed maintenance was not valued by the business -- you just didn't like it. So to "say maintenance is not valued by the business" is just to describe reality, like you in fact just did.
I think the common saying that "maintenance is the last on the list" is not meant to be a prescription, advocating this -- it's a description of what seems to happen. Analyzing why and if there's a way for a different approach to be better for the business is not something OP engages in. One would hope so if one, like you, values things working and being high quality... but if very vew companies act this way, there's probably a reason regarding alignent of interests...
In addition to knowing which bucket your salary comes from, I think it is also useful to know how your organization values building software. Because this affects your career just as much. * Is your company selling software development hours (consulting)? I'm this car you'll be valued for client relations skills and the ability to bang out acceptable software. * Is your company selling a software product (product com…
I’ve made that mistake, I’ve been asked into meetings and asked “how’s it going” then promptly told “don’t tell me the details.”
Working in bullet point three means working on boring, forgettable solutions. You may find yourself making valid technical solutions that are political suicide.
Re: (US) Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 174 "The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was enacted more than five years ago, but certain changes under the legislation are only now coming into focus as taxpayers prepare their 2022 tax returns. In particular, there are significant changes as to the deductibility of certain research and experimentation expenses, as well as the ability to utilize net operating loss (NOL) carryforwa…
I'm having trouble with this framing. The buckets only make sense metaphorically, but is written literally. The "laws" only make sense literally, too. For maintenance, if "you'll see this role smeared into product development" and "We give you a generous 2 days every sprint to take care of shit that's annoying," the budget here is R&D, not "Maintenance." Similarly, Growth and Developer Relation engineers are often (u…