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If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

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Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#81

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

skeeter2020 wrote: post #42
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to go by results , and for me, "results" means shipped* code that is used and accepted by end users**, can be maintained and extended***, and doesn't generate trouble tickets. * MVP doesn't count. ** Can include users inside the organization. *** It's OK if it requires senior-level ongoing support. I think expecting it to be maintained by monkeys is a bad idea.

saying "MVP doesn't count" implies that you throw it away and then right "the perfect system" at some point. If you've ever had an MVP land you know that's not how it happens.

I write "as close to perfect" as I can get. I know that "The Perfect is the enemy of the good" is a popular meme, but I have found that "The perfect is something to strive for" has been useful, for me.

In fact, my way has been working for me, for decades.

I'm quite aware that many folks do it differently, and that's one reason that I try to "keep it in the I," and write about how I do it, and talk about the bar that I set, for myself.

Most of the software I write, is free software that Serves a pretty small demographic. It can have a fairly outsize influence on the lives of the people that use my software, and I really care about the end-users of my work, so I tend to set a pretty high personal bar.

I'm quite aware that I don't have many of the stressors that beset commercial software houses, so I sincerely don't feel "snooty." In fact, I feel profoundly grateful to be in a position, where I can follow my muse.

I really would like it if folks wrote better stuff, but I am also aware of the culture, and how that's next to impossible, these days.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#82

Post by miki123211 »

wodenokoto wrote: post #76
abc-1 wrote: post #74

I always feel like these manager types have drunk deeply from the koolaid for some reason. It’s a lot of words and processes that they usually cargo culted from somewhere else. A lot of it seems to boil down to “don’t be an idiot” and “actually care about your work”. They always have this air of superiority because they’re high up on the org chart. Like CEOs who think they’re the chosen ones, when plenty of people co…

Would it have bought instagram and whatsapp? Would it have identified major social media trends in competitors that couldn't be bought and outcompeted them at their own game? Would it have suggested developing your own ad platform or just should banner space per cpm? There is a lot to not like about Meta and Zuckerberg, but saying he's a bad business man is a little silly. Metaverse was a wrong and expensive move, bu…

IMO metaverse was a bet.

It's perfectly fine to take a bet that you're not 100% convinced will pay off (professional poker players and traders understand this on a very deep level), as long as the potential upside is massively larger than the downside.

Zuck understood that Meta could take the hit if the metaverse bet didn't pay off, but that they'd be massively better off if it did, and they had their own platform. Apple's blatantly anticompetitive behavior around ATT was a prime example of what happens when your business is reliant on "platform overlords."

I'm not fully convinced that the metaverse era is over, though. If they can get Orion costs down and put something of that quality into serial production, I think they still have a chance there.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#83

Post by Xcelerate »

wodenokoto wrote: post #76
abc-1 wrote: post #74

I always feel like these manager types have drunk deeply from the koolaid for some reason. It’s a lot of words and processes that they usually cargo culted from somewhere else. A lot of it seems to boil down to “don’t be an idiot” and “actually care about your work”. They always have this air of superiority because they’re high up on the org chart. Like CEOs who think they’re the chosen ones, when plenty of people co…

Would it have bought instagram and whatsapp? Would it have identified major social media trends in competitors that couldn't be bought and outcompeted them at their own game? Would it have suggested developing your own ad platform or just should banner space per cpm? There is a lot to not like about Meta and Zuckerberg, but saying he's a bad business man is a little silly. Metaverse was a wrong and expensive move, bu…

Exactly. I’ve never understood this criticism. A good CEO (in terms of the business) is able to make significant, groundbreaking decisions but is also able to reverse course quickly if those decisions aren’t working out (anyone remember the Facebook phone)?

Unless the CEO is psychic, they’re necessarily going to make a lot of bad or wrong decisions. The key is being able to recover quickly and move on to the next thing. A bad CEO makes no big decisions for fear of being wrong.

When FB bought Instagram for $1B, there were a lot of talk show hosts riffing on Zuckerberg for making one of the stupidest business decisions of all time. A lot of executives who got to their position by corporate ladder climbing have personalities that would be terrified of that sort of widespread criticism. They would never make the kinds of decisions that might possibly put them in the unenviable position of being made fun of on national television.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#84

Post by Zanfa »

miki123211 wrote: post #82
wodenokoto wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it have bought instagram and whatsapp? Would it have identified major social media trends in competitors that couldn't be bought and outcompeted them at their own game? Would it have suggested developing your own ad platform or just should banner space per cpm? There is a lot to not like about Meta and Zuckerberg, but saying he's a bad business man is a little silly. Metaverse was a wrong and expensive move, bu…

IMO metaverse was a bet. It's perfectly fine to take a bet that you're not 100% convinced will pay off (professional poker players and traders understand this on a very deep level), as long as the potential upside is massively larger than the downside. Zuck understood that Meta could take the hit if the metaverse bet didn't pay off, but that they'd be massively better off if it did, and they had their own platform. A…

> IMO metaverse was a bet.

It was FOMO. They had no vision, they had no plan, it was clear that it was only a thing because it was a buzzword at the time. Just like every other company stuffing crypto-adjacent things everywhere. It might have been a bet, but it was obvious that it was a really terrible one.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#85

Post by chupasaurus »

infomaniac wrote: post #57
Sevii wrote: post #21

I appreciate that they have a programming philosophy that they want people at the company to adopt. A common problem I see at companies that don't have onboarding is that people join the team with assumptions from previous jobs but you never level set them with the company. So 12 months down the line the new guy wants to change the process and you have to repeat the same discussions about what agile means for the nth…

> Amazon does not use relational databases This is false, at least in my very thin exposure to the company: I interviewed for a team last year which was maintaining EC2 SSH keys using MySQL.

If it was using MyISAM relations are in question.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#86

Post by pjm331 »

switch007 wrote: post #70

> We’re an inverted organization. That means that tactical decisions are made by the people who are doing the work, not managers I've worked at various places where this was supposedly the system. Guess who had budgets, hiring powers, went to leadership offsites? Yeah not the ICs. It usually just means the C level will smile and nod while "listening" to your feedback instead of ignoring you completely Has anyone work…

To be fair - it says “tactical” decisions - not all decisions.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#87

Post by wesselbindt »

saghm wrote: post #46
Sevii wrote: post #21

I appreciate that they have a programming philosophy that they want people at the company to adopt. A common problem I see at companies that don't have onboarding is that people join the team with assumptions from previous jobs but you never level set them with the company. So 12 months down the line the new guy wants to change the process and you have to repeat the same discussions about what agile means for the nth…

> Amazon does a good job of training new hire on the 'Amazon way'. Amazon does 6 pagers, they do design docs. Amazon does SOA. Amazon does not use relational databases. Everything has an API. Because of the 'Amazon way' and the training they do new team members understand at least some of the context and expectations. As a counterpoint, a huge part of Amazon's culture (or at least, AWS's) in my experience was the emp…

> they didn't have any separation between SREs/on-call engineers from the people who implement their services

I.e., treat DevOps as a way of working, rather than a role meaning something akin to "Ops person who knows terraform, or k8s, or Ansible etc".

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#88

Post by 9rx »

infomaniac wrote: post #57
Sevii wrote: post #21

I appreciate that they have a programming philosophy that they want people at the company to adopt. A common problem I see at companies that don't have onboarding is that people join the team with assumptions from previous jobs but you never level set them with the company. So 12 months down the line the new guy wants to change the process and you have to repeat the same discussions about what agile means for the nth…

> Amazon does not use relational databases This is false, at least in my very thin exposure to the company: I interviewed for a team last year which was maintaining EC2 SSH keys using MySQL.

SQL, and therefore MySQL by extension, isn't relational.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#89

Post by bdavisx »

mickael-kerjean wrote: post #53
grogenaut wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It can but it's usually more obvious what's happening with code and how to fix it. Amazon wants you to think about the scaling issues while building as they don't want to lose the area under the customer curve on the far right. The theory is that with rdbms you have a magical box that scales vertically until it doesn't. And when it doesn't all you can do is scale back the customers until you fix it with sharding or a…

I recently finished a contract at a company who has gone full on dynamo with the idea that if we have slow queries and dynamo is good for Amazon, then it's good for us too. I've ran some explain on the queries causing issues and of course those queries didn't leverage indexes like they thought ....

That doesn't make sense, you have to specify the index when you're using Dynamo.

Re: If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?

#90

Post by scarface_74 »

bdavisx wrote: post #89
mickael-kerjean wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently finished a contract at a company who has gone full on dynamo with the idea that if we have slow queries and dynamo is good for Amazon, then it's good for us too. I've ran some explain on the queries causing issues and of course those queries didn't leverage indexes like they thought ....

That doesn't make sense, you have to specify the index when you're using Dynamo.

You can do scan operations and if they use PartiQL it hides whether you are using indexes.

I usually have an explicit DENY for dynamodb:Scan for the IAM role used to access the DDB table

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