Ask HN: Devs – how does it get decided what you work on? • Hacker News Board

Post by lukker » Sun, Jul 26, 2020, 10:03 AM UTC

I’d like to hear from other software developers who work for a company (not one man shows).

For context, I work for a smallish (40 people, 8 devs, 4 are in my team) company that builds a retail consumer app (both mobile and web). The company is less than 5 years old and is having reasonable growth. I joined about 6 months ago and the code base was super messy, which was apparently due to the company previously relying on short term contractors to smash out individual features. Funnily enough, I really enjoyed the mess, because there was so much to improve. We had stories coming through from product, but they also gave us a lot of freedom to just ‘make things better’ without too much coordination. Fast forward 6 months and we now have a new CTO, who demands everybody to follow a strict process. Anything you want to work on needs to be prioritised in a refinement session. And that’s literally anything - doesn’t matter if it would take 1 minute, hour or a day. I’ve had a couple of jobs before, but never anything that restrictive (even at big-corps). I understand that there are pieces of work that need to be widely coordinated, but this level of control feels like micro-management taken to the extreme.

Is this kind of strict process following common out there in the industry? Are there any experiences, opinions or stories you’d like to share?

Post by noir_lord » Sun, Jul 26, 2020, 10:40 AM UTC

> CTO, who demands everybody to follow a strict process. Anything you want to work on needs to be prioritised in a refinement session. And that’s literally anything - doesn’t matter if it would take 1 minute, hour or a day. I’ve had a couple of jobs before, but never anything that restrictive (even at big-corps).

Sounds like my big company. They perfected the art of removing what little value agile (in the true original sense) added and replace it with "waterfall with extra steps".

In terms of work assigned, it goes to a team level and then typically the leads/seniors like myself take the harder tickets (or the ones we know will go long/cause problems because frankly it's harder to shout at us) and the rest is divided out by the other team members depending on who feels like doing what (unless no-one picks something up that is important I generally stay out of it, it gives them some autonomy in an environment that honestly has little).

The whole process is hilariously (and I mean genuinely it makes me laugh) Byzantine.

It is also entirely the reason I'm looking for another job (combined with no remote in a global pandemic when I could do my job remote).

Honestly, it is simply poor management - they can't handle the flexibility of running large teams nor can they bring themselves to delegate the running of smaller teams so they impose a "One size fits no-body, was this even made for humans?" process in the hope that will save them.

It never does but they then assume the problem is the process and change it again - so often in fact that we on the 7th I think since I've been with the company - half our communication is "but you changed X from Foo to Bar on Jira, under the new process it needs to be Fizz before it can go to Foo" type stuff.