153 posts tagged with "icymi"

Maybe the answer is... don't do Agile. The point of Agile is to deliver a product iteratively to stakeholders. If the stakeholders can't or won't accept iterative progress and instead want a date on the calendar when they know it'll be completed, all the Agile practices become pointless. Just do Waterfall, it's the round peg for this round hole.

Scrum Teams are often Coached to Death, while the Problems are With Management

Most large orgs in my experience have zero clues about how to do software dev efficiently anyway. They're so tied up in wanting to control and de-risk everything that efficiency goes out the window.

Finished your tickets for the sprint early? Just do nothing until the sprint ends. No, we're not adding more tickets to the sprint. No, you can't work on a ticket that isn't in the sprint. No, you can't work on anything that isn't in a ticket.

Want to spend some time improving the dev experience? Well you'll need a whole sprint just for that, because all the tickets in a sprint need to be aligned. And then we'll need to justify prioritising that sprint over product work. Marketing are chasing Feature X for the trade show next quarter, so probably not in the next three months at least.

Yes we know it'll make everyone work faster and theoretically improve our velocity but we can't quantify that in terms of tickets per sprint so it's hard to see how that will help get Feature X shipped. Besides, the project plan for the next six months is already done and we don't want to change it now.

Management By JIRA is ridiculous at the best of times, but it gets really laughable in this kind of organisation.

Why don't organizations pay more attention to developer experience?

Just like Google’s don’t be evil motto, all these Silicon Valley types are the same, morals are just marketing material and when the facade is no longer selling it’s dropped like a bad ai generated ad campaign. Amodei was never more moral than Altman, his models never more “aligned”. Conveniently Anthropic was the sole arbiter of what was aligned and what wasn’t, you better believe they would never find anything that impeded Anthropic’s profits to be immoral. If they were ever actually serious about this pledge they would have created a completely independent oversight committee to deal with alignment. They didn’t because they knew the mask would slip eventually.

Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge

Largely agree with all of that.

It really does come down to having a high trust environment. The different departments, reports, and even executives have to all see each other as trusted team mates all competent and specializing.

I've actually been in meetings about this ALL morning. It's a hard cultural change to make. Happily, I have a CTO above me and 2 technical leads below me that share the view.

High trust has to be the goal, and it can only be accomplished by starting with trust. Devs need to trust their leaderships decision making and that they will not have negative results from sharing good information, that as situations change they will be listened to as experts and leadership will adjust. Leadership needs to trust that the devs are competent, are working at capacity, and will make decisions in their shared best interests. That the devs are giving good, accurate information, and that if they are told they need to adjust their plans, it's necessary. Between departments there needs to be trust that they are partners working towards common goals, that their concerns will be addressed, and needs met in good faith.

The crazy part is that kind of high trust relationship isn't something that can be worked towards. You have to convince people to extend the trust first. Once they do that the trust reinforces, but it's almost impossible to build trust in a company if people require others to "earn" the trust.

I'll say: high trust environments DO exist. I've helped establish them at a few companies now. But they aren't common. Personally, it's a process I really enjoy. I've seen it succeed twice before, and am currently in the middle of a third. I find most people are really excited about it once they catch the vision. But there is always a few holdouts who have been burned so badly in the past they have a REALLY hard time extending trust again, since they are subconsciously convinced they'll become a scapegoat again if they don't guard themselves absolutely.

Why don't organizations pay more attention to developer experience?

Marc Andreessen is not a techno-optimist. Marc Andreessen is a "giving Marc Andreessen unimaginable wealth, power and the latitude to do as he sees fit" optimist. The totality of his screed is about how humankind's advancement will only happen if people cease getting upset when his predatory vision of capitalism hurts the poor, or the environment, or literally everyone who is not Marc Andreessen.

Marc Andreessen just dropped a ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’ that sees a world of 50 billion people settling other planets

I work for a company building software to analyse collaboration so this is something I’ve had some experience looking at.

The short answer is that you have to have processes in place to ensure high-trust and high-autonomy throughout the org.

The longer answer is: it really has to be mandated from the top (leaders have to have be high-trust); there needs to be processes to increase visibility throughout the org; there needs to be obvious and causal feedback systems - so if someone does well they need to be rewarded and if they do badly they need to be helped to improve or to be fired; every level of management needs to be incentivised to be high-trust and high-autonomy.

Scaling this is hard, but most small companies I’ve dealt with have the same problem. A lot of people are controlling and have low-trust. A lot of leaders therefore do. I don’t have enough data to say but most leaders might be lower trust than they should (much worse in some culture types and much better in others).

If you try to solve for it you can, at scale, with enough help and work. If you don’t solve for it you’ll usually end up with a shit org.

Anyone else getting taken over by project managers and feel like all is lost?

I would say most companies have a mild to severe case of dysfunction, but the house of cards doesnt collapse because the market is saturated by fucked up actors.

it's like a 64 online deathmatch where you play with only a keyboard like it's 1993 ... except nobody has a mouse so it's a fair match

6 Lessons I learned from working at a dysfunctional workplace!

Jack Welch is commonly "credited" with inventing stack-ranking, or as it was known "rank n yank". This was back in the 60's-70's. It's been thoroughly discredited as a practice long ago, in no small part due to the complete disaster GE turned out to be.

I'm amazed this stuff still persists.

We KNOW measuring people affects how they act, and usually not in the ways you want. And yet we still get people in HR pushing this because it blows their minds to simply have a manager say: "This person is doing a great job. Let's do what we can to keep them."

Stack-ranking & the incentives of "hire to fire"

I was thinking of the scientific forestry example that the book uses as sort of a metaphor for the whole concept. But there was probably some record logging in there too.

For those who haven't read the book, I'll borrow Scott Alexander's summary of it:

[James C.] Scott starts with the story of “scientific forestry” in 18th century Prussia. Enlightenment rationalists noticed that peasants were just cutting down whatever trees happened to grow in the forests, like a chump. They came up with a better idea: clear all the forests and replace them by planting identical copies of Norway spruce (the highest-lumber-yield-per-unit-time tree) in an evenly-spaced rectangular grid. Then you could just walk in with an axe one day and chop down like a zillion trees an hour and have more timber than you could possibly ever want.

This went poorly. The impoverished ecosystem couldn’t support the game animals and medicinal herbs that sustained the surrounding peasant villages, and they suffered an economic collapse. The endless rows of identical trees were a perfect breeding ground for plant diseases and forest fires. And the complex ecological processes that sustained the soil stopped working, so after a generation the Norway spruces grew stunted and malnourished. Yet for some reason, everyone involved got promoted, and “scientific forestry” spread across Europe and the world.

And this pattern repeats with suspicious regularity across history, not just in biological systems but also in social ones.

Corporate Legibility for Software Engineers

It took me way too long to realize the our business culture just isn't equipped to deal with two types of people.

1. Stupid people with money
2. Greedy people with high opinions of themselves

The intersection of these two groups causes a tremendous amount of waste and efficiency in the economy.

Things I've seen:

1. Older folks playing shell games, trying to keep checks from investors clearing just long enough to reach retirement. This typically involves grandiose promises that will be impossible to keep, alongside waves of excuses (it's the economy! Not us!). When the company inevitably does fail and everyone ELSE is screwed, they go on LinkedIn and become "thought leaders" and "mentors" - obsessed with how amazing they are despite being retired and unemployable.
2. Complete idiots who are running companies due to nepotism, fraternity connections, and so on. These companies bleed money and are abject failures, but serve the very perplexing purpose of "giving my daughter's idiot husband something to do (a company to run into the ground) so she doesn't bother me about him" - which one of those things only the ultra-rich have to worry about.
3. Executives locked in golden handcuffs marching towards the impending sale of the company. No matter how bad things are, they literally zone out as if hypnotized, because for legal reasons they can not acknowledge bad news publicly. Instead, they look out for their own interests by gutting the company's assets and sabotaging its long-term prospects in order to make it look better on paper for the pending sale. Then, the sale happens and they ride off into the sunset with obscene bonus checks for their trouble.
4. The same company sold like clockwork every 2-3 years between different owners, all of whom walk in convinced that they can find savings and efficiencies (e.g. layoffs) and re-sell the company for more money. After the 4th or 5th time the hot potato is passed, the company is in such poor condition that its necessary to out-right mislead future owners in order to convince someone else to except it before it explodes.

How 2 egotistical dbags went from running a $10M start-up to facing bankruptcy and laying everyone off