My issue is mostly with my profession -- programming. Sometimes we are so micromanaged and our time is so sliced and diced that all of this short-term thinking easily gets 5x more expensive on a short time frame anywhere from 3 to 6 months.
This has been observed numerous times yet IT managers seem to want to never learn.
It's OK to try and save money. But saving money short-term in order to have a huge expense down the line is just being irresponsible from those managers.
I have had similar managers to what was described above, in those types of organizations. It may be a lost cause but it may be an opportunity to work on your influence skills; being able to explain and sell your solution is perhaps even more important than coming up with it in the first place.
3 years into major project, my team finally got prioritized to work on and improvement that will take us a couple weeks, that we were not able to work on previously because we could not justify its value. But for the past 3 years the organization has lived with pain that this would have resolved. So now we can justify it. And the thing is, it's not like we didn't know 3 years ago when we said we wanted to make this happen but things are going to be terrible if we were not able to prioritize it but in many organizations it's not good enough to just say how bad things will be. People need to actually have felt the pain.
Honestly, I think that's okay on its face. My bigger issue is that frequently there is no or very little trust around engineers who predict what the major problems will be an advocate for them and then it's not like when they're proven right management now listens to them the next time. I think that's the real problem.
This is a problem. But at any given time management hears programmers arguing for both sides - the "if you're not using Kubernetes you're a moron" and the "learn how to sysadmin and you'll realize you don't need Kubernetes in the first place" (quotes from the top of the thread). In many cases folks in senior management do not have any idea of these things, and they rely on one of these two opinions, resulting in the other half claiming here on HN that management is all bull.
What the profession lacks is a code of practices - like a Joel Test accepted by every accredited engineer.
I am not sure that is net positive for such a rapidly evolving space. Even now people are debating if unit tests are needed and other basic topics. The only "settled" thing about the profession seems to be that gotos are bad.
I'm not sure how one gets software engineers to justify and back up their decisions like this on a regular basis, but I suspect it would help management trust their engineers more.
More balanced senior engineers (I know anecdotally that there are lots of them) speaking up and challenging their fellow-engineers to justify their extreme positions will be a good start IMO.
No matter what brand,the base unit comes with enough RAM, processing power and spacious SSD.
Everybody gets the same brand,as it's easier to support from the IT perspective.
Keyboard,mouse,monitors should be an individual choice. Some want to ruin their vertebrae by staring at a tiny 13" screen and be happy about it,while some need 3 monitors and 2 keyboards to feel the power,why not.
Not sure why some companies are so tight when it comes to the equipment for developers,as it's always a small fraction of the overall cost of the position.
"If you use extremist and simplistic generalizations you are not worth listening to in a discussion" would be the first policy I'd put into a team.
Balanced arguments with pro/con analysis is what makes an engineer senior and a contributor to an argument. Everybody else shouldn't participate the next time around.
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and
fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and
wiser people so full of doubts."
"Give me a one-handed Economist. All my economists
say 'on hand...', then 'but on the other..."
If you demonstrate that you will not submit to extremists, I've found that a good chunk of the more balanced people are then encouraged to speak up.
---
TL;DR: Silence the bad and loud voices, and the wiser and quieter voices will start speaking.
I think it was Andrew Grove (of Intel / High Output Management) who boiled this down to the following algorithm:
(1) Invite all sides to a meeting. (2) Ask them what their decision is. (3a) If they agree, implement the decision. (3b) If they disagree, tell them to discuss it, then give you their decision at the next meeting. GOTO (1)
His point being that managers are the least informed (by virtual of organizational pyramids), and therefore the least effective at picking solutions. Build a team that can arrive at consensus, then trust the team.
I know this goes against the normal and people want to attach "right now " value (hours it took reflected on check) but going beyond the call can also give you leverage when your yearly review comes up for example.
What one can do is is deliberately allot time to the team to work on any side-project as long as they are somehow attached to the business. There are ways to do this more organized, for example innovation-weeks or the famous Google-fridays.
Just like those that never have been hacked dont care about security. Or those that have never lost data dont care about backups. Or those who has never had more then 10 simultaneous users dont care about performance. Basically we do stuff in order to avoid pain.
I've been working on it for a few years now and it's REALLY difficult but even the small wins feel very rewarding and are motivating me to refine my comm skills further.
While that's true, considering those incentives and changing them if necessary is part of my boss's job, not mine. My job is only to report the misaligned incentives I perceive to my boss. If my boss isn't able to make me understand his decisions, that's my cue to find a new boss. And I concede, those bosses are rare. I've only had two in twenty years of employment.
It takes time to recognize the qualities you need in a boss to perform well. I know myself well enough in that department to actively look for those qualities. Even to the point where I prefer a less challenging job under the right boss than the perfect job under the wrong leadership.
But there is also a flip-side where I see the opposite happen - especially in startups and VC-funded companies. These companies can take massive losses while at the same time investing huge amounts into elaborate solutions that appear to primarily exist for the purpose of creating impressive bullet points on the resumes of careerist employees. In these companies, even in management, the work seems to be driven by everyone trying to maximize the impact of their own, personal "tour of duty", then making a profitable exit. These incentives are not the same as those of people working at more legacy/boring companies.
Yep, that's one of the things I had in mind when I said "perverse incentives".
To extend this to non-tech examples, failing big companies, like Sears, do not disappear overnight; the decline was in full view for over a decade but ultimately the ship could not be turned. With tech the problem may be even worse; Uber still has not turned a net profit, but with tech investors like to throw money at losing businesses. Some turn around, but that's not guaranteed.
Your bosses optimize for those metrics because it's the one they can communicate higher up on the short time they can get higher ups attention.
If it were because the metric was any good, there wouldn't be so many cases of companies bankrupted by technical and cultural debits pilling up.
That's their problem and not mine, is it?
A good manager doesn't just reflect the lightning bolt to their underlings. They absorb part of the shock and process / transform what they will transfer down below. If they aren't doing that then they aren't managers; they are uneducated opportunists in suits.
> If it were because the metric was any good, there wouldn't be so many cases of companies bankrupted by technical and cultural debits pilling up.
Really well articulated, kudos.
But I'd argue that most 'computer nerds' have pretty deeply seated perfectionism flaws.
To take a simplified example, we tend to want perfect security, and like to prove that we're smarter than each other by understanding complicated attacks.
When it comes to running a business, though, a 10 person startup cannot afford to act like their threat model includes defending from hostile nation state actors willing to do Stuxnet-levels of effort to hack them. If they do that much work on security their product will never get off the ground.
The goal of most companies when it comes to security is never to have perfect security, but to have good enough security to stay out of the headlines.
It is like tradeoffs that have evolved in nature. You don't see organisms that maximize one feature at the expense of everything else. That energy always needs to go into competing concerns.
So sometimes as technical people we fetishize the perfect solution to some problem in the Enterprise, when actually doing that solution would be horrible for the Enterprise due to the costs.
(Of course the flip side is sometimes management only cares about window dressing the company so they can bailout with some golden parachutes and that has nothing to do with running a healthy company -- but not every example of a company not being perfect is due to deeply cynical and perverse incentives like that, but may be entirely rational).
My goal here absolutely was not to turn this sub-thread into a ping-pong of "but managers bad at X" and "but but but programmers bad at Y".
I am very aware of the nuance you introduced and I've been guilty of being a tech perfectionist much more times that I'd be comfortable with sharing. But finally I learned.
(Granted, many haven't and maybe never will. In this regard you do have a solid point.)
> So sometimes as technical people we fetishize the perfect solution to some problem in the Enterprise, when actually doing that solution would be horrible for the Enterprise due to the costs.
Absolutely. Not denying it. It's just that what gets me is the reaction to some of the engineers' flaws is to go to the other extreme.
Which is just as bad state of things. Both extremes are unproductive.
In my point of view, that's how you lose solutions to stay in the comfort zone, and I'm not saying the people whom actually "just obey orders" but those who make them.
As I gain more experience, with age and some wisdom (I hope), I see that most top-down decisions are actually the worst way to decide things, people who are "at the bottom" maybe not understand how a entire system works however they do really knows (and suffer) on how their work is sub-optimal.
Trying to solve every problem top-down manifests as micro-management that beats the morale and initiative out of strong ICs. But on the other hand, trying to address everything bottoms-up leads to local maxima, no standardization across tech or product, and warring factions within the company.
There is real art to this. Being able to grok the incentives and structures of a vertical slice through the org (C-level, VP, Director, Mgr, IC) as well as the tech (Brand, Product, Pages, Components, APIs, Middleware, Storage, Infra) is a rare and extremely valuable talent that allows solving problems that are impenetrable by any traditionally defined role.
That's an unbalanced state of affairs that completely loses very valuable feedback everywhere along the chain.
Part of the job of a manager is to find this perfect balance on the level they are working at. And most don't. They just pass the pressure put on them, down below to their underlings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_Production_System
But somehow, management never accepts this reality. Even the Japanese auto industry is regressing into Taylorism.
I've worked the line twice - first time as a teen looking for any work, the second time as an undercover analyst hired to examine why Lean was failing at a plant, both doing the same type of job: electrical component assembly. I got physical injuries (minor) both times. The majority of the assembly line workers had repetitive stress injuries, including losing fine motor skills and wrist control due to use of impact wrenches and exposure to bad ergonomics. If a human delaminates, you can't glue them back.
Although rational (Taylorism, Management by Objectives, MBO, OKR, Milestones, management by goals ) vs. normative (Lean / Toyoda, human-centric, Agile, humanist, culture ) division of management styles/rhetoric has been proposed, they should perhaps be seen through the prism of Creative Destriction (not disruption, and surprisingly, CD comes from Marx).
In a vulgar approximation, imagine capital-backed entities served by the manager class, which are stressed by short deadlines and performance-tied bonuses and careers. They are constantly shifting basic approximations of solutions and perspectives, without challenging the system.
Give employees more autonomy, and output and managerial control suffer. Instill more rigid control, and risk losing the ability to innovate and "knowledge producing" (Drucker of MBO fame) talent such as programmers.
In an antagonistic system, whatever you come up with has its own roots of destruction on top of built-in conflict (Marx again). Hence the back-and-forth re-framing between "rational" (Taylorism) and normative "culture, baybe, Holocracy!" so fast that today it is a zombie that has both and neither.
You end up with projectification, corporate "culture" that demands the soul and meeting arbitrary "milestones" from employees, but the corporation itself can only guarantee arbitrary termination.
There is a great and influential analysis "Design and Devotion: Surges of Rational and Normative Ideologies of Control in Managerial Discourse" by Barley and Kunda. I would suggest reading "Management fashion" by Abrahamson as well. Both can be found through G.scholar, including no-registration copies.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2393449 https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/amr.1996.9602161572
(I don't know about worker health problems, and I imagine that poor as Japan was at the time, any empiric data on it would be useless. But, anyway, I don't think the management structure is the correct place to fix that one problem.)
And I'll have to break into your Marxist narrative, but all that was once incredibly successful in a fully capitalist framework. It never became non-competitive, it was only replaced by order of top-down command structures.
The approach I outline can explain and predict why the two Ts rotate, including at Toyota (Toyota going Taylor, or rather normative - rational).
I prefer not to base my experience on what Deming or anyone else wrote, but how their writing relates to real-life practice (though of course as a critic of Taylorism as represented by MBO and other Performance Evaluation rational schools, he is a welcome breath of fresh air).
Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system? I have only seen a shift towards projectification and cultural hegemony.
> Have you observed, preferably both as a participant and independent, Deming idealism in a functional real-life system?
As a participant, never. As an independent, we are talking about the mentor of the movement that teached the Japanese management how to go from an industry that didn't produce anything good into the highly developed one that outcompeted everybody all ever the world.
So why the shift to Taylorism at Toyota, the heart of the Toyota system? Why the shift to projectification from life-long employment at Japan? How can one explain chronic injury if workers get to plan and improve the workflow (or are wasted humans not considered waste)?
And the Toyoda principles at the heart of Toyota predate Deming. (Ohno, Taiichi (March 1988), Just-In-Time For Today and Tomorrow, Productivity Press, ISBN 978-0-915299-20-1 )
The list of paradoxes can continue indefinitely, or one can elect to look for the root cause.
well, for the performance pay, Deming is more subtle: its not that it doesn’t work, its that the performance must be something meaningfully under the employees control for performance pay based on it to work (otherwise it can’t influence anything), and it must be a holistic measure of company value (otherwise you get perverse incentives around microoptimizations), and your measure of performance must take into account the degree of uncontrolled variation in the process (otherwise you give false negative and positive signals due to random variation rather than real problems/improvements).
I had this exact same thought recently when reflecting on my behavior in my new role as a "technical product owner". All of it was reflexive, as if I suddenly forgot all of the software engineering knowledge I accumulated over the years and became a deadline-driven cog.
I don't have a solution yet; I think it comes down to that I don't yet speak the same language that people I report to do, and thus I feel like I can't defend my position well enough. It comes with experience, I guess!
There's sadly an inherent conflict of interest between the people doing the job on the ground (programmers) and the rulers (managers).
Your job is to find the middle ground -- not to completely side with your higher-ups.
That would be a good starting point for you IMO.
We as an industry tried the all engineers thing and it didn’t work.
Have you considered the possibility that the boss’ bosses have a point? That the intelligent people you once respected have been convinced rather than intimidated?
It's the organization that shapes the individual, not the other way around. Changing a cog in an existing gear system only works if the cog is of a particular shape, and it will get chafed and dented if not sufficiently so. If the cog is too different, it will break and be replaced again.
Occam's razor says that if many different people fail within the same organizational structure, the problem is not with those people.
And as said in other comments, for some companies and businesses they are right indeed.
But not in programming / IT in general. At least not where I worked (and where many of my former colleagues worked).
It's all optimizing for short-term and never the long-term. And I have seen people playing the long game gaining a lot so I also know I am not imagining it.
Make it 75% short-term objective and give the other 25% to longer-term planning and/or simply playing with ideas and I'll be very happy to work in such a place.
I am not a fanatic -- and most programmers are actually quite understanding (if a bit too timid sometimes) people.
We just want the pendulum to not be on one of the sides 100% of the time. That's it really.
Example of when this was tried?
> if a solution exists today, and it has yet to be replaced, it's at least possible that it's over all the best solution, and the reason you're not seeing that is because of a lack of understanding.
And once you build mastery of $fwk/$lib/$tool, it's deprecated and you migrate to another one. GOTO START
Conversely, it's surprisingly difficult to get engineers to master things they aren't intrinsically interested in. We've had a stable tech stack and core architecture for 4+ years and one of my major challenges is to stop employees constantly trying to introduce $new/$shiny or major refactor X because it wasn't built how they personally would have done it and get them to just learn and understand the stack we already have - which addresses all our needs at most 5% less optimally than $new/$shiny.
If people have a good social safety net and a good job security, the depth of their skills improves by a lot.
Management and owners are a far from perfect group that make plenty of bad strategic decisions for a host of reasons, but they also have to deal with the real/perceived constraints of time, budget, market, competition, etc. that are easy to not appreciate when you are focused on the design/build portion of the business.
We should IMO also entertain one more possibility: namely pressure from the top.
A lot of people who I knew as sympathetic and calm before they took management roles turned into something I could code in one minute: namely a program that asks "how much is this going to take?" and if your answer is above N hours/days then they say "no, we're not doing it". And that's not because they are stupid or suddenly non-sympathetic. It's because their bosses optimize for those metrics and measure them (and their salary, and their bonuses, and even their vacation days) by the same metrics.
Perverted incentives play a big part in the current state of things where everyone just looks baffled at thing X and is like "why in the holy frak isn't this working better?".
Truth is, MANY, and I mean really A LOT of people know that their work is sub-optimal but pressure from above prevents them from making it better.
And people are not independent -- for most people outside IT and other prestige / high-skill professions, standing up to the boss means 3 to 9 months of unemployment and maybe no food on the table. Hence everybody learns to suck it up and do the bare minimum that keeps them employed, perpetuating the cycle.
Multiply that to at least 90% of our world and it's IMO quite easy to understand why it is like it is.