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.