Actual engineering still happens at the heart of the organisation, that heart is just shielded by the gigantic army of software bureaucrats.
A) thinking
B) programming
...
Z) meetings
The meetings contained something useful maybe 1/10th of the time, lasted maybe 4x longer than they should have, and involved maybe 20x more people than they should have. Those numbers skew higher the larger the organization.
Maybe that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.
I’ve generally been on the most productive teams in my segment of the business. The biggest differentiator seems to be that my teams had devs that knew when to ask questions and what questions to ask. This is probably the most important skill a dev can learn.
The solution to ambiguous requirements is not meetings. At least, not in the usual sense. It’s knowing who and what to ask, and occasionally meeting with customers or knowledgeable stakeholders.
https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/12/codes-worst-enemy.h...
I simply don't believe this is true. Its one of those things that has become "fact" through repetition. I don't think there is even a way it could be proven if you wanted to. I don't think amazon loses $X millions if the site is down for an hour. I think people just say oh its down and come back later and buy exactly what they were going to anyway.
Perhaps they have to pay out some SLA type stuff to advertisers. However I don't think there is a single outage of a major tech company that has lasted 24hrs in the last 20 years. Major tech company is of course debatable.
That being said if your service went down for 24 hours because of a bad code change, it probably means and your service goes down a lot. Because whatever caused that 24hr outage probably points to a systemic lack of process and discipline within the organization.
edit: There's also a lot of revenue impacting things short of downtime especially given the automated and ML heavy paths for most of these sites. A few slightly broken features in a key model can cause a 1% drop in your revenue which for facebook is over a billion a year.
IME SLA's rarely pay out enough to really make it worth pursuing. However I have gotten a couple payouts from SLAs for companies i worked at in the past. I didn't think it was worth the time but I got paid either way.
I get they have profit models that "prove" they lost money but they all must be based on an assumption. The assumption that there was only this one chance to catch the attention of the customer and never again. To me this is a very big assumption that simply cannot be proven and is probably wrong.
Why do you assume intelligent people who make decisions based on this haven't tracked spend by week, spend by month, regression models and the five hundred other ways to try and model this? We're talking about trillion dollar industries and you're assuming they don't do basic sanity checking.
>assuming they don't do basic sanity checking.
I'm sure they have a million ways to say its not my fault. I started writing a huge response about human nature and the incentive to massage stats but I think you will dismiss it. If a system is down its a great opportunity to get a blame hedge in case sales are not as good as you predicted. There is no incentive to take an honest look if a brief downtime really affected sales in a meaningful way. I doubt anyone even does look. They just say this it what it would have been in our models if the downtime did not happen.
Another way: you have nothing else to do at the time. so you might click the ads. But now the site is down, there is no ads for you to click.
Commercial web sites lose money when they are down. This is obvious to everyone.
Software engineering is writing technical design docs. Gathering business requirements. Gathering technical requirements. Negotiating with stakeholders like InfoSec, legal and accounting. Discussing user research and new features with UX practitioners. Etc.
Productivity is a very subjective term
Are you making more dollars for less money? This is productivity, everything else doesn’t matter
Im pretty sure LOC/person went down a lot with the pandemic across all companies.