But other than that solid point.
Even without knowing the principles I would expect people to stop talking if they don’t have knowledge - but most annoying thing is when people don’t know and are trying to help genuinely and they are convinced they are contributing.
got a list of them for reference ?
If I invest that £100 instead in another part of the business, that returns £150 a year on average. After two years, that's already £225 - enough to pay for the crisis and still have made £25 profit. If I can get a third year without the server breaking, I'm closer to £140 profit, and after four years I can already afford to have two crises off the back of my initial £100 crisis-avoidance money.
Obviously this is a very simple example, and there are lots of examples where this wouldn't work out. If my rate of return was only 10%, then it would take eight years before I'd have made back enough money to pay for the crisis situation. And sometimes gambles don't pay off and the crisis happens sooner than you expect, and other times people are just consistently bad at estimating these sorts of odds. But the point is that, even if it's cheaper to do something now then later, if you can find something more useful for that money to be doing right now, it might still be more profitable to take the expensive option.
(That said, there's also obviously the human cost - if your team is constantly operating in crisis mode because everything's been used until the last possible moment, then it's unlikely to be an effective team for very long. But then that's kind of the point here: this is all a matter of tradeoffs, and trying to predict the future as best as possible with limited data.)
- Don't build product before talking to prospective customers. Don't build your products in a vacuum.
- Pay your suppliers on time.
- Take good notes. You'll need them later when a CEO is breathing down your neck about why his darling (yet useless) feature was removed. It's hard to remember context around decisions that were made X months/years down the road.
I see your point though. Software has grown so big and detached from the problem that people don't get proper feedback about what they delivered and that makes for a bad quality. In niches it can be better that is why I started that way.
For those wages and so few job postings in case it all blows up? Bleh
I had lots of fun on those embedded systems classes back then. The market made sure I wouldn't pick that niche to pay my bills... I wonder if that's changed
And all of them have deemed you a suitable fit for their incompetent and stupid team or organization.
As someone who works as an educator at an art school where chaos is the rule, I must say if your company is less organized than a spontaneously formed group of twenty year old crazy-chaotic (and probably drunk) art students, you should probably just close down operations and change your career.
And yes, I have seen such organizations, companies and "professionals".
Why? It brings in boatloads of money.
Yes, it is. Not sure what you include in "books and training" but the actual hard stuff is the complexity inherent to each individual that you want to organize. Each one of them has moods, goals, desires and bad days. And the number of parameters is huge and they're all different for each individual. And it takes just one member of the group to be sufficiently aligned in another vector to make it all fall apart.
And I am just talking about a team or small department. Figure this at state level and you get why politicians actually don't get anything done.
Not really. It's a handful of common-sense techniques around communication, architecture, and getting out of people's way. There's 3-5 books that compress most of the necessary knowledge into straightforwardly readable form.
Of course, most people haven't read them. Instead, as an industry, we've converged on having engineering companies led by non-engineers, "scrum masters" galore, and desperate cargo-culting of OKRs instead of having real objectives and real key results. "Top" teams at FAANG companies are routinely having 1980s-style conversations about "staffing projects" while they reassure each other that they don't need to prioritize because "everything is important." (Ask me how I know...)
It's all self-inflicted. I don't know about your extrapolation to broader politics, but back here in the office? The simple task of organizing 5, 10, 50, maybe even up to 100 people? That part is perfectly doable without making any major mistakes. We just don't want to do it.
At minimum, though, I wish we'd stop sitting around and saying it's too hard. Here's Ben Horowitz, writing in 2011 (twelve years ago!) [1] about it:
> If you manage a team of 10 people, it’s quite possible to do so with very few mistakes or bad behaviors. If you manage an organization of 1,000 people it is quite impossible.
If we as an industry could hold the bar higher on running companies/teams when they were this small size, personally I think a lot of things would naturally sort themselves out at the 1,000+ person size. Besides, change begins at home — even just improving the running of your local team would go a long way. Then, even if the executives are flailing around with their latest harebrained take on why they don't need to write rigorous OKRs, at least your team is good.
I'm not claiming it's trivial, but I wish we'd stop making it sound like some sort of mind-blowing skill of living on the knife's edge. Leading a group of a dozen engineers is a perfectly straightforward and learnable skill. And it doesn't "take just one member... to make it all fall apart," because you can just fire that one member.
(Sorry for the morning rant. I know you meant well, and you're also right to empathize with each person's individual needs. It's certainly a difficult job... it's just not impossibly difficult.)
[1]: https://a16z.com/2011/03/31/whats-the-most-difficult-ceo-ski...
- Peter Drucker - The Effective Executive
- Andy Grove - High Output Management
- Fred Brooks - The Mythical Man-Month
- Marty Cagan - Inspired
- Dale Carnegie - How to win friends and influence people
- Jocko Willink - The Dichotomy of Leadership
I would also recommend The Goal by Eliyahu M Goldratt as an excellent primer on the Theory of Constraints as an effective management philosophy.
Most people recommend The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and other books in that ilk, but I've found far more value in these three books alone than every other management theory book I've read, combined.
"Workplace Management" - Taiichi Ohno
"Lean Six Sigma" - Jeffrey Ries
But aside from these "management philosophies", there's also standard industry/role practices that companies don't require their employees to implement, and when they do it's only enough to say they technically did it. Often the employees don't even know the standards exist. It's embarrassing.
Agreed; my example would be all the basic things in "High Output Management" — especially the performance management pieces.
What'd you have in mind?
- Management 3.0: Leading Agile Developers, Developing Agile Leaders (pushes a team-first approach that I think supports and reinforces the core concepts of agile )
And if you go and read some old management cybernetics you see all that stuff back in the fucking 60s, 80 years ago. I think you absolutely hit the nail on the head tho
Just recently I came to a realization, people and organisations exist in a competency / incompetency matrix.
The competent orgs with incompetent people are your blue chips and "traditional" companies. They ship stuff, have customers, grow along with the overall market and economy and are abble to survive most non-existential threats and down-turns and even existential ones from time to time. All, or most, the competency is institutional, recorded in implicit knowledge held by people and various tools and processes. Unless those companies loose that knowledge for some reason, things are good.
Competent orgs with competent people are incredible places, e.g. Amazon. They grow like crazy, rarely screw up and develop. They ship and have happy customers, they innovate. These places are hard to come by, harder to create and even harder to maintain.
Then you have incompetent orgs with competent people. By definition start-ups, those only reach competency when they serve, sucessfully and not depending on outside funding, markets and customers for a while. Doing things right, those orgs can create orgabisational competency based on the people competency.
And then there are incompetent orgs with incompetent people. Places were you think, as you said, you haluzionate all your training and experience. The only thing standing between a start-up (incompetent org and competent people) and such a nightmare is leadership. The thing that allows everyone to pretend to not be obe of those doomed places is endless cash. Sooner or later, those places come crushing down.
I shared room with people probably a bit less skilled at working than min wage clerks I worked with a few years ago. But they got a Java cert so they think spending hours in meeting is work, and efficient.
We should have mandatory non IT work to make people see what it is to work lean and fast.
Realize it has been written almost 50 years ago.
I have probably written more code in the last 6 months than the preceding 5 years. It's not because I suddenly got smarter or I am some 10x engineer, it's because all the BS got out of the way.
No agile, no jira, no backlog grooming, no story points, no standups, no sprints, no product owner, no stakeholder management, no churn. No "two masters" or principal-agent problems.
Client/boss knows what they want, and so thats what I work on. It's clear whats important, so that's where I spend my time. He trusts my advice and feedback because he doesn't have 10 other senior engineers whispering conflicting BS in his ear. He is clear on how robust a solution they want, and if it's worth moving onto a new idea or wrapping up the current one.
So, freed from all the other problems, I just build.
Just building by myself has an upper limit. To be fair, that upper limit is roughly 20% of what that whole 200 person org does, but still. I keep imagining what we could accomplish if we reached even 10% of the theoretical limit.
One path may get tiring after a few cycles, and you take the other path for a few.. rinse & repeat.
it's motivational in some ways seeing how dysfunctional even successful companies are
I've worked with so many truly incompetent and stupid teams and organizations, that have millions to billions of dollars. Sometimes I wonder if I've just hallucinated all the books and training I've taken that explain the basic business and industry concepts most people should know. And I wonder how it is an IC could seem to know how things should be working while seemingly nobody else does.
Then I go back to my 1/30th of the widget and wait for lunch time.