Re:Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
by whstl on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @05:30PM
(#34797140)
Sometimes it's not even about the short game of capitalism. I've seen multiple times undesired meaningless features being highly-prioritized without rhyme or reason because of hunches from some PO, because it was politically good internally for some product manager, or because the designer decided to do some redesign, and no higher-up wanted to intervene and check how important it was. When I saw that happening and I was "the higher up", I had to burn a lot of political capital to get the message from the team across. Modern software development is highly dysfunctional but we somehow refuse to tackle it.
Re:Thoughts on getting laid off after nine years at Twilio
by JohnBooty on Tuesday February 14, 2023 @05:37PM
(#34797229)
Modern software development is highly dysfunctional
but we somehow refuse to tackle it.
Sure, it's pretty rare to hear from anybody that their particular field runs smoothly.
But our field. Man oh man. We know what tech debt is, and we know how it affects the time+effort required to achieve a certain velocity. And yet we spend more time shooting ourselves in the foot than doing anything else.
Quite honestly I feel that the problem has become massively worse in the last decade, with everybody cargo-culting the highly complex architectures of FAANG companies when in reality much simpler alternatives would be an order of magnitude better.
I would be very loyal to a place that helped me grow as a person with continuing education opportunities.
I would also be very loyal to a place that had a solid balance of feature delivery versus vs. technical debt management. (I feel this benefits the company in the medium to long run as well, even moreso than the engineers)
Those things would not necessarily be hard to achieve and would pay for themselves.
Yet nobody actually seems to run their company that way.
I guess the fundamental roadblock is that so many things in capitalism force you to think only about the short game. Thinking even 12 months ahead is often viewed as sheer insanity.
As an engineer, I understand the pressures faced by higher-ups. Keeping the lights on is expensive. Investors want results sooner or later. And higher-ups often don't have the engineering chops to understand why good engineering processes can be such force multipliers enabling faster delivery in 18, 24, 72, whatever months.