[HN Gopher] Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts
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Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts
Author : mbellotti
Score : 129 points
Date : 2021-12-20 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bellmar.medium.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (bellmar.medium.com)
| denton-scratch wrote:
| I thought that was a pretty good essay. I've never had Security
| running the show, but the other scenarios he discusses match my
| experience.
| neonate wrote:
| *she
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Just so; my mistake. (Would have edited, but can't, so my
| error is preserved for posterity)
| nitrogen wrote:
| Is there another way to view the full article? I'm only seeing
| the first paragraph with no errors or popovers, and I'm not about
| to disable uBlock for medium.
| jakub_g wrote:
| Tip: if you can't read some URL, just prefix it with
| 'archive.is/' and it will take a snapshot of find existing one
|
| https://archive.md/Cr6F2
| jatone wrote:
| clear your cookies for the webpage
| jcadam wrote:
| High turnover also contributes to tech debt. When turnover
| becomes ingrained in company culture, engineers have no incentive
| to care overly much about the overall health of the code base.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| I can attest to this because the company I currently work for
| has the highest turnover I've ever experienced. People are
| barely making it 8 months, meanwhile the bosses are pushing for
| faster growth to match our newish funding. That's leading to
| people who have been here for 2 months hiring _more_ people to
| replace the people who left at 8 months. Just about every
| project is suffering from simply not understanding what it does
| or how it works, which leads to more burn out which causes even
| more churn. I've never seen the cycle this close before and it
| really is wild just how bad it can get.
| jcadam wrote:
| The current job market is punishing poorly run companies.
| It's too easy to pick up the phone and get a new job quick
| these days if you're unhappy, contributing to churn.
| echelon wrote:
| When does the market for engineers turn into a buyer's
| market?
|
| If the economy goes into recession or worse, do those
| playing hot potato get stuck out in the cold?
| jcadam wrote:
| It's a cycle, like anything else. Tech was largely spared
| during the last recession. Who knows what's going to
| happen during the next?
| xapata wrote:
| Cycles of arbitrary periods are nearly indistinguishable
| from a random walk. My guess is the latter.
| jmercouris wrote:
| What does this mean? Can you please rephrase?
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Yup. I'd never blame someone for taking a better job
| elsewhere.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| How is everyone moving and also moving somewhere better? Is
| it not the case that the majority of open job opportunities
| are ones other people have recently left from unhappiness?
| zippergz wrote:
| I think there's a lot of "grass is greener" moves
| happening. Unless you have trusted friends working in a
| company, it is very hard to tell if it actually is better
| than your current situation until you've tried it. None
| of the sources of information available to an outsider
| (including Glassdoor reviews and HN posts extolling the
| virtues or sounding off about the horribleness of a given
| company) are particularly predictive of what your
| individual experience will be, from what I have seen.
| There's just too much variability, and too much bias in
| each narrator.
| nijave wrote:
| Not only that, jobs seem to have a "honeymoon" period
| after which you start to notice more issues you might
| have originally ignored (so things seem fine for the
| first few months)
| [deleted]
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| It seems like many companies are more willing to offer
| high salaries to new hires than to give incumbent
| employees competitive raises.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > How is everyone moving and also moving somewhere
| better?
|
| Several of us exited a toxic company semi-recently.
|
| For what it's worth, it was common for people to take
| minor cuts to total compensation. The old, toxic company
| had evolved to pay well because it was the only way they
| could retain people (however briefly) through the obvious
| toxicity. We just didn't talk about it publicly much.
|
| But it didn't matter. Huge quality of life improvement
| and I don't really miss the extra money.
| sejtnjir wrote:
| I have the opposite experience. When people typically stick
| around for the majority of their career, there's no incentive
| to capture knowledge thoroughly. Onboarding time was noticeably
| longer because of it.
| datavirtue wrote:
| And everyone new has to run to the lifers...which means that
| the new people never learn deeply...and always have to run
| back to the lifer.
|
| It takes a loooong time to learn a system when you have this
| dynamic.
| lostapathy wrote:
| The ideal is almost certainly somewhere in the middle.
|
| The people who have only been on the job a couple months are
| probably not truly onboarded themselves, hard for them to
| document what they don't know.
| nijave wrote:
| Not only that, but they lose important context. The goals and
| priorities are often lost and the new guys end up relearning
| the hard way
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > Fortunately for us, the realities of flat organizations are
| pushing them out of favor and lively conversations about
| engineering leadership as a craft are taking over. Flat
| organizations are a nice idea, but they just don't reflect how
| people behave.
|
| this makes me wonder who "us" means.
|
| i make the educated guess it's "managers", which were dead weight
| in the Apple engineering scheme I joined, which functioned super
| efficiently without them, as it was emphasized how flat was a
| feature, not a bug, for getting things done.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| Flat organizations over a certain size just develop their own
| hierarchies usually based on seniority. If you can't see them,
| you're just on the bottom.
|
| Flat organizations also end up building the same thing 4 or 5
| times because nobody talks to eachother. As a consultant, I
| love flat orgs -- it means we'll be there for a while because
| nobody can really tell us to leave.
| rendall wrote:
| In most organizations that has one, the sales department has an
| outsized influence on every other department including tech.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Hire a department full of persuasive people. Expect to get
| persuasion. On top of which, subverting an organization's
| decision making processes and channels is a core competency of
| good sales departments. A two-edged sword if there ever was.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| > subverting an organization's decision making processes and
| channels is a core competency of good sales departments
|
| Know of any good books on this aspect of sales?
| jimnotgym wrote:
| > Engineering First Organizations
|
| > Like Google or Facebook these are organizations where
| engineering trumps everything else. If you're not in engineering,
| your pathway to promotion is limited.
|
| Just browsing Facebook's board...
|
| MZ-dropout SS-MBA Mckinsey etc PA-Accounting and Business studies
| NK- economics & management, Mckinsey again RK - lawyer PT- lawyer
|
| Not being engineers sure held them back!
|
| https://investor.fb.com/leadership-and-governance/default.as...
| fdgsdfogijq wrote:
| By now they are so big that engineering is not as important.
| But 10/15 years ago, engineering was definitely number one
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Thiel arrived in year 1. Sandberg in year 4.
|
| Facebook has been an investor led organisation from the
| beginning.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I know as many non-engineers as engineers at Google right now.
|
| The idea that non-engineers are sidelined is wrong.
| grey-area wrote:
| Board directors are not usually employees.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| 1) not necessarily true at all. The board is usually split
| exec/non exec
|
| 2) not true in this case. Two of the people on my list are
| execs
| 0xB31B1B wrote:
| Boards are usually filled with:
|
| 1) Founder/cofounders 2) investors 3) people who do not
| work at the company and are not investors that people in
| groups 1 and 2 think will be on their side during important
| votes
| criticaltinker wrote:
| Had to read quite a bit before Conway's Law was mentioned, but
| glad it was.
|
| Viewing organizations and software engineering through this lens
| has been a game changer for me personally. As an individual
| contributor I now appreciate horrendous technical debt and
| glacially slow development as systematic organizational issues,
| rather than blaming burnt out or lazy engineers.
|
| Now I'm much more aware and critical of technical and executive
| leadership. "A fish rots from the head" is one of those quotes
| that resonates with me more and more everyday.
| collaborative wrote:
| This is why my dream is to work completely alone. I still need
| employment to survive but hope one day I won't
|
| Another good quote is "a cow with 2 owners gives no milk and
| eats no grain" (castilian proverb)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| DuckDuckGo and Google give me no results for that proverb in
| English; what does it mean?
|
| Each owner steals the other's grain intended for the cow and
| the cow dies and gives no milk?
| jholman wrote:
| My guess: Each owner says "it's your turn to feed it", and
| so the cow is never fed. And when the cow does give milk,
| each owner quickly takes the milk, claiming they haven't
| got their share yet.
|
| It's like the human-scale version of socializing the
| costs/risks and privatizing the gains.
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| The english version is "The fastest way to starve a horse
| is to assign two people to feed it."
| tobyjsullivan wrote:
| The english version is "The fastest way to starve a horse
| is to assign two people to feed it."
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I'm guessing it means that nobody actually feeds it or
| milks it: there's somebody else who can do it.
| 1cvmask wrote:
| The main takeaway:
|
| Engineers prioritizing making systems easier and more consistent
| end up with overly complex, difficult to operate systems
|
| Product managers prioritize shipping features and end up making
| the software development process slower
|
| Security prioritizes minimizing risk of change and ends up
| maximizing the risk of out-of-date software.
|
| Flat organizations prioritize open communication and end up with
| cliques and internal politics.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Most of the ills in this article would be fixed by better
| product management that has earned clout with senior
| management. For example, the product manager should be able to
| tell everyone what most likely constitutes a minimum viable
| product (MVP), and be able to defend that against, for example
| sales-driven feature creep. And on the other hand, product
| management should be able to communicate to engineering the
| value of time-to-market. If your product manager is unable to
| do this and is just tallying feature requests and trying to
| cram in as much as possible you are screwed in multiple
| dimensions.
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(page generated 2021-12-20 23:00 UTC)