[HN Gopher] Corporate legibility for software engineers
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Corporate legibility for software engineers
Author : GarethX
Score : 108 points
Date : 2023-01-11 16:32 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (matt.blwt.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (matt.blwt.io)
| zug_zug wrote:
| Eh, I find this gross.
|
| It seems like the premise is "To succeed in bureaucratic
| companies you must become a bureaucrat".
|
| But what I witness is every company that becomes beureacratic
| dies. And it dies to smaller companies that do more/better with a
| thousandth the headcount. And I see this natural selection as a
| good thing.
|
| Maybe if your only goal is to be the vulture sucking money out of
| a terminal dinosaur these are good skills to adapt. But I think
| it's better to join a place that isn't lost to meaningless
| metrics and do work that's valuable to the customer and explain
| it to other humans in human ways (with a reasonable amount of
| measurement).
| rco8786 wrote:
| > "To succeed in bureaucratic companies you must become a
| bureaucrat".
|
| Yes, that is exactly the premise! "Don't hate the player, hate
| the game", etc.
|
| Luckily for all of us there are multiple games we can play.
| codemac wrote:
| Being able to work in a large organization to accomplish goals
| smaller organizations could not is one of the greatest
| accomplishments of mankind.
|
| The part that is arguable is whether or not smaller
| organizations could accomplish the same.
|
| I have a hypothesis that it's literally just LOC. The more
| lines of code, the more SWE you need to be stewards of that
| code, the bigger the bureaucracy.
| twblalock wrote:
| It's not LOC, it's the architecture.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| It is a fundamental opposition:
|
| 1) cooperation and altruism produces more effective companies
|
| 2) ...but machiavellianism produces more individual reward from
| a company
|
| Which is why the corporate values of any McBig McOrg reflect #1
| but day to day is inevitably #2 is what actually happens.
| Everyone is doing #2 while pretending to do #1, or couching it
| in terms of #1.
|
| For techies, it is absolutely necessary for you to realize what
| is going on in companies, since our lot is the ones that
| generally want to avoid middle management machiavellianism and
| just concentrate on producing value.
| beckingz wrote:
| Making work legible can be good for the workers as well!
| Sometimes. Often not. Jira Metrics / LoC can be used to help
| justify promotions and raises. Or wrongly deny them!
| meesles wrote:
| That point is made in the article.
|
| > By participating in the legibility efforts, they have the
| opportunities to make the measures work for them. For example,
| ensuring that impactful work is appropriately visible to the
| group that can decide promotions is important.
| trjordan wrote:
| Legibility also increases the ability for a large organization to
| chase singular ambitious goals.
|
| For example: software estimation is hard. It takes time, it's
| highly inaccurate (frequently by 2x or more), and rewarding good
| estimation incentives worse software.
|
| But having deadlines helps functions like marketing and sales
| immensely. Marketing can plan effective launches, and sales can
| guide customers towards new products with minimal lag in uptake.
|
| Lots of corporate life is like this. It's a net good if it's used
| to deliver a better experience to customers. It's a constant
| fight to make sure legibility efforts aren't being used to hoard
| power for personal gain.
| hammock wrote:
| >It's a constant fight to make sure legibility efforts aren't
| being used to hoard power for personal gain.
|
| At some point in the chain of command, it is always for
| personal gain. It might be the shareholder at the top, or it
| might be a middle manager further down the line
| pajuc wrote:
| Great article, very true.
|
| "For some reason, corporate legibility tools often have poor UX
| for those who interact with them who are not administrators."
|
| That's because administrators decide which of these tools to use
| and buy. Tools then focus on pleasing them first. This reminds me
| of a similar situation with doctors. Some years back there was a
| great article in the New Yorker called Why Doctors Hate Their
| Computer. There is a similar dynamic where doctors waste hours on
| documentation that is then read by hospital administrators who
| then base their decisions on that. To the administrators this is
| great, they can see patterns and react to them. To the doctors,
| not so much.
| Floegipoky wrote:
| In my experience (not the views of my employer) the most
| important stakeholder for an EHR is the ONC (federal
| government). Design-by-committee requirements with the happy
| coincidence of making it almost impossible to innovate or
| disrupt the industry. They change all the time, requiring a ton
| of dev effort just to stay in business, which favors giant
| companies who can afford that "rent". Next is health system
| administrators (whoever decides whether or not to buy, directly
| affecting revenue growth). Next is insurance companies. For the
| amount of revenue they pull in, a shocking amount of
| practices/hospitals/etc are so financially insecure that if the
| payers drag their feet for even a short period it can put them
| out of business. Actual healthcare providers and patients are
| too low on the list and it sucks.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| " ... as soon something is quantified, power is given to the
| measurer."
|
| Maybe this is what the "agile wars" are all about. To measure the
| project progress you have agree on how to measure it, and then
| whoever defines those rules has the power.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| This is half of Scrum in my experience. Hours and hours and
| hours of meetings arguing over the accounting rules for work
| with the Scrum Master eventually imposing something and using
| it to beat you down the road.
| indymike wrote:
| Power is given to the person responsible for the content of the
| measurement. The guy making the reports is rarely the one who
| wields power. The receiver of the reports is the one who gains
| power.
| now__what wrote:
| The guy telling the report-writer what belongs on the report
| arguably has more power than the recipient of the report.
| __derek__ wrote:
| tl;dr: In order to master the state's attempts at legibility, one
| must embrace the legibility and use it to advance one's own aims.
|
| I don't think that's _exactly_ what Scott had in mind, but sure:
| if you want to equalize manager-worker power imbalances in the
| workplace, it might be possible to work collaboratively to make
| legibility-creating metrics more accurate and fair.
| rco8786 wrote:
| Good article. A lot of this boils down to: you want to be the
| author/creator/owner of as many docs as possible. Even docs that
| are a collaborative effort.
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