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Well, since I have also successfully managed similar such projects for financial institutions & telcos, and I live in startup land, by your last remark I feel m

Well, since I have also successfully managed similar such projects for financial institutions & telcos, and I live in startup land, by your last remark I feel moderately qualified to comment. I'll challenge your view that folks in the startup world don't know enterprise. Maybe some visible fraction are the young and inexperienced hipsters as portrayed on HBO, sure, but most of those I know in CTO+ roles actually have a lot of enterprise under the belt. In my case in a B2B play it's practically mandatory, in order to understand the customer. I believe enterprises suffer principally from the fear of change, or more bluntly, the fear of screwing up and being held accountable, which leads to the pathological technical debt issues you've described. So the problems I've always faced in enterprise projects are not primarily technological, but instead those of a) finding a full team of people competent enough and fearless enough to perform transplant surgery on the beating heart of a living body corporate and b) collecting sufficient clout to be allowed to perform the operation. I reckon the best thing you can do, as a project leader in the enterprise world, is leave a legacy of constant and gradual change. Normalize frequent updates through CI/CD. Get business owners used to things like minor feature requests being included in daily deploys. No-one will thank you at the time, but a change in culture is almost certainly the most enduring value you can create. So yeah, I'll happily roll my eyes at the "incompetence of the enterprise world", because I've dealt with the stupid head-on, and used techniques from startup land to innoculate it permanently.

Justsignedup 10y ago
Furthermore lots of decisions in enterprises look like the following: An executive is approached by a vendor. The vendor entices the executive, shows them a good time, gives them a really good assurance their service is worth it. An engineer hates this service because it sucks. Because the decision was made based on how cool it looks, not by technical needs. Given that, it is hard for an executive to get approached by a vendor who says "okay, this will cost a crazy amount of time and money but we'll make your systems more modern" which sounds like "hey, I'm going to come in and offer to replace a system that has worked for 30 years with something modern and potentially risky. And it'll cost you a lot." The executive doesn't (usually) realize that the true cost is really high and goes up with time. And of course they don't want to lose their cushy job so hell no they won't take it. Also the executive isn't directly working with the engineers so he doesn't truly know if he can trust them.
- ExactoKnight 10y ago
  This reflects a failure of modern corporate structures to empower engineering to the role it should and (ought) to be having. Thankfully, this is changing rapidly and the valley is leading the way.

Justsignedup 10y ago

Furthermore lots of decisions in enterprises look like the following: An executive is approached by a vendor. The vendor entices the executive, shows them a good time, gives them a really good assurance their service is worth it. An engineer hates this service because it sucks. Because the decision was made based on how cool it looks, not by technical needs. Given that, it is hard for an executive to get approached by a vendor who says "okay, this will cost a crazy amount of time and money but we'll make your systems more modern" which sounds like "hey, I'm going to come in and offer to replace a system that has worked for 30 years with something modern and potentially risky. And it'll cost you a lot." The executive doesn't (usually) realize that the true cost is really high and goes up with time. And of course they don't want to lose their cushy job so hell no they won't take it. Also the executive isn't directly working with the engineers so he doesn't truly know if he can trust them.

ExactoKnight 10y ago
This reflects a failure of modern corporate structures to empower engineering to the role it should and (ought) to be having. Thankfully, this is changing rapidly and the valley is leading the way.